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Comment by flaminHotSpeedo | Hacker News Reader

Autodesk has the honor of being one of the few companies that are so shitty I'm _happy_ to pay money to their competitors.

I paid for a full solidworks license for a year (before discovering the makers license) and grumbled only mildly.

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You should consider donating to it's OSS competitors. Still lots of catching up needed in the cad space.

FreeCAD? What does FreeCAD need next?

Maybe Assembly, but I can always download the Assembly3 plugin.

Outside of having to download a plugin, FreeCAD has never limited me.

It really really really needs to fix the topological naming problem. It also needs a UI overhaul and some convenience functionality to knock some of the rougher edges off common workflows. It's possible to do a lot with FreeCAD, so in that sense it's not particularly limited, but it's deeply annoying to have to jump through some of the hoops it puts in your way.

From what I've read, it needs more UI consistency between workbenches. They should also use the constraint solver from Solvespace everywhere.

The whole workbench system is shonky, for my money. It ends up with a situation where arbitrary UI context switches are needed to jump from one bit of functionality to another, just because of the historical accident of who worked on which piece of code.

Using the Solvespace solver is an interesting problem: it would switch up the FreeCAD licence from the LGPL to the GPLv3. The FreeCAD folks don't want to do that: it's fine from a licensing point of view, but they don't want the additional constraints.

The only thing I am happy about Autodesk is that they do at least attempt maintaining a Mac version. Wish this was more common on other CAD developers.

We're a heavy AutoDESK using company. BricsCAD is looking more and more tempting. AutoCAD is a slow and heavy dinosaur and the amount of innovation and improvement between versions is honestly atrocious.

> I paid for a full solidworks license for a year (before discovering the makers license) and grumbled only mildly.

Does that Solidworks makers license still exist? Does it include the CAM stuff for CNC machines?

They've adjusted it since when it was first released. Here's the current page about it now though:

https://www.solidworks.com/solution/3dexperience-solidworks-...

And that site is precisely why Fusion is eating Solidworks for breakfast.

Getting solid pricing information from that is impossible. "Contact Sales" is a dead stop in this day and age ... sorry.

Fusion 360 is $545 annually even for commercial usage. It's right on the first damn page.

As for the "maker" edition, that edition of Solidworks nominally stops if you make $2,000. Most people will blow past that in a hurry. Most woodworkers pass that on one piece of furniture.

I think at least in my case I dropped fusion360 when they decided they weren't going to support the last windows machine in my house capable of running it (aka an old win7 machine). I again tried to use freeCAD, but ended up Atom3d, which is probably a better choice for the kinds of CAD stuff I was doing which was 100% stuff for my 3d printer, most of which were simple boxes with holes, standoffs, and the like for random PCBs. I mean I should be able to do that with freecad, but if it takes me another 20 hours to figure out how to make it work, its not been worth my time vs just paying for the base atom3d license (which is like $150/200 for a perpetual license).

Kicad though, 100% its not perfect, but its good enough for anything i'm doing.

Oh, I'm with you about Solidworks. I'm also not a fan of the kind of pricing, approach, etc that Solidworks has.

Also not at all a fan of Autodesk though, having used Fusion 360 from shortly after it came out. It's lack of working 5-axis CNC support (in any tier) was a turn off, especially when I was building a 5th axis for my (very hobby level) CNC system.

Then they moved CNC into a newly created commercial tier, then they put the 2&3 axis CNC stuff back into standard hobby tier, but leaving the 4&5 axis stuff in commercial tier.

No idea if their 4&5 axis stuff even works properly yet, and I've personally lost interest in the "maker" side of things in the meantime.

Shapr3d has been nice in my very limited experience too, much more intuitive than SolidWorks for hobbyists.

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