FREECAD VS SOLIDWORKS FOR FREE
FREECAD VS SOLIDWORKS SOFTWARE

If that’s a little overwhelming, I feel you, but if you’re creating parts for 3D printing, basically, you’ll spend all your time in the “Part”, “Part Design”, and “Sketcher” workbench, and the basic workflow is the same as in any other parametric CAD tool. Except for the undo button.īut FreeCAD doesn’t just do parametric 3D CAD – it also does architectural CAD, 2D CAD, 3D simulation, analysis, mesh manipulation, OpenSCAD modeling, CNC programming, point cloud manipulation, rendering, reverse engineering, robot kinematics, spreadsheets, surface modeling, and web browsing. With direct modeling, there’s no going back.

FREECAD VS SOLIDWORKS SOFTWARE

That’s in contrast to direct modeling, which is for example the classic workflow for something like Blender, where you always build on top of the geometry you have at that very point and you can never go “back in time” to change a parameter and have the software rebuild everything after that to match. If you built your part well, you’ll even be able to go back to some of the earlier features, for example, change a dimension and your CAD tool will give you an updated part that solves for that new dimension. Why do I bring all those up? Well, first of all, I guess that legitimizes me as “not a total CAD noob”, but also because I think that helps me sort of put into context how the FreeCAD experience stacks up.īut, ok, what is FreeCAD? In their own words, it’s “your own 3D parametric modeler”, meaning, like Fusion, Onshape, Solidworks, that the 3D modeling process with it revolves around inputting your design constraints into FreeCAD in the form of sketches and features that, one after the other, describe and build up your model, and in the end, the CAD tool will try to give you a part that fits within those constraints – or parameters that you gave it. I think this is my third time now that I’ll spend a dozen hours or so over the course of a couple of days, genuinely trying to use FreeCAD to create something, but every time, I barely manage to wrap my head around how the tool works and wants to be worked, I get frustrated, and ultimately go back to using Fusion360.Īnd I’ve used plenty of CAD tools before – from Catia v4 and v5, Solidworks, Inventor, Onshape, Fusion, I’ve used Tebis for CAM prep at a job, and I think I’ve even tried SolidEdge once, but those all eventually clicked for me. Still, I hope I’ll be able to provide some constructive feedback that perhaps explains why I can’t seem to have a good time every time I try to really get into and understand FreeCAD. I hope I’ll be able to provide some input from a user’s perspective because I really want there to be a good open-source option, and I’ll also try to provide you with a perspective on whether FreeCAD might after all be the right tool for you already.įirst of all, again, I have no intent on just bashing on FreeCAD, I think that simply wouldn’t be fair to a project that has barely any funding, is giving you their work for absolutely free, and also manages to deliver as complex of a tool as it does.

FREECAD VS SOLIDWORKS FOR FREE

But use it right and it’s actually pretty decent!Īre you tired as well, that seemingly the entire CAD landscape consists of extortionary licensing models that lure you into learning their tool for free and then slamming you with a massive subscription fee as soon as you’re hooked and start using it more? Or software that regularly removes features that you’ve grown to love? Well, worry no more, because there is an alternative, actually more than one, but for this video, I wanted to take another look at FreeCAD, a free and open-source, fully-featured CAD tool that is a perfect replacement for anything that Fusion360, Solidworks, Onshape, NX, Autocad, etc can do.Īt least that’s what I would have liked to say about FreeCAD, but while there is a fantastic tool at its core in there somewhere, the software still leaves many of the challenges unsolved that tend to plague independently developed open-source tools. FreeCAD has enormous aspirations – but it struggles to deliver.

Freecad vs solidworks