Is there even any CAD software that is not subscription base nowadays?
Most software nowadays had switched to subscription only (which i cant say i like it)…
Still have perpetual licensing (That you’ll have to pry from my cold dead fingers):
- SolidWorks
- Solid Edge
- DraftSight
- NX
- Ironcad
- Alibre
Probably a few other lesser known cad tools I can’t remember. Also some of the above have a subscription option.
Subscription only (Head in the clouds edition):
- 3dxWorks
- CREO
- CATIA
- Onshape
- Inventor
- Fusion 360
Your description is too kind.
You talking about 3DSywm?..
I prefer 3DDrown, because that’s what it feels like over there. Drowning in posts with no organization.
Put this on your Calendar - Sept 2021 you should see huge improvements over at swymn
Look at it this way:
-Solidworks desktop doesn’t seem to have the greatest life expectancy. (Hey, Captain Obvious)
-Solid Edge has 10% of the userbase that SWX does.
-Solid Edge has dedicated data migration tools (hmmm…who’du thunk)
-The disgruntled SWX users are a fairly accurate representation of the SWX userbase.
So if Solid Edge can capture even 10% of of the fleeing rats streaming off the SWX ship, they’ve just doubled their userbase. 
I have SE and Inventor and I voted for Inventor.
Inventor is closer to SW in operation and I’m still trying to absorb the benefits of the synchronous workflow in SE.
I think AI And F360 should be separate choices.
You forgot the SARC tag.
Ouch. That completely screws you unless you have synchronous technology (IV doesn’t). Now you’re dealing with a dumb solid AND your program can’t compensate for it with real intelligence.
It would be interesting to see how true this actually is. I typically find that people that end up in forums are A) people that tend to push the limits B) because they push the limits they run into and get stuck fixing other peoples problems.
In my experience 90% of users of all systems just go to work each day and use whatever tool they are given. If they run into a problem they either pass it off to someone else or cheat and do something stupid like manually entering dimensions. This has been the case since the first line was placed in a basic CAD system.
Edge in a heartbeat. It’s amazing how fast we forgot all the things we complained about in Edge as we slowly migrate to SW. SW seems on par with SE at providing pet-peeves to gripe about. Then we’d be back to trying to figure out what to use for file management though. PDM Pro doesn’t work that great with SE files, we’re also asking it to do things it wasn’t meant to do.
Something else I forgot to bring up about Inventor besides the fact it has gone to subscription only. The license is named user now. There is no longer a floating license option. So we have 150 users sharing 60 SolidWorks licenses. Now we would need 150 Inventor licenses.
SolidWorks Pro: 60 floating licenses at $1645 each = $98,700
Inventor: 150 named user licenses at $2190 each = $328,500
Inventor only has one bundle now that includes everything so its more comparable to SolidWorks Premium. So we could even go to Premium across the company. The catch is we would have to pay a Pro to Premium upgrade fee of around $4000 (I think). 60 Pro to Premium would be roughly $240,000. Then we have the annual maintenance of:
SolidWorks Premium: 60 floating licenses at $2195 each = $131,700
So first year is $371,700 but after the first year and for years after, IV will cost you a lot more.
From the stories I’ve heard, Autodesk treats their customers just as poorly as dassault.
You get what you pay for? maybe?
My personal pref is that Inventor’s UI felt nicer, just me. I wonder if there’s only one or two users the price difference you mention would be less impact?
I don’t have a crystal ball, but I’m worried about SW desktop maint fees starting to climb quickly as DSS tries tactics to push customers to their platform. That’s never happened in business before
Maybe you oughta check out DDM. We have plans to implement it in the near future. They are a smaller 3rd party company based in UK and have been in business for 20+ yrs. Beings they are 3rd party they are CAD neutral and can handle SE, SW, IV and other files…
I can’t tell you what their software’s like beings I haven’t used it yet but I was very impressed with what I saw in the demo. Thursday I’m doing training for it so I’ll be better able to tell what it’s like after then.
That’s really odd and I can’t see how they would expect for this to even work. I was looking at some of the information on this and everything says “At a comparable cost to what you’re paying now”. They are ending all multi user licenses by May of 2022. So any company like yours where you have a bunch of “Part time users” would be screwed unless they make some sort of deal with you.
right now for people transitioning they are offering a “2 for 1” deal but is that perpetual or just the first year?
Seems like this would be an easy thing to make work. You assign “X” number of seats to “Y” company with unlimited sign in’s. When you sign in it’s your set up and seat and one license is pulled from the stack.
The way, at least the way it appears to me, is that you have to assign a user to a license and that is not available to anyone else. However they state in a bunch of places you can track usage and adjust accordingly…how you do that seems very vague. If Bob is only using his license 5% of the time you can you just pay 5% of the cost?
Cost is comparable for heavy users. But we have a lot of users that only use it in waves depending on projects.
This is subscription only and their attempt to make it easier to “swallow”. Not sure how long it lasts. At some point you are paying for the extra licenses.
They could do that if they wanted to, other software does. This is just a push to named user license because they feel they get more $$$.
You can probably reassign the license but it’s manually done by an administrator. I had to do this with Matlab, it’s assigned to a user on their online portal. I had to juggle users on a project to project basis. I don’t want to be in the user management business. Luckily we only had 2 licenses, I can’t image doing this with CAD.
Some places only allow you to move licenses a limited number if times. If they wanted you to be able to share licenses, they would give you that option.