ABAQUS vs. ANSYS

[abusementpark]

Can anyone shed some light on how ABAQUS and ANSYS compare to one another? For those with experience with both, which one to do you prefer?

I have experience with ANSYS and find many things about it not user-friendly. Is ABAQUS any better? Is one better for structural analysis?

 

[GBor]

Do a search on this forum...this question has been discussed, rediscussed, and just when we thought it was going to die, it was brought up again...your question is roughly round 4 in the last 3 years.

 

[Jordonlaw]

Are you looking at the implicit or explicit solver ? My experince of Abaqus (explicit)was/is very good but the software is very expensive (yearly license). On the other hand I've always been very dissapointed with Ansys (implicit)and felt they can't deliver what they claim to be able to.

You need to define what analyses you need to run to get some realistic feedback from this forum. However, what I always say is that you MUST give the vendors a benchmark example to run. This way you know that the code can perform the analysis on your structure with your loads. If you don't do this then you will be at the mercy of the salesmen. My experince is that vendors will be happy to run such as benchmark if there is a sniff of an order at the end of it.

 

[gurmeet2003]

ABAQUS is more expensive, but it is definitely very capable and more user friendly. If you intend to do any non-linear analysis, ABAQUS is certainly better. Better convergence and contacts. The preprocessor ABAQUS CAE is user frinedly and lot more capable than Workbench.

I used ANSYS workbench for 4-5 years. Once I started doing Non linear analysis (material non-linearities) I had lot of convergence problems and relatively poor support.

ABAQUS user support is an order of magnitude better. However there are lot of experienced users with ANSYS experince. Once you have 15-20 years invested in learning a software, it is hard to change both for the company and the user.

Gurmeet