I use it regularly for my 3d printer, nice simple software, but be warned it has quirks…
Still able to do 90% of the stuff I want to do
It’s very quirky compared to Fusion360. If they made it at least a little bit smoother to use, at least for my tastes in CAD Software; I would be all in.
Yeah I am having too much friction getting Fusion360 to work on my Linux Mint, I know there are methods but with the registration as a hobbyist and using a container… Got too much, you can blame me as a user not being invested enough to get it working, and installed FreeCAD from the Linux store hassle free.
The quirks I can work around, sometimes it makes me go back and redesign another iteration to avoid the quirk and then also improve my design as a bonus
OnShape is another option that has a free plan and works on Linux, since it runs in the browser
To be fair, fusion 360 also has a free plan, and they also have a version of it that runs in the browser. However, it might be the slowest 3d modeling ever known to man, but it does still work.
Same for me. I got a 3D printer and was more interested in downloading files than creating my own. But when I got into FreeCAD it opened a world of customisation.
It took me a long time to learn and I’m still learning, like ensuring I’m constraining in a way which allows resizing later on in the design.
Yeah learning freecad was a huge pain. Hiwever it does support most things so at least the featureset is good.
I am starting to learn FreeCAD for a picture for a research article. I do not want to learn Inventor or any other propertiary software.
For whatever reason I just could not for the life of me get FreeCAD to work at all.
No matter what I wanted to do, it felt like it would always behave in a way I didn’t expect, do nothing at all, not work like it did in tutorials, or flat out make a change that then became impossible to undo, or take me to a menu that I somehow just couldn’t get out of.
I don’t know if it’s just me, but I had to literally give up on FreeCAD after spending hours trying and failing to make even the simplest shapes, like a cube with an indent in the middle.
It’s good FreeCAD exists, but it needs a LOT of polish, especially for people who don’t already have experience with tools like Fusion, and only have more rudimentary CAD experience with tools like the ones built into slicers, Tinkercad, or Onshape.
Have you tried it recently? I had good success with their tutorials. Though I sure wasn’t using advanced features. And plugins were hit or miss.
I second this. Version 1.0 was only released a year ago. I gave it another try and was pleasantly surprised!
How recently? Last time I tried was early December of 2024 (version 1.0), though I suppose a lot of the tutorials I was watching were probably made on at least 1 version prior based on their release dates.
Maybe it’s just a skill issue on my part 💀
I used the tutorials on the wiki in the past year.
I want to like it but it’s easily the least intuitive option
It has been too buggy for me to use unfortunately. Unable to select areas for pads for example.
Same for me. I want to love it, but the usability is just not there. Moving/rotating the view feels unnatural no matter what settings I used. Not being able to extrude multiple things from one sketch was a big blocker. The external reference import for sketches on an existing surface was unintuitive, slow, and fragile.
That’s not a bug, that’s how FreeCAD works. You don’t select areas, you can select either the entire sketch or individual wires to Pad. Which is a different verb to Extrude.
But that genuinly didn’t work too. Also there was a tutorial video that did select areas.
It’s possible that was for a fork or experimental branch, I don’t think it’s in the standard issue.
Regardless, i also tried two separate sketsches for 2 separate bodies but that was genuinly bugging out.
I love it. I had learned AutoCAD in college (a while ago) so FreeCAD feels natural enough. I use it for custom-designed 3d prints
The recent v1 updates were a big improvement
Will this be suitable to do 2D architecture stuff? I was about to buy Bricscad, how does this compare?
I haven’t used it for that extensively, but it has different “workbenches” for different purposes and I’ve of those is archipack for architecture. If you give it a shot let me know how it goes since I do need to plan out some home reno work myself.
The Arch workbench is now the BIM workbench. And you need quite a lot of tutorials and patience to work everything out. But after a few hours/days/weeks of frustration it feels like it’s worth it, because you actually own your data.
Don’t hesitate to ask/search in the FreeCAD-Forum, they are very helpful.
I’ve done a fair bit on TinkerCad. How does it compare?
my usability scale from most user friendly (top) to least (bottom)
- TinkerCad
- Google sketchup
- …
- …
- …
- …
- …
- Autodesk Inventor
- Blender (CAD plugin)
- …
- …
- FreeCAD
I love freecad… I’m going to have to agree with your assertion
SketchUp has been owned by Trimble for over a decade, but I still think of it as Google SketchUp as well.
FreeCAD is a parametric modeler, so it’s closer to Inventor, Fusion360 or OnShape than TinkerCAD. FreeCAD is GPL FOSS software, so it was made by programmers for programmers to program on, not for designers to design designs in. For the most part, features aren’t implemented in ways that are useful for the user, they’re implemented in ways that were easy or straightforward for the developers.
No hyperbole, a functioning understanding of Python is almost a prerequisite for getting anything actually done in FreeCAD, because you’ll encounter things like variable scope.
In some ways, I like how FreeCAD handles things better than some other software. FreeCAD has a spreadsheet built in, you can put your dimensions there in one place and then reference them in drawings (again, think Python variable scope. Dimensions.overall_length) and then if you need to make revisions you don’t have to hunt through sketches and shit you just change the parameter. And then watch as the model explodes because they still haven’t solved the topological naming problem.
TinkerCad is great to teach CAD, but it suffers on important CAD features for production. It also does not make round cylinders, they are polygons. But, sometimes when modifying another model, I can use TinkerCAD where Fusion360 chokes on too many vertices.
I need to learn cad. Would you choose freecad or solvespace. I have played a bit in solve space but haven’t tried freecad yet.
I don’t know solve space, but I can not not recommend FreeCAD enough.
Have trouble parsing that sentence? Now image that level of mental gymnastics for everything you’re about to learn in FreeCAD. Don’t do it.
I am a FreeCAD fan, but I learned on AutoCAD and others way more polished before I ran into it. If FreeCAD had been my intro to CAD I would not have continued. They’re doing great things but it is not entry level ready. To use and continue to use FreeCAD you have a special kind of blind spot for some of the less intuitive workflows, and it’s tendency to randomly lose its fucking mind and turn your project into a mangled, inverted abortion of its former self and then forget what Ctrl+Z is.
Lol thanks for the reply. Turns out solvespace is pretty sweet, coming from a level 0 noob. Check it out.
