I am not an engineer. I’m not even good at math, and my spatial reasoning skills are nonexistent. With that in mind, here are the CAD programs I’ve tried.
Blender, Pros: Free, surprisingly comprehensive. Cons: Not parametric, can’t precisely measure or constrain models, all the extra stuff you get like rendering has no use in 3D printing.
Onshape: Pros: Easy to use, convenient (I’ve successfully edited a model on my phone), free*. Cons: Runs on someone else’s computer in the cloud, not private, enshittification is sure to come shortly if history is any indication.
Fusion360: Pros: seems to be what everyone else is using. Cons: enshittification is already happening, runs locally with limited saves in the cloud so you don’t own your files but also don’t get the run anywhere convenience of the cloud.
Plasticity: Pros: buttery smooth workflow, pay once run forever, runs and saves locally. Cons: Not peremetric so hard to go back and adjust things later.
FreeCAD: Pros: free, open source. Cons: workflow as rough as sandpaper, constantly crashes.
Plasticity and Onshape have proven to be the most productive choices for me. If only Plasticity were parametric it would be the perfect software for me personally.
I want to like FreeCAD, I really do, but it’s so hard to use. I love Plasticity, but it’s meant for making 3D assets for games etc. using hard surface modelling, not so much for manufacturing.
If I may digress for a moment, I work as a network admin. I’m familiar mostly with Cisco at work, but use Ubiquiti at home. Cisco equipment is monstrously expensive from a consumer or prosumer perspective, and the only way to get true hands-on experience is to buy used equipment from ebay which may still be pricey.
Ubiquiti’s market strategy seems to be to make the kind of gear that a network admin would want in their home. It’s inexpensive relative to the big fish like Cisco, but has a fairly comprehensive feature set. The idea is to entice Joe IT guy to buy Ubiquiti gear for his house, fall in love with it, then push for the company to switch to Ubiquiti the next time they upgrade.
What I want is the Ubiquiti of CAD programs. Easy to use, low barrier to entry but comprehensive enough to use professionally.
Suggestions/comments?
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I recently looked into (affordable) Linux-CAD programs and stumbled upon VariCAD, which, checking their presentation, appeared pretty complete. Saying that I would just make a decision after throwing a serious project, multiple parts, workgroups, parameters and technical drawing generation, on it. Maybe someone can comment on it?
I personally like OpenSCAD (with VSCode not with the built-in editor)
Try freecad as a flatpak maybe ? Doesn’t crash for me unless I do something stupid with fillets. It’s harder, tougher to use than paid options but you own what you make at the end.
It hasn’t crashed for me in a long time
Fusion is easiest to get going for ‘serious’ projects as a beginner.
I will use it while I can, or until an equal alternative is available. Nothing lasts forever.Blender has addons for parametric workflows. Actually, there’s plugins to do anything you want.
I would also highly recommend Destructive Extrude for Blender, a plugin that enables the push-pull modeling that made SketchUp an entry level CAD learner’s dream (before Google sold it to Trimble who promptly ate it and shat it back out)
I liked TinkerCAD.
You can save files in fusion 360 locally. It’s just not the main way the program encourages which sucks.
I think you have to like export instead pf save but you do get a .f3d file which is the same as what gets saved to the cloud.
Onshape would be ubiquity. Easy to use, flash, has all the good bits, ripe to screw the customer at any moment once enough lock in is gained.
My solution to the same issue was OpenSCAD. But it might not be for the faint of heart. For me, this is a godsend, working 100% in my mindspace.
I second this. It was my step after tinkercad and never looked back. But I do love programming so maybe biased.
If they so said have no math or spatial reasoning then OpenSCAD is the last tool for them to try.
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Maybe I suck at CAD but love OpenScad as its easier for me to understand.
As I said, it’s right for me, but it might not be for everyone. If I was to invent a CAD system, I’d write something exactly like OpenSCAD…
I’ve been using freecad with great success for years now and I’d say while I agree freecad is rough in terms of ux, it is highly usable, especially after 1.0 version. I feel like investing time in overcoming its flaws and weaknesses will pay off in the future, as it will enable access to a stable, eternally free and reliable software. Though I also agree it crashes frequently, I set a very frequent auto save and I don’t often get screwed now.
