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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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.
It is getting better, but I still get crashes in 1.0. I feel like there are some specific tools and features that are a lot more prone to crashes and others that are quite solid. I had crashes in particular with the thickness tool and some joins in the assembly workbench.
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.
I saw a bit ago that blended has an addon or plugin or something that adds parametric functions
I think I got the impression it’s less powerful that proper parametric cad or something, but I figured I’d mention it in case that makes it a more viable option for you!
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)
RS Design Spark?
I haven’t used it in a few years but I remember it being alright for hobby stuff.
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.
I haven’t used it but there is also tinkercad
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.
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…
Maybe I suck at CAD but love OpenScad as its easier for me to understand.
Pirated inventor is good. Fully local, used by lots of people. Free when obtained on the high seas
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.
Solidworks has a cheap maker version. You can save locally. It’s always been shit, so it can’t get enshittified /s.
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 tried using FreeCAD 5 or 10 years ago, and it was painful. I had access to Inventor, so I used that for the limited work I was doing. Later, I heard of some build/pack/whatever that removed a lot of pain from the FreeCAD workflow, but I can’t remember what it was called and I wasn’t doing CAD work any more. Trying to find that led me to this, though:
Also, I found a video on YouTube that appears to go through the same steps. Here it is.
I’m not sure it that will solve your problems, but the 20 minute video should answer that question for you.
The Ondsel project seems to have died. Their apparent business model was they were going to bolt cloud shit around FreeCAD. Hilariously stupid business model but at least some of the money they wasted went to open source software. They shook out a few of the open source tumors, like the sketcher now has a semi-intelligent dimension tool, I think they tackled the topological naming problem and we’ve finally got an official Assembly workbench that even sort of works I guess. But it’s still FreeCAD and if something can be unintuitive, it will.
Freecad 1.0 released not so long ago, you should take a look and be amazed
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.
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.
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.
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 agree. I’m a software developer and absolutely love OoenSCAD.
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/
I’m pretty happy with blender. There is also a plugin that makes it more like cad.
Worth highlighting, Cadsketcher is parametric. https://youtu.be/1jNDLUDL0gc
