this post was submitted on 15 May 2026
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What software are you using for CAD/modeling? (quokk.au)
submitted 13 hours ago by meowmeow@quokk.au to c/3dprinting@lemmy.world
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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?

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[–] klangcola@reddthat.com 1 points 2 hours ago

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

[–] bold_omi@lemmy.today 1 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

FreeCAD for most things. Microcad for anything I need to script. I hear OpenSCAD is promising.

[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 4 points 8 hours ago

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

[–] MushuChupacabra@piefed.world 16 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

I use FreeCAD.

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

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

[–] neclimdul@lemmy.world 2 points 9 hours ago

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.

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 27 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 13 hours ago

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.

[–] neclimdul@lemmy.world 4 points 9 hours ago

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

[–] PonyOfWar@pawb.social 14 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] meowmeow@quokk.au 3 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

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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[–] Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 1 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] meowmeow@quokk.au 1 points 6 hours ago

Adobe doesn’t own fusion. Did you mean Autodesk?

The cloud. I hate it. It also has way more than I actually need. It’s bulky. It’s importing assets is very limited in ways that I need.

I’ll take a look at MatterCAD. Thank you for the suggestion.

[–] ReCursing@feddit.uk 8 points 13 hours ago (3 children)

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

[–] TootSweet@lemmy.world 4 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

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.

[–] SmoochyPit@lemmy.ca 3 points 13 hours ago

+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.

[–] thejml@sh.itjust.works 2 points 13 hours ago

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.

[–] wjrii@lemmy.world 3 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

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.

[–] cAUzapNEAGLb@lemmy.world 6 points 13 hours ago

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

[–] Trev625@sopuli.xyz 0 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Fusion360 for non-organic and Blender (with add-ons) for organic. I don't like fusion360 for organic stuff. FreeCAD was supposed to get a big update at some point but I never tried it. Autodesk Inventor was alright but I didn't like it as much as Fusion360.

[–] meowmeow@quokk.au 3 points 6 hours ago

FreeCAD, as of today, looks and feels like it was made in 2010 or earlier. I’m sure there is a type of person who FreeCAD check all their boxes and excites them to no end, but I am, sadly, not in that group.

[–] smuuthbrane@sh.itjust.works 4 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] finalarbiter@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 10 hours ago

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.

[–] LastYearsIrritant@sopuli.xyz 4 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] wjrii@lemmy.world 2 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

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.

[–] neidu3@sh.itjust.works 4 points 13 hours ago

Blender for most things, freecad sometimes

[–] tuxed@sh.itjust.works 4 points 13 hours ago

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

[–] PetteriPano@lemmy.world 1 points 10 hours ago

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

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

[–] kuroshido@ani.social 3 points 13 hours ago

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.

[–] akilou@sh.itjust.works 1 points 10 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] mrcleanup@lemmy.world 1 points 9 hours ago

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.

[–] meowmeow@quokk.au 0 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

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

[–] akilou@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 hours ago

What's the unique identifier, email? Just use a different email address

[–] iceberg314@slrpnk.net 3 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] meowmeow@quokk.au 1 points 13 hours ago

What are you used to?

[–] CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.today 2 points 12 hours ago

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.

[–] tpihkal@lemmy.world 1 points 12 hours ago

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.

[–] agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 1 points 12 hours ago

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

[–] DampCanary@lemmy.world 1 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Either SketchUp 2017 or FreeCAD depending upon complexity

[–] TheRedSpade@lemmy.world 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] DampCanary@lemmy.world 1 points 12 hours ago

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

[–] galaxy_nova@lemmy.world 1 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] meowmeow@quokk.au 1 points 11 hours ago

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

[–] it_depends_man@lemmy.world 1 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] meowmeow@quokk.au 1 points 11 hours ago

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

[–] shads@lemy.lol 1 points 13 hours ago

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

[–] roofuskit@lemmy.world 0 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] meowmeow@quokk.au 0 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

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!!!

[–] roofuskit@lemmy.world 2 points 10 hours ago

OK, use the free tier if you don't sell...

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