I’m using Fusion360, and I dislike it for a lot of reasons, but it’s easy to use. I tried FreeCAD, but it was very janky in comparison. Shapr3D was surprisingly good, but there’s no way I’m paying monthly for my hobby usage. I need precision prints, so I can’t just use Blender or similar.

Is there some magical unicorn software I’m not finding?

I'm still learning FreeCAD, but so far is seems just fine to me! Just different from what I am used to. But there are a few good channels on YouTube that do good tutorials

No, all CAD software sucks. I use FreeCAD myself and just got used to the jank.

I'm using OpenSCAD because I want to program a fish!

I bounced pretty hard off Free ad and ended up using OnShape. I don't feel great about it though.

FreeCAD. It's janky, absolutely, but it's quite powerful once you get used to it. Improved a lot with the latest major update as well.

I also tried OpenSCAD for a bit. As someone with a programming background, I really like the principle of how it works. But ultimately, I found it way too limiting.

I used OpenSCAD for a bit, and it’s good for simple things where clicking is far less efficient. I once needed a plate with a set of holes. OpenSCAD was great.

What are you used to?

FreeCAD, but (from a pure usability perspective) OnShape is quite good if you just want something done (note my CAD usage is fairly limited).

Do make sure to retry freecad if you havent in a while - they finally merged their big update that made faces not break - its still got a learning curve but its far less frustrating now

Fusion 360 as well. I think it's great for rapid development, I'd love some of the paid options but not enough. Haven't found anything else that comes close to its power whilst still costing nothing.

100% this. Ive been through 4 different cad packages professionally and every single one of them is terrible bad awful garbage. Pick your flavor of garbage and get with it.

After a few months of forcing myself to learn it, FreeCAD really isn't that bad. It's miles better than Creo.

+1 for OpenSCAD! If you have experience with scripting/coding, it feels really comfy. There’s a nice wikibook that taught me the basics.

The full release hasn’t been updated since 2021, so I highly recommend running a development snapshot. The preview and rendering are much more performant. Enable the “manifold” engine if it’s not on by default.

It works fine OOTB, but I customized it a bit to match my workflow: I use vim with an LSP as the text editor, and I use git to track my changes.

Now I’ve began using bosl2 in most of my projects. It has a lot of QOL features and can save a lot of work.

I love OpenSCAD because not only can I easily parameterize things, and define libraries for commonly used stuff but I can also combine it with my Git setup to get all the benefits of code provenance and backups and change sets and such.

I use FreeCAD, Fusion, and Solidworks. I don’t love freecad as it’s unintuitive and clunky. Solidworks is powerful and okay but I often find myself fighting with it.

Fusion, so far has been the one I like most, but it doesn’t run on Linux which forces me to keep my MacBook around. The collaboration features in fusion are good and it handles step files way better than solidworks does.

I know Rhino is really good for the price, so maybe consider testing it out. I believe the licensing is perpetual.

Blender for most things, freecad sometimes

Look up how to use FreeCAD's spreadsheet.

OnShape is what I use. Fusion is fine, but a little heavy for me.

FreeCAD is just slightly too clunky for what I use it for, but I'll keep trying every release to see if I change my mind.

In the meantime, OnShape is cross platform cause it's all in browser and I don't care about my designs being public. I actually post them all free anyway.

butterflies

I also don't have a good solution and I'm extremely slowly writing my own stuff starting from svg and drawings and some programming to do geometry. But I mostly haven't touched 3d yet.

I would use blender which you have already excluded so no idea.

Used to use fusion 360, hate cloud, freecad is painful to use, been trying out plasticity and it seems pretty decent

Onshape is the way to go for free tier CAD.

Otherwise TinkerCAD can work, it's just more of an MS Paint version of CAD.

I mainly use Blender and manually type in the sizes for things, make heavy use of the boolean operators to make holes and cutouts. I would like to learn FreeCAD eventually. I refuse to use proprietary products and services for my hobby projects.

