It needs a ground up interface resign that was al least as simple to use as Google sketchup, and a simple snap grid of some sort instead of infinitely variable placement and rotation (so you can move something and back to precisely the same position) among other things.however, it is free, and currently there is no equal for free users (all I want to do is review things and make suggestions without buying something expensive). Libre is 2D, and BRL-Cad is more of a renderer from what I hear. Look forward to when it is finished and a coherent user-interface is added. Lastly, THANK YOU.įreeCAD has great promise, but it's young and very much a work in progress as yet. I like its user interface and much about the capabilities so far - though it has a few odities and bugs still. However!!! As at August 2015 it allows you to design a single homogeneous part (e.g. But most real things require an Assembly of parts (e.g. MouldingS + screws + bearings, etc.) - and that's not there yet - which rather scuppers any serious use yet. You can of course design many parts and even place many components on the same drawing. But that's not the same as being able to assemble individual parts into a component/product/composite-part. I know there are some good intentions and good features in the pipeline, like the Assembly module and true Parametric driven* design capability. Providing these are well thought out and well implemented, they'll make it a great product with much potential. If the version number of FreeCAD were an integer, my rating of it would be much lower. 15, though, I think that it's a very impressive piece of software. The people involved with the creation of this program are doing a great job.

I use Autodesk Inventor in my day job and have previously used Pro/E/Creo. The user interface and sketcher in FreeCAD are bother frustrating to use compared to those. Some of that, of course, can be attributed to being more accustomed to my regular software. Some appear to be bugs - it appears that certain operations are unsuccessful - but this may also be my learning curve with the interface.

I added the Assembly2 workbench and like it so far.

From what I've read, adding real assembly capability to the software is a major undertaking, but assembly is crucial to making this software more usable.

Free drafting software reviews