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!
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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.
It’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.
I 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.
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.
I 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!
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.
On 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!
I 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.
everything 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.
I don’t agree with you and this is pretty much frowned upon at the company I work at. As long as you follow good design principles, minor changes to features would trickle down without much issue. Sometimes things indeed break but they shouldn’t be too hard to solve. It’s not a good habit to keep adding, changing and removing bits to the same area with new features as if you are carving a statue; the history will become unmanageable at some point. Especially in a professional setting where someone else might need to work on your design it would make sense to have a logical build up of your model. For a hobbyist this doesn’t matter that much and I can see how your argument for preserving history makes sense to you.
But an example of my frustration: With most CAD programs, sketches are usually put on faces and if you make a change elsewhere, the sketch will still be attached to that same face. With FreeCad, sketches seem to be assigned to a face number. This means that if you make a change earlier in the model that adds or removes a different face, your sketch will no longer be attached to the same face it was before because it has a different identifier. At least that’s my experience, but maybe I was doing wrong. It’s certainly not as I expected it to work.
This is the topological naming problem and should be solved in an upcoming version pretty soon (within a few months hopefully)
Others you may want to try are OpenSCAD and BRL-CAD.
I exclusively use openscad. I can treat a project like software, with git and make.
FreeCad, because it’s open-source and work great on Linux. Took me 1-2 week to understand how to use it!
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.
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.
SALOME 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)
This 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.
Way 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.
Ive tried to use FreeCAD before, I’ve tried to learn how it works, and its just so different from other programs that I have used that I have to completely re-program myself to use it. I really want to like it, but its just such a pain in the ass to use.
I’d say the opposite is true. The pro CAD softwares are a lot more user friendly than FreeCAD in term of UX, so easier to learn too.
That’s literally what they said though? FreeCAD is more difficult to learn (but you have a lot of online resources to help).
FreeCAD has a lot of problems that stem from things like opaque errors (wire is not closed, failed to recompute) to how some features aren’t just there (multi surface sketch is the big one for me) that continuously break my flow. I could adapt but it feels a bit miserable to use compared to others. It’s not “hard” it is actually “worse” (for now)
Solid Edge is available for free for non-commercial use to everyone, I’m almost done writing its article and it looks really good tbh!
Never heard of ZW3D, sadly the pricing seem a bit steep for what I’m looking for :S
Do write a bit on synchronous modeling.
It’s up! Let me know if you have anything I should look at correcting
I’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
Excellent information on most of the CAD packages!
Just pirate solidworks and enjoy industry standard. Free software is 10 years behind and cheaper alternatives are still expensive.
I mean do your really need the latest fluid stimulation just to block out a model for printing?
No I dont need flow simulation at all, basic features in 15 years old SW are enough for almost everything I need.
Well I think learning SW was a big mistake and I blame my uni for that 🤣
I mean theres a reason why the conpanies target University. Why microsoft partners and gives codes to their products, or adobe to art students.
They train you in their software so youre less inclined to use anything else when youre out of school.
Exactly, I hate that, but it is what it is
I 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?
They 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
I 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.
I 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?
I got the impression they probably would especially fall when they seem to do some heavy sales promotions.
Blender works fine idk why everybody here saying there aren’t good alternatives
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.
I’ve played around in Plasticity and it is moving at a quick pace to get to version 2.0
Thank 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.
You are welcome! I liked the interface and some of the workflows. It is more on the artistic side of things but totally capable of product design.
I didn’t look too far into it but that might be exactly what I need. I’m more focusing on one-off projects vs mass-produced products so I don’t need a lot of the features of $$$$ CAD suites
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!
I’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.
