BEST FREE CAD / 3D Modelling software 2024 - I tested them all! 

😂😂😂😂

Jefe, do you know what a PLETHORA is? 😂

@@doro626yes. 😐 *noun* 1. a large or excessive amount of (something). 😒 aka: "a lot". That's the joke.

No, you missed the joke. LOL. Google Three Amigos, Plethora of piñatas 🤣🤣@@danriehl4244

To hell with “celar door”, plethora has been my favourite english word since I was a little kid.

Just to clarify, the different navigation styles come from FreeCAD. I really liked the additions that you guys did tho, like the little circle when you're rotating. Rotating in native FreeCAD feels wild and weird, the circle helps so much.

Came here to say exactly this. The GPL license applies forever to this fork of FreeCAD. Worst-case, the source code for any version can be copied and the application can be built/distributed/forked by others legally without regard for Ondsel's future development decisions (or existence.) That's not to say that their efforts to extend the app and offer related services shouldn't be rewarded by subscribing. I only mean to explain that this is not an unsurmountable "gotcha" as with OnShape, or SketchUp. @Ondsel, thanks for your efforts and support of open source.

@@cristhianserpa Yes, people in the upstream FreeCAD project are doing great work, we really like recent changes in how the project is managed, it's more efficient to everyone's benefit.

@@cristhianserpa In native FreeCAD you just do not get the red dot but it does exactly the same function. Choose a vertex or enven over empty space and the rotation will be focused aound the spot you've clicked previousy. My favorite Navigation Mode is GESTURE.

@@LFANS.FreeCAD yes, I'm aware the camera rotates the same in freecad. The red dot makes it so much easier to visualize tho. My favorite navigation mode is blender. It made sense since I was coming from blender 😁

Yeah but you use Linux

@@hihellothere9569 Same on windows...

@@hihellothere9569available for Windows and Mac

@@hihellothere9569 yeah he is smarter than most people, your point is?

@@nikoraasu6929 nah I just hate Linux and it's community. Not all but most of them

It's a steep learning curve. You did it and got behind it, so everything's fine.

Did you learn following tutorials? I'm looking to learn, I've found a few but there aren't many

@@Th3_Gael I've found a lot of good tutorials on the @MangoJellySolutions channel. I'm not sure if MangoJelly gets into creating toolpaths in any of his tutorials. The biggest difference I saw with this demonstration of Ondsel is it provides a single button to start a new project and get into the PartDesign workbench/workflow. This probably solves the first stumbling block that many have using FreeCAD (how do I start?). Everything else seemed to just be a reskinning of the interface.

@@Sembazuru thankyou

​@@Th3_Gael Tutorials don't work for me. I don't think it is an efficient way of teaching/learning (the same with books). There's often so much stuff in them that just doesn't fit your needs and is more of a distraction than help. Learning works way better if you have a project in mind (start small) and then search for solutions to your specific problems along the way. That's pretty much how I learned programming and electronics as well. Tutorials or books are definitely not useless though. I just don't see them as a learning tool (for how something can be done), but rather as a reference (for what can be done) maybe showing different ways than you already know.

@@superdau it's the reference I need. I don't know much of anything about CAD, what the functions are and how they work. The green jelly channelentioned above is pretty helpful. Once I have the basics figured out I'll be going as you suggest, using things largely for reference

You can also copy and paste to rotation by degrees, thus making the fillets easier to do.

​@@KLP99 I've been using tinkercad for years and I can't imagine how to do the fillets, do you know of a tutorial?

@@geeklimit If you do the indentations with a torus on its side you get (sort of) fillets.

One more hint for TinkerCad: using duplicat button in the tinkercad (instead of CTRL+C and CTRL+V) provides great functionality: 1. duplicate one pair (looks like nothing happened, because the new copy is at the same place), 2. keep selection + rotate by an angle (e.g. 60Deg), 3. keep selection + duplicate again - and it copies also the rotation => done.

Came to the comments for this. 👍

It also appears to be completely FOSS like FreeCAD, which is a requirement of copyleft licenses like GPL anyway.

Michael actually ran into all of its deficiencies and angry toxic positivity FreeCAD stans roasted him for it. Its a cult.

