[leoedin]

Open source CAD has improved a lot in the last few years. You can use FreeCAD for modelling simple parts today and it mostly works. That wasn’t the case a few years ago.

There was a time KiCAD was a buggy mess. And no doubt blender as well.

[thyristan]

Blender is rock-solid and very smoothly usable, and as a beginner, I won't find anything missing or buggy. It would take a beginner years to get to the limitations, corner cases and broken things.

KiCAD is solid, very usable, but not totally smooth. The workflow is still far away from blender-like total integration and bliss. Where ten years ago you could find the occasional bug, a beginner won't find any nowadays.

FreeCAD only just last year started shipping releases that don't nullpointer after 2 minutes. Even a beginner with a trivial project will stumble over bugs, limitations, problems and design flaws.

There is a huge difference in quality, and KiCAD will get to Blender levels certainly. But FreeCAD will take forever, if the pace continues like that.

[criddell]

FreeCAD is built on top of Open Cascade and I think that’s what’s going to limit them. It was a fast way to get to v1, but there’s only so much that project can do to work around the limitations of the library they built on.