You basic choices today tend to be Solidworks, Fusion360, Autodesk Inventor and in certain industries, Siemens NX. I have experience with all of these, as well as, in the old days, contorting AutoCAD to do 3D and 2D mechanical work.
I am going to say I run most of them at expert level, perhaps more so in the case of Solidworks and NX. I would not touch NX unless there was no other choice and I was required to use it. This is the case with a bunch of aerospace and other industries where there might be legitimate cases for using NX.
In the choice between Fusion360 and Solidworks, I would likely consider migrating to Fusion360 if they had a way to make it just as local as Solidworks. I haven't had to touch it in about two years, so I don't know if this transition took place at all. The fact that your data is cloud based doesn't sit well with many of the companies I tend to work with. In those cases Solidworks tends to become the go-to option.
From my perspective, yes, Solidworks is a standard tool. It is very rare --again, in my world-- to have someone ask for anything other than Solidworks when I ask what format they would prefer. This includes the new breed of private players surrounding the NASA Artemis mission.
I’m in that private player space and confirm solidworks is the most common, but I’ve run into the ones you’ve mentioned plus Solidedge, Creo, Ansys spaceclaim and a few others. We tend to use a neutral format for exchange. I’ve used pretty much all of them and I’d also pick Solidworks, but steer clear of anything beyond The standard package as the value is terrible and mostly doesn’t work well outside of a single person environment anyway.
Incidentally I recently did a study of what I should use for a side project (I.e. need to buy with my own money).
I decided that I’ll try Fusion360 (been a few years since I’ve tried it) and if it’s not enough I’ll try Solidedge. Solidworks doesn’t work For my use case (large up front cost plus annual fee). To restart maintenance/upgrades, you have to back pay for any years you missed, up to a certain point where you just have to pay the upfront cost again.
On the other hand you can pay by the month as needed (or not) for Fusion360 and Solidedge.
For $500 US per year the Fusion 360 suite is unbeatable in my opinion. I have paid Solidworks tens of thousands of dollars over the years in annual maintenance fees. The simulation and CAM packages alone, if I remember correctly, were in the order of $9K US for the initial purchase and several thousand per year for maintenance for both.
What tends to happen with this kind of software --at least in my mind, not sure about how others thing about this stuff-- is that the ROI curve becomes asymptotic over time. The "support" fees don't match the marginal gains from release to release.
For example, I don't think we've had a need to contact GoEngineer (our reseller) for well over a decade. Once you achieve a certain level of competency there's very little they can contribute to the equation. Which means all that's left in terms of value for the "support" fee are the incremental software updates from year to year. And, as I said, with time, it's hard to point at features or solutions that justify the annual cost.
From my perspective if companies like SW/Dassault were smart they would progressively reduce the cost of annual updates to match customer realities.
The ONLY reason to upgrade past a certain point becomes interaction with other companies, vendors or consultants who might be on a newer version. Aside from that, I can't think of a single feature introduced by SW in the last many years that would justify spending thousands of dollars per year to get those features.
I haven't done the accounting at this point. If I had to guess I would say we have about $75K US per seat into SW and related tools. That's just crazy.
Don't get me wrong, I love SW. And, yes, we've made a ton of money using the tool. Yet that doesn't mean I am not going to be critical of a cost structure that, in my opinion, does not match the marginal improvements offered in exchange. It's negative value.
Here's a specific example from CAMWorks, the CAM tool we own and they push (to the point of SW having added a "lite" version of it for free with SW in the last few years). We have the full package, which wasn't cheap, along with training and maintenance over the years. And yet, for the tens of thousands of dollars we have spent on it, their tool, feeds and speeds library absolutely sucks (it will actually damage your machine if you are not paying attention) and they don't implement HSM (High Speed Machining) a critical productivity tool in modern machining. In fact, if you want HSM you have to spend (don't remember exactly) about $1,800 US for the initial license and (again, don't remember exactly) >$1K US per year for support and updates.
I can't wait to drop CAMWorks like a hot potato, it's horrible software we got stuck with over a decade ago. When you are running a CNC shop it isn't always easy to jump from software to software. People need to learn the tool and become productive with it. In addition to this, mistakes can be very, very costly (a spindle Z crash on a Haas VMC can cost you $5K to $10K US easy). In other words, you have to be very careful about the decisions you make and these decision become multi-year commitments, like it or not.