Either SketchUp 2017 or FreeCAD depending upon complexity

Honestly most of the time I get by fine with Tinkercad if I'm making something functional, Blender if it's decorative.

Sketchup was used in the real world? I remember using it in the mid 2000s to make a castle to add across the street from my house in Earth.

I use FreeCAD.

I follow Mango Jelly Solutions and DeltaHedra on YouTube for tutorials.

I've had excellent results designing items for 3D prints.

I have a licensed seat of Solidworks on my work computer; that's where I learned to solid model. I also have an older pirated copy on my home computer but it requires Windows.

If I had to choose something free I would probably choose Onshape because it is very similar to Solidworks (it was created with help from one of the founders of Solidworks). However it sucks that all of your models are public.

Otherwise, the only viable option in my eyes would be Fusion 360.

I haven't tried it, but I know there is a plugin for Blender that allows you to do parametric modelling but I'm sure the options are pretty limited.

It was first thing I used when starting on Anet A8.
I liked that it was simple had all kind of add-ons for 3D printing (solid inspector, BezierSpline, Fredo Corner, Tax Engineering, ...)
so I just kept using it

I use 3dstudio lol, because I know how it works quite well for my needs.

For 3d printing.

With plasticity, do you make precision parts where .1mm matters or is it more decorative designs?

Well, CAD and “3D” are not the same thing. Blender is good for 3d, but cad features are stapled on. Also blender has too many knobs—that is not useful for CAD

Wow that’s a name I haven’t heard in a while!

Some of it will depend on what your goals and OS are. OnShape is pretty good, and being in-browser it's inherently cross-platform. BUT... their free tier has the single worst licensing setup imaginable: your designs are public, you can't make a single cent off them, BUT any paying customer (and arguably any other user at all) can. They also jump straight from free to enterprise pricing.

Fusion you know. Licensewise, the free version gives you a small grace zone to make a couple of bucks without issues, and you can at elast keep your designs to yourself.

SolidWorks has an extremely heavy and unfriendly web interface, but their in-browser parametric 3D CAD is better than it used to be, and you can get a maker plan for $25-$50 a year that gives you a little wiggle room to sell a few trinkets and not get blasted if someone or something rats you out to Dassault. If you're on Windows, you'll also be able to install proper SolidWorks (though files will be watermarked to limit them to a hobbyist/maker install.

Solid Edge is a bit clunkier than (real) SolidWorks or Fusion, is windows only, and there's also a doughnut hole for limited commercial use, but it's the full software and it's free as in beer.

Since they cleared up the worst of the toponaming issue, FreeCAD is way better than it used to be. I still feel like the moment you have to do anything more than draw/extrude/fillet, then all the clunkiness comes back, though. It's a brilliant project in its way, but it remains a mixed bag, shall we say.

I paid for a permanent license for my version of Alibre Design, and that's what I generally use. It's somewhere between SolidEdge and Solidworks in user-friendliness, and more than powerful enough for my keyboards and random widgets. I also do like the simplicity of owning my license and therefore fully controlling my designs, but it wasn't cheap, probably two years' worth of monthly payments on the Shapr3D usable tier or the fancy Fusion tier, so I will probably keep plugging along for a while yet. They have a more basic product (Atom) that's missing some fairly useful features, but is still parametric and is rather cheap. It's also all Windows only, though I keep hearing the next version will play nice with Wine/Proton. For now, my investment with Alibre is pretty much THE reason I occasionally boot back into Windows.

TinkerCAD (opwned by Autodesk like Fusion is) is great for certain things, and the "make shape, set solid or hole" workflow is much more intuitive for the abject beginner, but if you're on Fusion you're already past the need for it, i'd think.

There are other players (Rhino, Plasticity, DesignSpark, SolveSpace, among others), but Fusion, Shapr3D (for single parts only, no assemblies),OnShape, SolidEdge, FreeCAD, Alibre, and Solidworks pretty much cover mechanical CAD that's (1) full-featured, (2) 3D, (3) got parametric history and (4) available with usable free or maker versions.