Honestly I don't even feel you need the dev version. the only extra steps needed to get to the type of cad software he is used to using in the current version of freecad is after starting a new file, go to "parts design" workbench and follow the prompts in "tasks" for most of it, only caveat is when adding text being in drafts using the "text to shape tool" .. really it's just that freecad is a jack of all trades kinda program (each workbench makes it function like a completely different kind of cad program) so the starting point isn't obvious,,, like if you open a new file and switch to/stay in the "part" workbench you have what is basically tinkercad, or like it has an openscad workbench that's primitives based programing cad (I first used this bench cause I started modeling using openscad). But freecads biggest advantage imo is the thousands of youtube tutorials on each function so after 10-15 mins of watching some videos on whatever problem you are having you'll be able to solve it (unlike a lot of the others, and if you don't understand one explanation you can select another video and will probably be good). Big difficulty in freecads current version imo is switching workbenches well having something selected may cause a default on that new workbench to be different then what you would expect after using/learning on something like AutoCAD/fusion360, but it's a feature for faster design once you understand the behavior. since that behavior makes it faster to use like creating a draft on the selected surface of a part instead of having to type in all the offsets

@@vanarsdalelance I user freecad from flatpak version 0.21.2.33771 and is the stable. It can do everything. The only thing that Ondsel changes is the UI configuration. Plus adding the ease to share files online but that is the paid part of it. They also contribute back for changes they make to FreeCAD.

As I understand it, that's basically what Ondsel ES is: FreeCAD's latest development state plus the addon to support their cloud stuff, and a different default UI theme (not made by or exclusive to Ondsel, normal FreeCAD can be configured to use it too).

Thats what I thought. He was talking about how the UI is improved in ondsel but it literally looks the exact same but with the buttons in different spots lmao. Literally doesn’t change the workflow at all.

Are changes being push upstream then ? I don't think the company can change the program they ship as it is LGPL. Any changes to the program have to be made available.

@@randompersonoftheinternet8012 exactly, he said that are unable to work in FreeCAD and work nicely in Ondsel with same interface ;)

Ahh, I was wondering what was going on. I was watching thinking "that looks exactly like the part design workflow I've been using for a while", so wondered if maybe the windows builds of freecad just lag a long ways behind dev or something. This video is an amazing creation though, the amount of time it must have taken to do a decent effort on so many packages, astounding dedication!

FreeCAD is currently like Blender ~2.6, the functions are there, but the UI's the issue to utilizing them. Blender back then had a giant learning curve, but once you understood it, you really had a powerhouse available. Same with FreeCAD, once you DO manage to claw and tear through the learning curve, it's really powerful. But it's a fact that it WILL take serious fighting to get there (and good video tutorials, shoutout to MangoJelly and JokoEngineering). Which was the same for me with Blender back then too. I actually needed 3 different attempts over several years before I finally managed to get into Blender. Only reason the 3rd got anywhere was because I finally found enough good tutorials. Before 2.6 it was just abyssmal... the UI too.

That's the neat trick FreeCAD has to make sure your models won't cease to work for any reason, the software is so bad you can't create them in the first place! I've tried several times with FreeCAD and it really is completely awful, there is lots of great open source software out there (I contribute to and even publish some) but Free CAD sucks badly.

@onekattsopinion726 I can use Catia, Solidworks, Sketchup, Blender, Rhino and others with out issue, they work as expected and have a sensible UI. Freecad? Nah, it is not user friendly, and has serious problems in the way components work when you delete features. The version I tried seemed to renumber the feature tree and everything fell apart. One of the worst UI's I have ever used.

My students learned Freecad in 3 lessons of 90 minutes. If you learn to use the rights workbenches, you can use it in 5 minutes and learn the basis in a few hours. It is so complete that you don't learn everything in 100 hours. I hope it will continue to improve.

@@user-nx2if8nt5l I can drive Solidworks with ease, Catia? No problem. Inventor, easy. Sketchup, absolutely fine. Freecad? Disaster area. I am sure it is possible to use it, but compared the the UI experience and ease of use of commercial products, it has a VERY long way to go. It just needs the UI dev team to listen to the users and accept the need for change.

Open Scad is built into free cad, so by starting with free cad, you also get open scad, and can seamlessly go between the two. I have downloaded a couple of big clive designs in open scad, his preference, and changed things in open scad. Then converted to the free cad so I could see what I had done, since I am mostly visually orientated in design.

@@Phaedruses I could be wrong, but I didn't think that OpenSCAD is built into FreeCAD, rather a workbench to interface with OpenSCAD is there. You have to configure FreeCAD to know where OpenSCAD is installed.

+1 . I couldn't 3d model in traditional cad programs if my life depended on it but I love openscad.