So, yeah, if Fusion360 had a full local mode of operation I would be throwing money at them. It's the right approach in my opinion: A reasonable annual fee, for a full-featured suite and modern software that seems to be evolving quite nicely.
I love SW, but it makes sense for you use case I would definitely go with F360.
I think it's clunky and outdated in many ways. There are some things that drive me up a wall, like the issues with the selection of the units you want to use when designing a part or creating assemblies.
For example, in Solidworks you can change between units (millimeters to inches, for example) any time you want and as often as you want as you are modeling a part. In NX you have to run a script to convert the part file from one unit system to the other. It's an absolute pain in the ass.
That said, if you are designing a rocket with 1,000 of your closest friends it seems NX is a better tool for the job. I've never tried to use SW in large team settings.
Yeah, sadly it's a nonstarter for me for anything other than hobby projects. Even at that, since I own Solidworks there's very little incentive to use F360, even though I have it installed and really want to send them money (Solidworks and CAMWorks annual maintenance costs are ridiculous but I have no options).
There are lots of tentacles to this cloud-based business. Autodesk is a very large and solid corporation, yet there are no guarantees that they are going to be around. I still valuabe AutoCAD files dating back 30+ years that I can open using a fully licensed old version of AutoCAD. The files are local, fully backed-up for decades, secure, private and we own the software licence. We don't need Autodesk to exist to access these files and use the software.
Same case with Solidworks. They could go out of business tomorrow and our current license would serve us well for years. And the designs would be safe and locally accessible within one computer, don't even need a network.
With clients, particular those in sensitive domains, cloud-based CAD is a nonstarter. I'm sure there are those who use it, I just haven't run into any yet.
Another example of this is the Adobe Creative Suite. We own full licenses from amny years ago. The minute they went to cloud-only we were done sending Adobe money every year. With permanent local licenses you can manage the financial decision of when and why you upgrade your software. With these cloud-based options some cut you off if you don't pay your annual fees.
I understand why these companies do this. I get it. However, they seem to be missing the point: Their customers use their software to create products and intellectual property. They don't use their software to use software. They could not care less. The value they create is in the work product, not the particular software they use. A model that cuts off access to your intellectual property (because you can't use the software) without an annual fee can flush years of work, decades, down the toilet. That's a terrible outcome. Again, there are no guarantees that any of these companies will be around forever.
JetBrains seem to have a reasonable model and we are happy to pay them on an annual basis. The massive difference between coding tools and CAD tools is that the work product isn't in a proprietary format that requires a license to that software. If we stop using JetBrains tools our C or Python code doesn't evaporate.
As a data point, I've investigated FreeCAD a few months ago. It seems "ok" for designing single part objects, and has reasonable 3-axis CAM.
FreeCAD's main drawback (from my PoV) is the lack of coherent assembly functionality. They have several incompatible, competing approaches all in development.
Hopefully one of those becomes the "blessed" approach, and people can safely use that for the next [decades]. :)
Did you evaluate A2Plus? Right now I'm building all my parts as independent Bodies in the same workspace, and haven't adopted A2Plus (since I like to design my parts within the assembly view, while it forces you to design parts then Import them into another workspace).
The purpose I was looking at FreeCAD for, was to publish some reference designs that would be useful both personally, and potentially externally for many years from now.
As they're all incompatible with each other, and none of them is the official "blessed" choice that's guaranteed to be part of FreeCAD for the next [decades], I just dropped FreeCAD as not yet being suitable for purpose. :(
Hopefully these separate efforts converge into a single system at some point, which would let FreeCAD compete with the commercial systems. :)
The rest of FreeCAD seems to be good enough (from my PoV), apart from that one critical blocker.
Frankly, if the cloud-based issue isn't a detractor I would not think of anything other than Fusion 360. It's a great product. Even the paid tier is amazing value for the money. Their $500 a year license would likely cost me well in excess of $5,000 a year in Solidworks. I mean, CAD, CAM and simulation alone get to that level in annual fees depending on what you have. So, it's 10x cheaper and likely a few x better value in some fronts. If they had a fully local option (with no cloud component whatsoever) I would likely switch away from SW over a few years.
Back when I was doing CAD work professionaly it was by far the most encountered software. Others have footholds in some industrys (aerospace, automotive) but for "general" product design SW is king.