In the meantime, OnShape is cross platform cause it’s all in browser and I don’t care about my designs being public. I actually post them all free anyway.

The biggest issue with their license is that they went so hard on protecting themselves hosting it, that they basically give everyone BUT the creator the right to monetize a public design. It's an offensively sloppy ToU, or at least it was the last time I checked it.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately.

Over time, I've come to hate doing things in the "productivity-via-point-and-click-adventure" model. I very much think the use cases where the mouse is actually necessary are way slimmer than people really think.

If FreeCAD and similar tools take the approach of the "potter" paradigm where you connect your brain to the medium via your fingers as directly as possible even if the medium is digital/virtual (like most of the CAD programs out there), OpenSCAD is more of a "dark factory" paradigm where you externalize a piece of your mind/expertise into a program that encodes all of your expertise and the program acts on the medium on your behalf. (And in the case of OpenSCAD, the program is kindof "made of the same thing as the medium itself.")

In the "potter" paradigm:

• You end up with a finished product, but devoid of any accounting of the decisions which went into making the finished product.
• Your metaphysical "finger prints" make it into the end product. The tiniest twitch of a finger is reflected in the final product, even if it's an unconscious motion.
• Altering earlier steps that came earlier in the process isn't as easy. Think of a painter layering paints to capture the subtle tones of human skin and then deciding that four layers down they wish they'd done something different. To fix it, they'd have to cover part of the image and redo all the steps manually. (And yes, undo chains attempt mitigate this somewhat, but imperfectly since reapplying later steps isn't necessarily perfect.)
• Excessive precision isn't typically possible.
• Making another, similar asset is a manual process that can't reuse the steps/expertise that went into building previous ones cleanly.
• There's no time spent after finishing your work where the computer has to work/chug to produce the finished product.
• Parameterized builds are less natural.
• For digital assets, almost always involves using a pointing device.

In the "dark factory" paradigm:

• You end up not just with a finished product, but also a program that gives much more insight into how the product was built and what decisions were made in the process of constructing it.
• Only conscious decisions go into the final product.
• Altering earlier steps can be done much more cleanly and later steps can be written in such a way that they "automatically" inherit properties introduced by changes in earlier steps.
• Perfection(ism?) by default. The perfect may be at risk of becoming the enemy of the good.
• Later, similar assets can reuse the logic from earlier assets where there are similarities.
• You might spend some time waiting for your program to finish running before your asset is ready.
• Parameterization is like breathing. It's arguably easier than not parameterizing.
• Requires no mouse or pointing device. Just a text editor.

And mind you, a lot of programs try to kindof live somewhere in the middle. Being extremely mouse-driven while still supporting parameterization. Or doing sophisticated things with

I'm not trying to advocate against the "potter" paradigm. There are benefits and drawbacks to both. And I can't bash just doing what works for you. But a) the "potter" paradigm doesn't work for me very well at all and the "dark factory" paradigm does and b) I very much believe that the "dark factory" paradigm is so underserved as to be nearly non-existent. I know of OpenSCAD (and ImplicitCAD and a few others in the CAD space) and Graphviz and a few others that were suggested to me in this comment tree. And CodeComic which I personally wrote. And I'm working on another such DSL for making 3D models/assets for games and 3D animations. (Think "art" rather than "engineering". FreeCAD is to OpenSCAD as Blender is to what I'm building. Yes I'm planning to Open Source it in the near-ish future.) But there's so little in that realm.

So, as you can imagine I really love OpenSCAD. I'd be very surprised to find myself using anything else for CAD in the future that wasn't a DSL.

P.S. Maybe I should start a blog. Heh.

