No, all CAD software sucks. I use FreeCAD myself and just got used to the jank.
this post was submitted on 15 May 2026
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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.
FreeCAD has possibly the worst UI I have ever used combined with some of the worst UX of any software. But it has every feature I need, it's free and it works (mostly).
Idk Creo has pretty awful UX
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I use FreeCAD.
I follow Mango Jelly Solutions and DeltaHedra on YouTube for tutorials.
I've had excellent results designing items for 3D prints.
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.
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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.
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FreeCAD, and I recommend you give it a second try, while watching the excellent tutorials from Deltahedra and Mangojelly on YouTube. Lots of the jank can be avoided if you only know how, so the tutorials are extremely useful.
FreeCAD has gotten exponentially better with each release the last few years, and both active developers and funding/donations from users have increased exponentially. The future is bright. And unlike the "free" commercial programs, FreeCAD is immune to future rug-pulls and enshitification.
You might also want to try https://dune3d.org/ , a relatively new 3D CAD software
I'm using OpenSCAD because I want to program a fish!
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.
+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 absolutely love freecad. There are dozens of us that actually really like it
I was learning with freecad.
Tried to defeature the screw holes on Steam Controller model and it crashed the application :/
I'm still learning so I have no idea how to do that manually :<
FreeCAD. Anything that's not opensource is basically using you for some nefarious purpose. You're a product or a product in the making or you're making a product for them...you could be training a CAD AI to end all CAD.
FreeCAD is us. You use it, if you find a problem you report it or fix it. That simple. Your CAD files don't die because the company changed CEO or died.
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.
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.
FreeCAD and OpenSCAD. FreeCAD is steadily getting better and better.
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
OpenScad because I do simple things like funnels or part bins.
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.
OpenSCAD. Nothing for the faint of heart, you need to know what you are doing, but it is perfect for programmers like me.
What sort of precision are you not getting from blender?
Once you set the parameters (I set mine to mm), I have found it to be accurate enough to make additional tools with which to measure.
Mind you, I don't need accuracy down past a mm.
I like using Blender too. Granted, I'm already somewhat familiar with it for art purposes. But just for STLs, if you know what you're doing you can actually get away with quite a bit using a boolean CAD-like workflow!
FreeCAD, but (from a pure usability perspective) OnShape is quite good if you just want something done (note my CAD usage is fairly limited).
Blender for most things, freecad sometimes
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.
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.
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.
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FreeCAD for most things. Microcad for anything I need to script. I hear OpenSCAD is promising.
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
What are you used to?
Either SketchUp 2017 or FreeCAD depending upon complexity
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.
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
90% fusion
9% tinkercad
1% dicking around in OnShape, getting frustrated, and giving up
FreeCAD, runs on a damn potato. Fusion bakes it to charcoal instead. At least that is my experience on a kinda low-end laptop.
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OnShape. If you're familiar with Fusion360, OnShape requires almost no additional learning. Workflows are pretty much the exact same. It's free under the guise that everything you make is OnShapes IP. But if you're looking to model casually and aren't making things you wish to patent, it's great.
Not open source if that's a requirement.
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I bounced pretty hard off Free ad and ended up using OnShape. I don't feel great about it though.
Used to use fusion 360, hate cloud, freecad is painful to use, been trying out plasticity and it seems pretty decent
With plasticity, do you make precision parts where .1mm matters or is it more decorative designs?
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.
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
Honestly most of the time I get by fine with Tinkercad if I'm making something functional, Blender if it's decorative.
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.
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