this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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What are your recommended alternatives to SolidWorks?
To be perfectly honest nothing even comes close to the level of productivity I get in Solidworks. And I've tried them all.
Fusion360 is a great alternative if you don't mind depending on cloud-services for your software to work properly. It handles some things in a more modern way than Solidworks does, and I really like some of the features, it's just the way the software is built cloud-first that really pisses me off.
Then there's Inventor, which is actually has some interesting features if you're a mechanical engineer. The current version is perfectly capable of most things you can do with Solidworks, although I would argue drafting parts is much more of a pain.
If you're into open source software there's always FreeCAD, which is what masochists use for their fix. (Honestly it's not that bad, but there's absolutely no polish to the user experience)
If you like to use tablets or phones for anything, you could give Onshape a go. It's a pretty great lightweight replacement, all things considered.
Last, but not least: Altair Inspire. If you like working with generative design this might be the alternative for you. Really fun to work with, but not a full-blown replacement for everything Solidworks offers.
Also OpenScad and Blender, but Solidworks is still the standard in the professional space.
Solidworks is used in the industry by many professionals. I'm an enthusiast that also does 3d modeling and I use Blender. It's FOSS and is very user friendly with the ability to do many complicated designs. There's also FreeCad and OpenScad which are also Foss and used by more advanced users.
Blender is awesome for modeling, but it does not do parametric modeling, which makes its use limited outside of game art / VFX workflows. It's more suited as a replacement for Maya/3DS Max than it is for replacing Solidworks.
That said, there is the CAD Sketcher plugin which makes Blender behave slightly more like a parametric modeler.
There is also Plasticity, which behaves like an oddly satisfying mix between Blender and parametric CAD. It's built on Parasolid, which is the same geometry kernel powering Solidworks and Siemens NX.
Do learn Blender, but use it for further detailing your models and making renders. The best way to export for Blender I've found is through Solidworks Visualize, which can export to OBJ and FBX formats. Depending on what you're rendering, you might have to spend some time UV unwrapping in order to get textures to map properly.
Bonus tip: If you have a VR headset give Gravity Sketch a try, it's a great way to do conceptual design sketching and NURBS modeling in a really intuitive way. I'm confident VR/AR is the future of 3D modeling if diffusion models don't fully replace the need for it in the near future.
I'm a fan of OnShape. It has parametric modeling, and is free (if you don't mind your designs being visible by everyone).