Solidworks vs Inventor 1

[rockguy]

Hi,
Don't want to start a war here. I have been using SolidWorks for about 3 years. I recently moved to another company. They are debating wheather to buy Inventor or SolidWorks. Inventor is having a promotion which is making it much cheaper than SolidWorks. I have never used Inventor but have reads quite a bit about it. If anyone here has used both could you please tell me your thoughts on them.

Thanks.

 

[SBaugh]

See thread:

thread559-15930

Regards, Scott Baugh, CSWP
credence69@REMOVEhotmail.com

http://www.3dmca.com

http://home.insightbb.com/~scott.baugh/

*When in doubt always check the help*

 

[SnowCrash]

Check with your VAR. Our guy just told me about a great promo for multiple network seats of SW office. You are planning on buying more than one copy, right? hehehehehe.

Crashj 'share nicely' Johnson

 

[APPENG]

DOnt get me started Rock LOL!

Inventor is an "ok" product and they have kickin demos to watch but if you put two equally capable designers behind each one and do a benchmark on real life work, you find that SOlidworks has the upper hand in a lot of areas. SUre there a few areas that they may have a slight advantage but the many features and benefits the solidworks has far outweighs the few!

Why else would they have to do that "frisbee" marketing routine they use??? You get waht you pay for, and you pay for that that you do not get....MANY FOLD!

Regards,
Jon
jgbena@yahoo.com

 

[BBJT]

APPENG,
Sounds like you have used Inventor doing "real life work" to be able to say SolidWorks has the upper hand with "real life work".

Do not get me wrong, I think SolidWorks is the better midrange package in the mid range market. But I am, as well as your are, biased because SolidWorks is the package that we use and support.

As far as the "frisbee" marketing, whatever that means, means nothing to a user that is confused on what package to buy.

rockguy,
You are in a tuff spot with the new company. If you have using SolidWorks for 3 years you already know the benifts of SolidWorks and probably know the in and outs as well as the rest of us. I would think this alone would weigh heavy in your companies’ decision. The only insights I can give on Inventor is try out an eval and do some "real life" parts.

Good Luck!
BBJT CSWP

 

[rockguy]

Hey thanks for the input gentlemen. I have evaluated Inventor 5.3 for about 3 days and sat in on a training class today. I'll tell you what I think. I think Inventor in a very capable package. It looks, acts, and feels a lot like SolidWorks. I would not say I had an easy time with it. I tried to pick parts to model that I thought were moderately difficult and it would be the type of work I would mostly be doing. I did the tutorials first to try and get a feel for where things were. Then I tried the part modeling and assembly creation and drawing. I had problems because I knew what I wanted and needed to do but I did have difficulty finding the right tools (or maybe tool terminolgy) in Inventor. After sitting in on the training class today I was better able to cross reference SolidWorks and Inventor terminology. I would like to say Inventor is a very good copy of SolidWorks. From what I could tell it could preform almost all the same things as SolidWorks. I found some things to be easier than SolidWorks and some things to be more difficult. I thought certain types of mating were very nice in Inventor. SolidWorks does a better job of being straight forward to use. Autodesk always seems to clutter up thier products with confusing things that are really not neccassary. Inventor has a nice Materials color library but moving around in the viewing area is really clumsy. I couldn't believe the didn't have standard view buttons. Another thing I found disturbing. I tested (4) dwg files in SolidWorks and it opened them all fine. I then tested the same (4) files in Inventor. (2) of the files crashed my system (more than once) and the other (2) opened with errors. At the training today I asked the instructor to open some dwg files for me. I though maybe I was doing something wrong. He tried (3) files. (1) file opened the other (2) files acted like they opened but could be found no where in the graphics area. Very odd. He couldn't give me a good explaination. Another thing I do alot of is trace bitmaps in SolidWorks. You can not do this in Inventor. Also Inventor has no Parting line draft capabilties. The instructor told me to try sweeping to add the draft. So, I think all in all SolidWorks is the better overall package. It just seems more robust when it come to more complex modeling and tasks. Inventor is a great product. A few more releases and they may have totally caught up with SolidWorks. My two cents.

 

[BBJT]

rockguy,
Thanks a million for the hands on input. Hats of to your company for taking the time to evaluate the two packages. I agree that Inventor will continue to get better but I think SolidWorks will always be one up because of their head start. They are all good packages and the competition between them is our, as users, biggest benifit. It forces the tool that we decide to use to be continualy sharpened.

Thanks for the two cents and good luck. BBJT CSWP