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Comment by rossng | Hacker News Reader

Does Autodesk have any remaining users that actually _enjoy_ being their customer? Their CAD software is unstable and painful (just try installing it...); architects resent their stewardship of Revit[1] and so on.

This seems like an existential risk to the company if something better comes along. Sure, they have massive lock-in, but these things don't last forever. Remember when we all thought that Microsoft Office file formats guaranteed an eternal monopoly?

[1] https://the-nordic-letter.com/

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If you think Autodesk is bad, try their competition.

Paid competiting software from companies like Dassault are even more locked down and free software alternatives don’t even come close in feature parity.

Autodesk can do this because it’s been 40 years, a lot of people have tried, and somehow they all manage to make something worse.

I find Rhino3D to be a pretty good antithesis to AutoDesk.

The company behind it is employee owned and been around since the ‘90s.

Subscription-free, single payment, and they actually support older versions of their software.

One nice part of their license is if you buy the student version, there is no restriction on you continuing to use that license commercially, in perpetuity.

Software for the construction industry is uniformly terrible, Autodesk and Trimble are the big players and I’d be grateful if someone disrupted them.

There is a small amount of good construction software, Procore (project and document management) and Bluebeam (amazing pdf editor) are wonderful tools but the estimating software I use by Trimble is awful. Inconsistent UI, they use their own custom GUI elements instead of the built in Windows GUI elements, unclear interfaces, every UI/UX crime is present in it.

Autodesk isn’t going anywhere tho, basically every architect/engineer uses it (in commercial construction).

If you are a GC looking for an alternative project management software that is easy to use, modern, and fairly priced, consider https://constructable.ai (full transparency, I'm one of the co-founders).

Everything being said about existing software in this post very much resonates with what we learned talking to hundreds of GCs. We want to change this.

Fusion 360 is getting worse and costs more every year. Now they just emailed that the early renewal discount will also no longer be available.

Sadly FreeCAD is just not there where it needs to be to be a good alternative.

Fusion turned a corner recently imo. They added the ability to reference driven dimensions in formulas, which makes fully parametric designs trivial. I seem to never get hung calculations or crashes anymore.

I use fusion 360 several times a week, but I'm not quite able to follow what you said. Can you provide an example or a link to where they announced this feature?

https://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360/blog/october-20....

Fusion is my daily driver and this is a huge thing for me. Missed it. Thanks.

I switched to FreeCAD 2-3 years ago. It suits me just fine and I'm so glad I can store my project in a local folder. I also don't have to worry Fusion360 taking any more features away or locking me out. I also don't have to beg them to renew my licence every year.

FreeCAD has improved a lot recently.

MangoJelly has also done massive work creating thorough video tutorials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_yh_S31R9g&list=PLWuyJLVUNt...

I tried FreeCAD earlier this year but I nearly pulled my hair out trying to move a hole in a design after the hole was created. This is a much easier task in Autodesk. I am not sure I am a huge fan of the UI design choices that FreeCAD has made.

Businesses have pipelines entirely relying on Autodesk tools & formats.

> but these things don't last forever. Remember when we all thought that Microsoft Office file formats guaranteed an eternal monopoly?

It will last long enough for Autodesk. The real issue being why Autodesk was allowed to basically buy most of its main competitors in the 3D/CAD authoring tool space without any push back from government agencies.

> The real issue being why Autodesk was allowed to basically buy most of its main competitors in the 3D/CAD authoring tool space without any push back from government agencies.

That's not even remotely true. There's Dassault/Catia, Siemens/NX, PTC/Creo, and probably a dozen (or more) niche competitors.

The real problem is massive vendor lock-in. Each CAD company goes out of their way to have crappy interop with the others.

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