FreeCAD is a spectacular second CAD tool to learn. Once you understand the concepts and workflows for one of the industry standard tools, you will know how to translate that to FreeCAD speak as it were.
As a first CAD tool it is atrocious. It crashes while you are exploring new tools and you just don’t have the vocabulary (or muscle memory) to actually ask questions or search for answers.
If someone really wants to get into hobbyist CAD (for 3d printing), probably the best flow is to start with TinkerCAD, switch to Fusion 360 (assuming you aren’t running linux. Onshape if you are), and once you are comfortable and can build basically whatever you want change to FreeCAD if you want more control over your toolchain.
And if someone wants to do this professionally? Fusion 360 is the endstate. Maybe you’ll end up at a firm that uses the other family (which I think Onshape is part of?) but you will basically never find a company that wants FreeCAD formats.
FreeCad was crashing on average every two minutes when I tried using it last month. I really want to like it but crashes need to be toned down…
Edit: everyone is saying stable builds are fine, but I was just using whatever nixos had packaged. I’d assume that’s the stable build but may be wrong.
Also, amd system with up to date drivers so that’s not my issue. Maybe sketches are just unstable?
I’ve been using it for months now and I had zero crashes. Is this a platform thing or just because I’m mostly only using the parts menu?
Possibly, it mainly crashed dealing with sketches.
No issues with Freecad here and I am on linux + Nvidia!
Are you sure that your system is up to date? are drivers ok?
Yeah I have used Freecad for ages and never had an issue, also use an NVidia GPU. Hopefully you get your issue sorted, because freecad really is good and only getting better every time.
Install the stable versions not the developer versions. Freecad is seriously good. I’m using both freecad and NX on a project. NX for drawings because freecad still chokes on drawings. But its getting better for drawings. We’ll be fully jumping to freecad soon.
Maybe use a release and not a weekly build?
Well, it definitely isn’t suppose to be THAT bad. I can get a crash every half an hour or even longer. Usually for no apparent reason - like when I want to sketch on a face and the app switches from PartDesign workbench to sketcher or wise versa. And then after restart that doesn’t happen again. That is annoying, has been happening for ages and would really like it to be fixed. But it’s not every few minutes, more like half an hour to an hour.
I have had FreeCAD crash apparently because of something I did. Like it couldn’t handle some operation and couldn’t fail gracefully.
FreeCAD: Pros: free, open source. Cons: workflow as rough as sandpaper, constantly crashes.
It has a learning curve (like all software), yes. But I cannot confirm the crashes.
The 1.0.x versions have been rock solid for me. I like using it, but that might just be the Stockholm syndrome kicking in.
Yeah 1.0 has been quite stable for me. I especially recommend the weekly releases with features planned for 1.1, like better sketch projection tools and snapping.
I love freecad but even the latest release has some occasional crashes. For instance if you try to use PartDesign_Chamfer or PartDesign_Fillet and then go back and edit any of the sketches those were applied to things start to get wacky.
I agree I have had some chamfer and fillets trouble that even wasn’t there before (a not-completely-tangent arc cutout from a square exposes this clearly) and will cause faces to shoot to “random” positions. Things can get wonky also because the Topological Naming Problem isn’t 100% gone, but a model getting messed up is not the same as crashing.
Still haven’t had a single crash in 1.0.2.
You missed OpenSCAD but that might’ve been intentional if you’re looking for something with low barrier to entry and a purely “visual” workflow. It’s the diametric opposite of Blender, basically. Surprisingly non-comprehensive with very limited options of primitives to work with, but laser-focused on building precise, constrained, parametric models out of said primitives. The downside is that you have to code it. Like, in actual code. For the artistically-minded designer, it’s probably not the right tool. But for people with the appropriate mental model and skillset, it’s an extremely effective tool, and infinitely extensible. If you need to do something particularly complex, chances are someone’s already written the functions and libraries to do it, and if you need to know how to do it too, you can just look at their code. Assuming you can read it.
The actual coding language itself is a bit janky and for me, counterintuitive and unpleasant in some ways. It certainly wouldn’t be my first choice, but it’s workable, and the elegance of the overall idea makes up for it. It’s worth the extra investment in learning, and I can’t go back to wrestling with what I find are clunky visual workflows anymore. I crave the hard numerical precision of actually and accurately defining the shapes I’m working with.