Glad to see other people in the world using OpenSCAD! I find it a lot easier to conceptualize projects using OpenSCAD versus traditional CAD software, and a huge bonus IMO is that OpenSCAD runs on basically anything: my computers are all pretty ancient but they handle OpenSCAD rendering just fine, and the raw .scad files themselves are just text, they don't take up much room.

@@TheNickelGhost The runs on anything part is quite dependent on which operations you use. Once you begin using hull or worse minkowsky, bump up %fn or the other parameters that control the amount of geometry and the part gets a bit complex, the rendering time can get quite large. It is somewhat mitigated by using preview while developing the part and keeping $fn at 100 or so until the final render. There are also huge performance improvements in the development build vs the stable version. Took one of my things from needing over 8 hours and 80GB of ram to render to less than 4 minutes and 8.5GB.

Yeah, I definitely wanted to see Solid Edge in this round up, its free version seems quite fully featured compared to what F360 has become, though of course there's no guarantee they won't go down the same path in the future.

How does Solid Edge do on converting STLs to their CAD body? I use the free F360 and it will *do* that - but it leaves all the triangles in place and the memory load becomes enormous, to the point where some things I'm trying to reverse-engineer/cusomise just crash the program.

@@Bruno-cb5gk Problem is, you cannot load the files in the pro version. While that is not the end of the world if this was the only choice, why deal with it when Fusion doesn't have that limitation?

he he he siemens

@@rsilvers129 wdym by "load the files"?

If it works out for them as planned, maybe at some point it'll turn into the equivalent of the Blender Foundation. That'd be awesome.

@@BloodyMobile To match the Blender story Ondsel would have to go bankrupt like the venture capital-backed company that owned Blender around the year 2000. Then the founders could pick up the pieces and keep going towards a Foundation, which would be awesome.

Not being the original creators of FreeCAD, they cannot change the license or take their changes back once distributed. It's Free Software, not just OSS.

@@TazioC a) it's not even the original creators, to change the license they'd need permission from every single contributor b) In this case, they can distribute their contributions as closed source. Freecad is under the LGPL not GPL proper, so as long as they provide a way to use their contributions with FreeCAD source code not distributed by them, they can keep them closed source

@@awwastor They would need to integrate things to be able to link to them afaik. Not sure if thats even easily possible in Freecad in its current form.. They would need to build their own UI which links the Freecad code.. thats alot of work just to keep your own UI closed.

Yeah. This was hillarious. "Freecad is unusable! Ondsel makes it better!" ... then goes on to show a workflow that is litterally 1:1 the exact same workflow with same screens, dialogs and toolbars, just themed slightly differently...

I was kinda disappointed he didn't test SolveSpace.

Solvespace is also the software that underpins the Blender CAD Sketcher program. I really like SolveSpace. It isn't everything that everone need for every project, but it's super-useful for tons of projects, and a great tool in which to learn CAD.

Is the 3d version free now? I've done a lot of things in 2d and really like it. But the licensing aspect eventually broke for me and I couldn't get it recovered. Same happened to my Fusion360 license. I'm just going to stick with learning Freecad knowing that it should be around for a while.

@@minigpracing3068 You get 3d and most of the simulation&generative design stuff now. But then the features they turned off make only sense if you know the properties of the material after the manufacturing process really well. More for use with SLS than fdm or even msla.

I think I've downloaded this but never got to installing it.

@@minigpracing3068 FreeCAD is the way... Those greedy companies will see in the future that professionals can't cope with their prices

That's the one I use. The best free CAD software IMHO.

Why didn't you just use the free version of Fusion?

@@rsilvers129I would guess that using Linux as their OS is a major reason. For us Linux users, F360 is not a great option.

@@rsilvers129 The licensing does not allow it, as this is considered commercial use. And Fusion has no linux version. But it worked out okay, FreeCAD has been good.

​@@rsilvers129I'm looking to learn CAD,i started with fusion as there's loads of tutorials and everyone says its great. It was, kinda, it lasted 2 weeks before it spat it's dummy out because the pc I use has no internet access. Freecad from here out for me

@@rsilvers129 Our use is considered commercial, so the licensing would price us well outside what our members could afford. And there is no linux version. But all is well - FreeCAD has been great.

I would recommend only to go FreeCAD route, it is the only competitive product to SW. Can be fully used with integrated SpreadSheet without requiring any other spreadsheet software, and Dassault failed to do that and has to be integrated to MS products, so it is aimed for enterprise companies only. FreeCAD has blender's zoom, move actions and that is best way to navigate. The largest drawback is that comming from SW to FC, there will be adjustment period, because you have learned a habit to think in SolidWorks way and now you need to develop new habit to think in FreeCad's way, which is sometimes is less intuitive. Otherwise it is great software and has strong development and becomes better and better within a years. (I'm using freecad on and off for about 10years now, so the project is alive and continues to move in right direction, if the community would be that large as blender's, probably we would be using only two software tools for FreeCAD and Blender...)

