this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2026
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I need to learn cad. Would you choose freecad or solvespace. I have played a bit in solve space but haven't tried freecad yet.
I don't know solve space, but I can not not recommend FreeCAD enough.
Have trouble parsing that sentence? Now image that level of mental gymnastics for everything you're about to learn in FreeCAD. Don't do it.
I am a FreeCAD fan, but I learned on AutoCAD and others way more polished before I ran into it. If FreeCAD had been my intro to CAD I would not have continued. They're doing great things but it is not entry level ready. To use and continue to use FreeCAD you have a special kind of blind spot for some of the less intuitive workflows, and it's tendency to randomly lose its fucking mind and turn your project into a mangled, inverted abortion of its former self and then forget what Ctrl+Z is.
Lol thanks for the reply. Turns out solvespace is pretty sweet, coming from a level 0 noob. Check it out.
My company has a detailing department that uses all the fancy paid CAD softwares like AdvancedSteel, TeklaStructures and so on, I am not apart of that department but I have to be able to view and interpret the 3D models they make, so I installed FreeCAD on my work desktop and the experience has been quite rough, essentially it does not do a great job at importing files exported from these fancy softwares, I have to fiddle and tinker with different settings every single time and it sucks.
Perhaps I’m using it wrong, feel free to call me out on it as CAD isn’t really apart of my expertise.