I am a big fan of OnShape, its free for personal use. By that they mean that all your projects are publicly accessible when using the free options. Otherwise its the same as the paid option. As a hobbiest this is fine with me because I am putting all my stuff up with a creative commons license anyway. It is my way of giving back to a community that has given me so many designs for free.

Teaching tech did a great introductory series on it which includes a video about why he chose on shape.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGqRUdq5ULsONnjEEPeBxxStEsobDKAtV

If you have experience with other cad programs you'll probably get through the videos quickly as the concepts translate from software to software, its just a difference in interface and execution.

I really wish onshape had a middle area between free and 1500 USD/y

Same with Shapr3D (which doesn’t export high res in free mode) I just can’t justify paying for subscriptions when I use it sporadically.

I don’t sell, and I don’t create frequently

Uhhhggggg I hate modern software!!!

OK, use the free tier if you don't sell... And if you don't like the terms, FreeCAD is your option.

Onshape is nice and I enjoy using it, but the free tier has some really absurd caveats that anyone considering the platform should be aware of:

Free users are restricted from commercial use and all designs are publicly-available.

Additionally, while free users technically continue to own the IP they create, they lose control of licensing rights. Section 1.7.2.2 Your content - Intellectual Property of the Terms of Use states

For any Public Document owned by a Free Plan User created on or after August 7, 2018, or any Public Document created prior to that date without a LICENSE tab, Customer grants a worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive license to any End User or third party accessing the Public Document to use the intellectual property contained in Customer’s Public Document without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Document, and to permit persons to whom the Document is made available to do the same.

In theory, this means that while free users cannot monetize designs they made on the platform, paid users can take those files and monetize them without the consent of the creator(s).

Plasticity. It's the best balance I've found between cost and usability. And it doesn't force you to save your files on someone's cloud.

You pay annually and get updates but when your year is up you can choose to pay less for each subsequent year or stop paying and continue using the version you currently have indefinitely without future updates.

I can't wrap my head around 2D interfaces for doing 3D modelling.

I know my measurements, so OpenSCAD feels more natural. I have done a fair amount of 3D programming in the last three decades, though.

I absolutely love freecad. There are dozens of us that actually really like it

Mango's videos are great. I'd wager there are gems in there for even experienced users of freecad. I'm often surprised by some of the tricks he has.

I did the Plasticity demo, but I got busy and forgot about it. Now I can’t do another demo.

Public files aren’t okay. Using public files as a way to get people to pay is also not okay.

What I’m getting from this community is to stick with Fusion. Which is fine I guess.

I was a SketchUp make guy back in the day and was able to stick with it a long time but it's so old it isn't working right for me anymore (Linux).

Plasticity is about the closest thing I have found. I paid about 175 the other day and plan to use this version for the next 10 years.

I use autodesk inventor, which is like the more professional version of fusion360. But there is no free version and it is very expensive, i have a free student licence.

I like it way more than fusion360, and it is much better at Assembly's. Still clumsy sometimes.

It doesn't run on linux so i just remote into an old windows laptop when i need it.

I have tried freecad and onshape a lillte but i am just so used to inventor that its harder to use them.

My current use case right now is designing tiles and a set for a ttrpg campaign, so currently more the latter. As far as I’m aware though you can do some of the former it’s just that it’s not exactly the workflow you’d be used to. Precision isn’t the issue so much as having history I suppose. Just means you have to plan out your design a lot more ahead of time. I’ve tried some of the code based stuff like build123d since I’m a programmer and the like but frankly they never made much sense to me, although perhaps that’s the way it uses Python more than anything else. Admittedly I didn’t spent a whole lot of time on it though and I was pretty burned out at the time.

Curious what the hangup with that is?

OpenSCAD. Nothing for the faint of heart, you need to know what you are doing, but it is perfect for programmers like me.

What are the main reasons you dislike fusion? I use MatterCAD - it's full of headaches and bugs but I find it super intuitive and a very low learning curve.

I've beens thinking of trying fusion despite disliking Adobe.