Yes! This so much.
I am entirely convinced that one of the more underserved niches in software is domain-specific languages for doing traditionally-mousey/clicky/GUI things. I’m so convinced of that that I’ve written just such a DSL and am actively working on a second one.
About the only really good examples of that that I know of are OpenSCAD and Graphviz. (And I guess the one I wrote.) I’ve love to know about more. (And, no, libraries that make GUI-sort-of use cases easier in some general purpose language don’t count. There’s really something about having syntax/builtins/standard library custom made specifically for the use case that I’m quite convinced has major benefits to overall usability.)
About OpenSCAD specifically, I also have some nit-picks about the language. There are cases where I’ve written code in other languages that outputs OpenSCAD code specifically to get around some limitations. (There’s one project I’m working on and haven’t Open Sourced yet that just begs so hard for maps/dicts/string-keyed-composite-types. And the ability to use modules as values. (Like, making it more of a “functional” language… or rather a “moduleal” language.)) But like you, none of that detracts enough to make me not love OpenSCAD.
About the only really good examples of that that I know of are OpenSCAD and Graphviz.
Like, things that take in a text file with programming capabilities describing what to generate? I can think of a couple off the top of my head.
I’ll have to check out both OpenSCAD and Code Comic. Some completely non-CAD DSLs that you might be interested in, since you mentioned GraphViz:
Mermaid.js does something very similar to Graphviz. There are a couple other similar tools like that out there, but Mermaid is supported in a lot of places natively or as an easy to use plugin, like GitHub Markdown (and other git forges like Forgejo), Hedgedoc, Obsidian, SilverBullet, etc…
I’d also argue that LaTeX counts, and to a lesser extent, Markdown - compare using them to using Word.
And reveal.js is an equivalent for slide deck creation that would normally be done with PowerPoint.
I agree. I’m a software developer and absolutely love OpenSCAD.
It would be great if it supported things like fillets and chamfers, otherwise I’m very happy with it.
CAD without fillets and chamfers is PFU.
BOSL is a massive improvement over the barebones OpenSCAD functions, and if you need to do stuff like fillets and chamfers you should check it out. There are probably other libraries that do the same but I know BOSL(2) does, through functions like cuboid() and prismoid() and edge_profile() among many other things.
That is very cool!
Thank you for the suggestion.
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/18/belfry-openscad-library-bosl2-brings-useful-parts-and-tools-aplenty/
There’s an entry missing in your list, which many people seem to not know about: Siemens Solid Edge
Like fusion, is free for personal/hobby use. But it’s not “cloud based”. Also unlike fusion, they aren’t constantly scaling back what you can do with the free edition. Probably worth a shot.
I will be blunt. If you are as bad at math and spatial reasoning as you say, then CAD probably isn’t for you. You will always find it difficult and unrewarding. Design and engineering require a mindset you might not have.
As far as “cheap and easy and professional” CAD they ALL require effort to learn and money to gain entry for commercial versions. CAD is a skill and skills require effort to acquire. And it sounds as if you have no desire to put in very much effort.
For a CAD program to meet your want of cheap and simple, (professional means a lot of money and takes more than a few minutes of effort), look at TinkerCAD. It’s free and simple enough that I teach that to 5th and 6th grade students well enough for them to make simple objects. Ain’t nothing wrong with starting there and learning how to think about design and CAD before you might try and step into more demanding software.
Woof.
Put down your participation trophy for a minute. It’s nice you feel the need to ride to the rescue, but sometimes the truth just sucks.
OP openly claims to have poor math skills and lacks spatial awareness. If that’s the case, he’s not ever going to have an easy time. Those are 2 skills you need to have, at least to some degree, if you even want to start with designing things. And he naively expects,“free, easy, and professional” results NOW! Then lists his reasons on why he doesn’t like any of the free versions of OnShape and Fusion and FreeCAD. And I doubt OP would do any better with SolidEdge either.
OP wants something he cannot have-- instant skill without personal effort or aptitude, (again from his OWN words). Life don’t work that way Buttercup.
Hey, horses don’t say woof.
I’ve been using progeCAD for the last few years and its basically a clone of AutoCAD for a fraction of the price and you own it unlike autodesk’s model they’ve had since like 2017 or something.