I had the same idea as rhino user, and found out in Europe you don't get paid a lot of salary even if you have some SolidWorks certifications.

I tried this version quite some time ago, and I don't remember being able to go offline, and ended up hating the 3D experience thing. might need to revisit it, the biggest problem is once you want to go commercial it gets very expensive, sure there's the 2k yearly for the maker version but meh to low IMO.

​@@4floWenoL "Maker" version is $40 per year, not $2k. If you want Solidworks for commercial purposes, then the next tier up is their "Entrepreneur/Startup program" for businesses with less than $1M in revenue. You enroll your business and get three years. First year, you get everything for FREE. Next year you pay 30% of the normal price. Final year 50%. The discounts apply to the "3DEXPERIENCE" products, which are nearly identical to the traditional Solidworks 'DESKTOP' software. The only real difference is that it is a pay-for-access type of software. Yearly cost is about the same as the traditional 'desktop' Solidwork's subscription ~$1k. So you'd pay $0 first year, $300 next year, $500 third year, $1k each year after. After the second year it might make more sense to just purchase a traditional desktop license.

I applied for the community edition, which is already weird, but then GOT DENIED. What a dumb way to turn people off of learning your software.

Same with SolveSpace. Beautiful tool, not as feature rich though…

​@@Xentherayou don't need to "apply", open an account and it emails you the download address which is NOT a unique address

@@XentheraApplied? All I did was verify email, fill out the form, and it sent me to the download. Maybe they changed it since you tried.

@@_droidmaybe he applied so student versions instead

They cannot do that, FreeCAD license forbids that. They can only have fully proprietary plugins.

@@TazioC sorry I don't follow. Which thing specifically can they not do?

@ckstar Any changes and additions to the Freecad code they do and which is shipped, needs to be made available under the same License as Freecad. This is typically archieved by maintaining a public fork, which could then be used to pull changes they made back into Freecad. Most Businesses which operate under these Copyleft licenses make their money via support and service contracts. Some can circumvent these licenses and also offer some additional packages and features (usually addons or they made a split license when they made the project themselves, which allows them to do so). This way we get open software and businesses still get revenue. Of course some want to pull shady stuff..

I've found that Blender just feels horribly non-intuitive for me when it comes to accurate 3D modelling. I've tried several different add-ons for it, but they all seem to have their weird caveats that just make it unpleasant haha.

@@Smoth48 That's fair. Everyone learns different softwares when learning how to design in 3D initially. For me, it was Blender from the start pretty much. I also happen to enjoy the puzzle of figuring out how I can use it to do things that CAD Engineers insist "cannot be done" in Blender. Like 99% of the time, it can. Besides that, it's FREE. I'm willing to put up with a few caveats to maintain that freedom in my design workflow. In any case, to each their own, as the old saying goes.

Ondsel or the Link branch of FreeCAD are worth checking out.

Solid edge community edition is a fully featured CAD package, but it takes a bit of time to get used to its interface. I think I’ll move over to it after my Inventor license runs out

I been using 123d design for many years and I do sometime have to go search on other programs for certain functions like characters but generally, 123d design does everything for me too, sadly its quite underated

agreed, I wont pay subscriptions

I'm not sure if you've come across it but you essentially just described Alibre Atom3D. The license is perpetual and you only pay for the updates if you want it. It's pretty fleshed out. Genuinely surprised that's it not as popular when I randomly came across it

plasticity is very good for small projects it's not as smooth as fusion but the perpetual licence is cheap

They actually made huge improvements to the rendering performance in nightly builds, like 10x for my models

@@froqstar Hmmm. it would be nice if they were able to drive a stake into one of their development builds to offer as a public stable release. The current stable release is dated in 2021...

And BlocksCAD, which is kinda Scratch for OpenSCAD ;)

@@ping170Interesting. I will check it out!

CAD Query is a similar thing. Python on OpenCascade though so you get bevels and chamfers.

That wouldn't be so bad, if it was a one-time payment afterwards. But it's subscription 😒

I come from a professional modelmaker background, and Shapr3D has been the the only one that my brain works with intuitively. I'm getting my first patent soon, everything was modelled in Shapr3D. Well worth the subscription.

