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.
https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/fusion-360-ideastation-archiv...
Haven't really used it much since then, mostly because of their answer.