Shopping Low-Cost CAD Options

If you fall into one of these categories—engineer at a small company, college student or faculty, or independent designer—you may think you’re limited by cost when choosing the best CAD tool for the project you have. Maybe you’re dabbling in CAD design or you just want to try new tools on the market without incurring great expense. So, are you relegated to subpar options for your designing needs?

The short answer: no. Reliable, robust options, including cloud-based CAD with or without subscription models, are available at little to no cost, according to experts with perspective on tools that won’t break the bank. At your disposal are CAD options, with varying levels of “free,” such as open source and limited free versions on up to professional level tools.

Market for Low-Cost CAD

Vice president and co-founder of Jon Peddie Research (JPR) Kathleen Maher has been studying the CAD business for a long time.

“In the 2D world, there are all sorts of low-cost and free 2D drafting tools because that technology has commoditized. 3D CAD is going down the same path but cost always depends on the types of jobs you’re doing. Where we’re seeing real opportunity for low-cost products is in mechanical 3D CAD. Many of the low-cost CAD products are also cloud based, there’s not a high barrier to entry and they’re fairly easy to use. But you’re not going to build a car with them,” Maher says.

“That same separation [exists] for complex jobs in architecture or manufacturing or electrical or anything along those lines—there’s going to be a hard line between the professional tools and more accessible tools,” Maher explains. (See sidebar at end on a sampling of low-cost options.)

On the accessible end of the spectrum, Maher says, “Tools like cloud-based options such as Shapr3D and PTC’s low-end tool, Onshape—those products do have a very strong niche and it’s a growing market, especially for startups. It’s a very low cost of entry as you sign on a new employee. New team members and contract workers can get right to work rather than having to buy contracts, subscriptions, and have professionals set it up on separate workstations et cetera. That kind of dichotomy is a pretty good way to come at the market.”

At Autodesk, entry-level CAD options often serve as a portal to more advanced tools, depending on need. Bryce Heventhal, Autodesk senior manager, technical marketing, explains: “We offer everything and anything in between, all the way down to the free level and all the way up to the enterprise level. That’s been Autodesk’s strong suit over the years.”

“At the beginning level (K-12th grade), we’re giving access to CAD [through Tinkercad],” says Heventhal, who frequently teaches children how to use CAD. “The kids latch on to Tinkercad insanely. Tinkercad, viewed as Autodesk’s entry-level solution, allows users to start learning the dynamics of working in 3D.

“Kids, quite often, can learn it faster than I did when I was in college,” Heventhal jokes. “I’m always thinking, ‘Oh my God, he just basically caught up to me in like an hour, and he’s an 8th grader.’ It’s the paradigm that you were trying to enable teachers, students, educators to learn at a very early age.”

He explains how by starting with Tinkercad, Autodesk then offers incrementally more advanced solutions for users to create more advanced design solutions. “… We’re trying to make it so we grow with you to be honest,” Heventhal says.

After Tinkercad, “Fusion is our professional grade CAD/CAM solution that drives just about everything from a consumer product to industrial machinery. It is what’s driving the next wave of growth on how people go to market with CAD/CAM and CAE,” Heventhal notes.

For Fusion, Autodesk offers a personal license for noncommercial use, meaning one can use the basic tools a commercial user gets without having any barrier to entry.

“But we also have the tools to go to commercial growth,” Heventhal explains. For more advanced solutions, Autodesk offers extensions. “Say I want to be an advanced simulation expert. I can get access to some of the most advanced simulation technology out there in the market, and it’s just an add-on.”

Still Deciding? Consider the Job

As you work through the options, JPR’s Maher says it’s important to note the job you’re doing. For instance, according to Maher, with a tool like Sketchup, used often in architecture, it’s a “preliminary ideation tool. An architect would use it to flesh out their design and … then they would probably move over to something more advanced like Graphisoft or Autodesk, etc.”

Jason Love, technology communications manager, explains how Autodesk offers a variety of CAD tools for the product design and manufacturing space as well as in architecture, engineering and construction. He notes how for educators and students, basically, all Autodesk tools are free.

Breaking it Down

Autodesk offers three flagship products, referred to as cloud-connected (or in some cases, cloud-based): Tinkercad (K-12), Inventor (at the other end of the spectrum) with capacity to design, for instance, robots on a factory floor for large-scale design and manufacturing. In the middle of these two ptions is what Love says “blurs the lines in both directions,” Fusion, Autodesk’s newest cloud native product. “Everyone from the personal license up to the small to midsize manufacturer, designer, even enterprise can have their needs addressed by Fusion.”

A user may migrate from a free personal license to a startup license up to a full commercial license. “An individual or a company can pick and choose, and pay as they go through a few different pricing models to make it very powerful and yet still very much [remain] in that low-cost category for what people are getting,” Love explains.

For those on the fence, Heventhal says to ask what problem you’re trying to solve.

“It comes down to the complexity of the problem you’re working on. Are you in a factory designing an assembly that bottles all the milk or are you designing a consumer product? These are the kinds of questions that we ask customers … to see if you have the right solution,” Heventhal notes.

Love says the ultimate goal is to sustain the passion for engineering. “So Autodesk puts a lot of energy and attention into what we are doing for the next generation … but also what are we doing to upskill and reskill the existing workforce?”

Always a Market for Low-Cost Tools

The bottom line, according to JPR’s Jon Peddie, “Low-cost options are here to stay, but I think they’ll be niche. Low-cost CAD—and free CAD – it has been a portal and entryway for DIY.

“Obviously, the low-cost CAD market is not a dramatic market—it moves slowly. Low-cost CAD market doesn’t contribute as much you might think—$50 million, maybe. It’s simple to understand —fewer people are doing it. Most DIYers will only use free CAD—that doesn’t get put into the calculation of what the market is worth,” Peddie adds.

“Really, the CAD being used today is not very different from the CAD that General Motors was using in 1965. That’s because geometry is geometry. What has changed are the tricks,” Peddie says.

More Autodesk Coverage

More Jon Peddie Research Coverage