[checkcircuits]

FreeCAD is great for the effort they put in. Unfortunately it's still very unpolished even for relatively simple work. You can tell they mean well but it's simply not designed by people who have used better tools regularly.

For those of us that cannot deal with F3D being entirely in the cloud there is Alibre which comes at a reasonable price for CAD software. It's very well designed, buy once own forever, and you get a real professional tool.

I hope FreeCAD one day beats the current offerings. But I found the tool to be unusable. The workflow is just so...bad. If you do find yourself making something usable in FreeCAD and want to upgrade to better tools almost nothing will transfer over. I've used Alibre for several years now and it functions almost exactly like Solidworks with some exceptions. Unfortunately, CAD is a space almost entirely dominated by commercial tools and will likely be for the foreseeable future. There's too many decades of collective experience brought to bear on these tools and it doesn't seem like something a really good software engineer can simply design their way into. You truly do need industry experience.

[wakeupcall]

I've switched 100% my of my hobbist design work onto FreeCAD since last year. It's still kind of painful, but I didn't feel limited. I'm waiting for it to have his "blender" moment. It's still far behind, yes, and it still does tend to crap over geometry a little too much, however I don't have to deal with licensing BS, and by knowing python I can actually do way more than what I could do with other cad offerings. The potential is absolutely staggering there.

For reference, I was mostly using onshape+f360 before for my personal work, but my experience includes inventor, solidedge, solidworks and creo. I work close to an HW team, but my employer is stingy to give cad licenses to anybody which doesn't strictly need it due to the outrageous costs these software costs for every single seat. This makes collaboration a ROYAL pain.

So my workflow usually involves importing parts into freecad, reverse engineer them, and then send the actual modeled suggestion back to the HW team. I can work with a good 30% of the parts involved without too much trouble, which is pretty amazing in it's own regard, although it's usually not pretty.

I really wanted to buy Alibre. I can afford the full "alibre design offline license" no problem. It's the only cad program I've seen that has decent pricing and decent licensing, but it doesn't work on linux. And I tried everything to make it work on wine. Hard pass.

In a certain sense, I'm glad I've stuck with freecad recently, since I know every single design I do I will not have to fight with licensing or obsolete window incompatibilities later on. It's mine forever.

[nirav72]

Are there any good tutorials for Alibre? I got into 3d printing couple of years ago and now looking into designing my own functional print models. I played around with fusion 360. But their licensing kinda turned me off. Tried out freecad and found it just as frustrating as others have noted here. So i’m looking for that one tool that I can invest some time into where I can sorted make it my IDE for all things CAD.

[amelius]

> You can tell they mean well but it's simply not designed by people who have used better tools regularly.

How can developers best learn about features in mature but expensive tools? Is anyone maintaining a list of features a capable CAD tool should have, with links to documentation, tutorials, videos, etc.?

[WJW]

You're probably not going to like this answer, but the best way is to be a regular user of the better tool before trying to recreate it yourself. Yes, this takes money, and that is why some of these proprietary tools have such a long-lasting advantage.

[johnwalkr]

I use Solidworks professionally and for personal use I use SolidEdge. It's almost as good and is free for hobbyists. When needed, I can get a license on a monthly basis for $100. The other pro cad packages have really terrible license schemes which I want to point out. For example Solidworks starts at something like $5000 plus $1500 per year maintenance fee. If you don't pay the maintenance fee you can keep using the latest version you've paid for. But when you eventually need to upgrade to work with a customer, or fix a bug, you have to backpay missed maintenance fees.

[amelius]

Alibre looks great except that it only supports MS Windows ...

[sgt]

I enthusiastically googled that and found that it's Microsoft only. People still use Windows?!/s I need a Mac version and FreeCAD works fine there.

[class3shock]

Sadly yes, none of the big players work on anything other than windows as far as I'm aware.

[class3shock]

Have you used Solidworks or Creo? Is Alibre relatively inline with their workflow/layout?