Exploring the available CAD software
Exploring the available CAD software
A collection of quick reviews of CAD software for the hobbyist. Features free and/or accessible options such as Onshape, FreeCAD and Fusion 360
Hey there! As a 3D printer addict I do a lot of small parts in CAD to print and use around the house. Lately I've been exploring all sorts of CAD software since finding out there's a more around than just Fusion360 and Onshape so I started exploring what's out there and jotting down my impressions.
Hope this is not spam, just want to help people see what's around and help them pick!
I use Tinkercad for simple stuff, FreeCAD for complex parts, and Blender for anything requiring sculpting. As a 3d printing hobbyist I can't justify the price of commercial CAD software. I prefer open source when a good option is available. FreeCAD took a little getting used to, but it's got everything you might need to create a part or mechanism for printing. Tinkercad is great for real quick simple stuff, and for blending simple models together. Software is a tool, and you need a specific tool for each specific task. Blender is the best free 3d sculpting software I've found.
15It's worth noting that the version number of FreeCAD is 0.21 so it's still very much a work in progress. It has a solid base of a very powerful 3d engine and is the bare bones of a CAD system that is usable now and will only get better.
11Yep! I was critical of FreeCAD but I also tried to make sure to point out that I think that for us hobbyists it is the sustainable choice, save for some other (CAD Sketcher/Solvespace) leapfrogging them but I don't really see that happening. I want to try out CAD Builder later on which is pretty much FreeCAD but managed by the OpenCASCADE/SALOME team, maybe it will be a similar experience with less boobytraps...
6I think FreeCAD should feature freeze and redo it's entire GUI to make what's there more usable. Take a look at OnShape or Fusion 360 and do something similar. Hide infrequently used buttons, put labels on commonly used buttons, make everything more context sensitive, task-centric, forgiving and user friendly.
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I started with freecad to design my 3d prints, and am now learning the path took for CNC code generating. Pretty food software, but the learning curve is a bit steep. At least there are many youtube channels dedicated to it. Blender can also be used to generate printable 3d models.
7I will probably try out Blender with CAD Sketcher because I have a neat use case for it where I'd like both constrained geometry and pure meshes to work together and that seems the best candidate for it!
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Unfortunately there aren't a whole lot of good options. They're either commercial and therefore potentially cost $$$ (or are time limited or otherwise restricted), or they're free and kind of suck in one way or another.
Of the commercial offerings I like OnShape. I think Fusion 360 is fine too. They're WAY more powerful than anyone needs for just designing 3D parts but they're still powerful, well designed tools. I think if your needs are simple and you don't care a great deal about complex shapes then Tinkercad is great too.
Of the opensource, FreeCAD is the closest to OnShape / Fusion 360. It's a parametric modeller like they are but the user interface that throws every button in your face at once and doesn't bother to sort them very well or provide context. It's not an intuitive or forgiving tool and really needs a usability makeover to make it as simple as the commercial equivalents. I've never had much success with it because of this.
Blender is pretty popular for modelling. It's not really CAD so it's likely more useful for modelling free form / artistic stuff. The UI is pretty complex but it is extremely powerful.
OpenSCAD is pretty neat if you want to create something by essentially programming a shape and rendering it. It works well for certain kinds of geometric designs that are better expressed in code. e.g. maybe you have to punch 100 holes in a spiral pattern on the side of a box or something.
5On the FOSS side I also like SolveSpace but I think its limitations and attitude from the team are holding it back. For simple project I'd even prefer it to FreeCAD to be honest, it tends to trip up way less!
3I really don't understand FreeCAD. I have used SolidWorks, Inventor, Fusion360 and OnShape for personal use and we use Siemens NX at work. I'm not an expert at any of them, but I get the job done. My colleagues and I often joke how unwieldy, slow and difficult NX is, but it's nothing compared to FreeCAD. It's just so different and unintuitive.
Even when applying good design practices when creating your models, everything will collapse into a giant mess once you try and change/remove an earlier feature. Or possibly I am taking a wrong approach since it's so different.
The FreeCAD devs know this, and criticisms about how it's so different from other CAD programs isn't allowed on their forums (I understand their reasoning for this rule though). I really just don't understand why the devs of the only free open source CAD program feel the need to do everything so different than anything else that's out there. It's not even like they need to find their niche to fill, it would be wildly more popular if it was more in line with commercial CAD programs.
I can't remember ever reading about someone liking the program but I often read people struggling with and complaining about it.
2everything will collapse into a giant mess once you try and change/remove an earlier feature
In my limited experience that's true in solidworks too, because every feature is built on the last one. So if you want to modify a feature that's halfway up the hierarchy, you make a new feature to do it instead. That way it doesn't break the model and you also preserve the design history of the part.
That's the accepted and expected behavior, because preserving design history is important.
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Others you may want to try are OpenSCAD and BRL-CAD.
5I will probably explore scripting based CAD in a different style since there's different breeds and they don't really fit the format. One I found out recently which seems very interesting is build123d which comes with more features out of the box (like fillets etc), a VSCode extension for live preview and generally I'd rather write Python than OpenSCAD
2I exclusively use openscad. I can treat a project like software, with git and make.