You cant work well in 3d modelling on touch alone really. There is so much stuff, a combination of keyboard and touch really works best. So i have my graphic tablet and keyboard, so i can quickly touch keybinds and do things.

I'd love to have a proper 3D modeling app for Android. We have a galaxy tab s9 ultra which is mainly for my so to draw with, and not being able to use the pen and the humongous screen on it for cad, seems like a wasted opportunity. I've already tried viewing 3d models on it (in printables mainly), and it feels so intuitive to spin and zoom them around on the big touch screen.

​@@tarakivu8861that's definitely true, but a tab would still be nice for simpler things.

Hey.don't quit. I learned to use AutoCAD in the 1980s. Then I learned to use NX when I was overseas. FreeCAD is difficult to use and the tutorials do not work very well; I think some critical instructions are left out.

Thanks, it means a lot!

@@MakersMuse Plethora?

I been using it for many years and its still an incredibly good software, it does lack many features I would like to have but I have ways around that as there isnt anything better yet

SketchUp what did happen to it..... it just vanish some how!!

I also use Fusion 360. My son "placed an order" for a table that will match the colors of the furniture. It took me half an hour to design it in Fusion, much longer than it took to make and paint it. My son now loves the new table. And I have the satisfaction of having transferred the idea to a specific, satisfying item at home.

@Vipcioo The design aspect is addictive. I'd compare it to kind of like spicy foods or even PubG. Stressful when in the thick of it, but always keen to go again

@@rvarsigfusson6163 They became expensive, and the free version is web based and very limited like no plug-ins. And plugins was what really made Sketchup shine. I still have Sketchup installed as that was the first 3D design software I learnt. Have tried to jump over to FreeCad but find it to be a struggle using after using Sketchup.

The beauty of the node based approach, literally you can build your entire shape using nodes, each with parameters that you can change, hook up differently to give something completely different in the end, something that even the best parameter-based cad program doesn't do.

I have a problem with geometry nodes in Blender. WIth Davinci Resolve video editing I LOVE nodes. My default for any kind of video effects is to skip right over the billions of built in effects and build things myself using nodes. However, I absolutely HATE Blender geometry nodes. I am in the middle of a paid tutorial on Blender geometry nodes and it is still as impenetrable as the FreeCAD interface. It may be just the naming of the nodes or it may be the insane resolution of the nodes so you end up with enormous node trees full of nodes that do small things where you forget why on earth they are there. I get that having nodes that do tiny things gives power but other node based software seems to handle it with attributes and functions attached to sensibly named more generic nodes. Oh well, I'll keep banging my head against it :)

100% agree that geometry nodes adds that "parametric" capability especially if you have a programmer's mindset. Those red nodes...the Blender manual has to do a better job of explaining and providing examples.

If you're doing a one-off part then using Plasticity (very cheap) with the Blender Bridge is the way to go. Plasticity is a direct modeller which will always create bespoke parts faster than parametric/history based approaches. Blender is king of the modellers when it is used with it's add-ons (such as Tissue). The video didn't mention Blenders sculpting ability. Try to model someone's face in one of the other programs to see why sculpting is very useful.

I looked up “decades” and the word “fast” does not appear in the definition. FreeCAD might be viable in another 20 or 30 years at the rate we’re going.

It is, I bought ironcad lifetime license this year, you csn check it out

You could try Simplify3D. Free trial for a month, then a fixed amount to buy the current version. Can stick with that version or there’s the option to pay to upgrade as new versions come out. As a hobbyist I’m currently looking at it to move from Shapr3D (similar UI).

Apols, Plasticity not Simplify!

Ironcad, you csn buy lifetime license

Uhm Rhino 3d

Very limited and hard to measure detail

Very limited and hard to measure detail

@@weldingjunkie this is true. For basic things though it definitely does the job.

I love Self-Cad, and it's all thanks to your channel! Your videos helped me a lot. Thanks!

I concur with FreeCAD for product dev. I have professionally worked in Silicon Valley with high-end CAD systems and simulators like Solidworks, PTC along with Mentor Graphics and Cadence for advanced electronics and product development for over 20 years. FreeCAD is amazing for FREE!

It was featured for about 25 seconds, which is about the time it takes to get frustrated with it and uninstall 😅. Just joking, but I really hope it can improve in the future to actually become nice to use.

​@@Iisakkiik It takes about five minutes of tutorial video to learn FreeCAD's basics. That a video titled "Free CAD Programs" doesn't include FreeCAD marks this channel as something of a numbnut.

Plasticity is not free

Which one do you choose?