Evaluating changing to a new Cad Products! Which one is better?

[PatCouture]

I have made some research about using a new cad software. I've been thinking about switching from Mechanical Desktop 6 to a new software such as SolidWorks, Solid Edge, or Inventor but as far as I'm concerned they seem to be able to do approximately all the same thing. So it makes my decision very difficult. So if anybody has some comments about it that could help me make differences between each products, I'll be very grateful.

Thanks

Patrick

 

[dompie]

Pat,

at the moment we are also checking out some other 3D programs (now we use MD4 ); for us, sheet metal is pretty important to and we found only 2 programs that were realy good at this: SolidWorks and TopSolid. I think it might be worth it to check TopSolid out to.

greetz,

Dompie

 

[PatCouture]

Hi Dompie

I don't know TopSolid and with what I've seen on the TopSolid web site, this software must cost a lot more than SolidWorks am I right?

I know that there's a lot of good and very good products out there but for now I'm just looking for a very affordable one and the three software I mentionned earlier are as much as I can go.

Thanks

Pat

 

[EdDanzer]

We have used SolidWorks since 1996, and have always upgraded, but 2003 has been driving me crazy, so I looked at the competitors. We do small lot quantity manufacturing (1 to 10) of products with 10 to 2,000 part in a product. These assemblies are mostly weldments and machined parts with some sheet metal.
SolidWorks is still the best of the bunch! The best way is to find out which product is the best for you it to time how long it takes the VAR to build a simple assembly from your old prints. We do this every time we evaluate CAM software, and when we were looking at changing from SolidWorks.
We will probably not upgrade to 2004 because of file maintenance cost.
Good luck with your choice, there will be a learning curve.