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If you are an American or Canadian veteran, you can get the educational version of Solidworks for $20 / year. I'm on my 8th or 9th year of using it.
4This is a field where free software is unfortunately way worse than the paid options, and all the paid options are expensive.
If you are still a student, you can get SolidWorks for 100 USD a year, or Creo, Inventor, or Solid Edge for free. Completely non-commercial though.
If you are serious about this, get a SolidWorks permanent standard license (it's like 4 thousand USD?) or ZW3D permanent license which is just a bit cheaper, it's a relatively new Chinese company though, so a bit of jankiness is expected, but up to you if you want to try them out.
4Way worse? Maybe more difficult to learn.
FreeCAD is a great free open source 3D modeling software with plenty of online resources to help you get started.
2I've tried ZW3D. What I can say is it looks like NX. I'm familiar with it cause I use NX before. And it capable doing g3 continuity. As far as I know it has good price, permanent license, and maintenence skip (just skip maintenance and after years just pay 1 time maintenence fee you will get the latest version). It is not as good as Siemens NX, needs more fix/features here and there. But it has potential in the future.
But for hobbyist I'll recomend Solid Edge Community Edition, because it has no limitations besides for non-commercial use. This one is really powerfull if you can use sync tech mainly for prismatic modeling. And 2024 version has been launched, just wait it till community edition will be updated.
Creo I never touch it so can't say about it. But I like the UI. PTC has Onshape (cloud based CAD) too if you want to try, just register and open/design using your web browser. But for free account your model will be public, if you have academic/edu email you can use it to register and your file will remain private.
Inventor, I have tried but didn't like it.
There are Alibre for affordable price. Also there are T-flex and Kompas 3D (russian made).
If you like direct editing based CAD (history free) there is Ansys SpaceClaim. *(Solid Edge is kind of hybrid can do Sync/history free and Ordered parametric).
CMIIW
2Excellent information on most of the CAD packages!
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I would also recommend checking out SALOME for 3D modeling. I've been using the shaper toolbox to create geometry for fluid simulations and it's worked well for me. The shaper toolbox is parametric (as opposed to SALOME's geometry toolbox which is not).
After you've created your geometry in shaper you switch to the mesh toolbox to create your stl file. I think there's really good control over the triangle creations with SALOME. For example, you can specify edges and faces you want smaller triangles in (like around tight geometries, holes, etc). I've been able to get much higher quality stl files with this method than with freecad.
SALOME is free and open source software.
4SALOME is definitely on my list along CAD Builder, which as far as I could see seems a more streamlined version of SALOME 9.09 focused on part modeling (at least from my 5 min quick look)
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FreeCad, because it's open-source and work great on Linux. Took me 1-2 week to understand how to use it!
4I generally settled on Fusion360, but Alibre Atom was promising aside from some system stability issues on my desktop. I really wanted to like freeCAD, but I just didn't have the time to invest in learning its quirks.
3I hope I get to revisit it for the series. I had the trial months ago but let it expire without trying it much (had a lot on my plate at the time, plus was having some issues with it). Sadly I could not reset the trial, maybe if I ask kindly they'll let me have an extra week or something?
1I got the impression they probably would especially fall when they seem to do some heavy sales promotions.
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Just pirate solidworks and enjoy industry standard. Free software is 10 years behind and cheaper alternatives are still expensive.
2I read that Dassault is quite active in tracking down pirates, and honestly I don't see the need to resort to potentially installing malware (how much ethics can you expect from random torrents anyway) when the free alternatives seem good enough?
2They are not good enough, not even close, at least not for me...unfortunately. Its not random torrent btw, solidsquad (probably guys from DS) are releasing every single version. If you are satisfied with free alternatives then look no further. Using it since 2008 and even that old version is much more advanced compared to anything thats free today. Cant wait when foss reach that level, but Im afraid Im too old for that
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This looks interesting, thanks for sharing! I've played around a bit in Tinkercad (too limited) and Fusion 360 (complicated) but haven't found something that feels right yet. I bookmarked this to follow what you find!
1I'd suggest giving Onshape a look, it's the more user friendly and intuitive of the ones I've tried yet.
If you have an iPad with a Apple Pencil, Shapr3D has a really neat UI (it uses touch and pencil interactions distinctly) but having to pay a subscription just for exporting was too much of an ask for me. They seem to have different pricing now with a free tier and a Windows app (I don't have an iPad anymore) so I might cover it later on.
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I love tinkercad, but it leaves me reliant on Autodesk which I'm not happy about. I would like to find something simple to use that doesn't rely on a server someone else runs to operate, and that includes activation servers.
1Blender works fine idk why everybody here saying there aren't good alternatives
1I’ve played around in Plasticity and it is moving at a quick pace to get to version 2.0
1Thank you very much for the recommendation! I haven't seen Plasticity yet in any "CAD shootout" comparisons and it looks super interesting.
$100 for a non-subscription commercial license is probably the most appealing part right out the gate.
1If you want a similar price for a more CAD-y like software (sketch/feature-based) Alibre Atom3D should approach that price (also non-subscription), though pricing may be regional. The italian reseller asks for 180eur (but already had a discount down to 130) which isn't as cheap but definitely within the same range.
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