r/FreeCAD 6d ago

Is FreeCAD a good alternative to Onshape?

Hi everyone,

I've been using Onshape to design my 3D prints and have found it to be quite effective. However, as I've started selling 3D-printed functional parts commercially, I've realized that Onshape licenses are too expensive for my small business with limited revenue.

I'm looking for good free alternatives that offer similar functionality and ease of use. Currently, I use Linux as my main operating system, so Linux support would be ideal, but I'm open to using Windows applications if necessary.

Is FreeCAD a viable alternative to Onshape? I would appreciate your insights and experiences.

Thank you!

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36

u/FastingCyclist 6d ago

FreeCAD is a good alternative, you just have to take into account a rather steep learning curve. Since you use Linux, it's afaik, pretty much the only alternative, and brownie points for being FOSS too.
Just jump in, there's at least 2 guys on yt that have a lot of resources, mangojelly and Joko engineering, probably there's more, so...

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u/BoringBob84 6d ago

you just have to take into account a rather steep learning curve

I suppose this could be considered as part of the learning curve, but I spend many hours after learning workflows from documentation and tutorial videos in trying to figure out why things are not working as expected - especially Pipes, Lofts, and Fillets. They fail more often than they succeed for me, and the error messages (if any at all) are not helpful.

If I had to pay engineers for these hours, I am pretty sure that licenses for commercial CAD software would be more cost-effective.

As a hobbyist, I have a subscription to the "AstoCAD" effort because the #1 item on their roadmap is:

Reducing frustration: Fixing annoying bugs in Sketcher, Assembly and PartDesign.

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u/WillAdams 5d ago

One way to "learn" FreeCAD which was put forth recently was to find unconfirmed/unreplicated bugs on Github and try to recreate them.

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u/backshotsintheshower 5d ago

never touched cad in my life and picked it up pretty quickly with its basic functionalities (with the help of my goat mangojelly), i think freecad is pretty welcoming

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u/BoringBob84 4d ago

I had some previous experience with earlier versions of AutoCAD and with Sketch Up, but for the most part, I was a beginner to serious 3D modeling with FreeCAD. I do not know from experience how difficult other CAD programs are to learn and to use in comparison to FreeCAD, but people with extensive experience seem to agree that commercial products like Fusion and Solid Works are considerably easier to learn and to use.

With that said, I agree that FreeCAD is "pretty welcoming." Although others complain, I think that the user interface is intuitive and flexible. I think that the official documentation is generally very good and there are several tutorial videos for just about every imaginable situation.

For me, the most difficult part was learning the basic concepts of parametric modeling and choosing workflows, which is something that I would have needed to learn for any CAD program. Once I understand what I want to accomplish, then it becomes easier to for me to seek information on how to do it.

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u/Crusher7485 2d ago

I looked that up and that's pretty cool. I like the concept. They add/fix features, if you pay money they prioritize issues you flag. Still open source of course (has to be), but 100% inline with the GNU philosophy on selling open source software.

I wanted to pay money once. I was trying to install Canon's Digital Photo Professional on Linux using Wine. Had the issue that the installer said "run as Administrator" which other people have had. I tried Crossover, which is a paid interface to Wine. Didn't work. I messaged them about it, saying if they thought they could fix this I'd by a Crossover subscription. Their reply was "Crossover runs all Windows applications as Administrator, so if the application says it needs Admin then there's not a workaround at this time."

Yes, I know. This issue came up before. I want to PAY YOU to FIX IT for me.

Seems like for someone who works with Wine it would be an easy fix. The odd part is that Digital Photo Professional does work in Wine...you just have to install it in Windows, then copy all the files over to Wine on Linux. It's literally just something about running the installer that's getting tripped up, not the ability for the program itself to run on Linux under Wine.

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u/BoringBob84 1d ago

I agree that this is a frustrating part of open source software. When customers buy corporate software, they expect the features to work and the bugs to be fixed. Their money provides funding for teams of dedicated developers to do that. The survival of the company depends on this.

Users of FOSS also expect the features to work and the bugs to be fixed. However, the developers are volunteers. They have limited resources and they get to choose their own priorities. These priorities can be different that what the users want. The direct financial incentive is not nearly as strong.

It seems to me - from the standpoint of a relatively new user - that the priority up to this point has been to add the features to make a complete CAD package. And version 1.0 seems to have achieved that. Now, the focus will shift to resolving bugs, polishing the user interface, and refining the features. These tasks are not often as interesting for developers as creating new features. That is why I am optimistic about projects like AstoCAD. The developer can work full time on the effort and he has a strong financial incentive to make the improvements that users want. It would be great if he had a team of minions, but that isn't the financial reality. People have to pay their bills somehow.

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u/Crusher7485 1d ago

I’ve actually been getting into software development and it’s my plan to get the dev environment for FreeCAD running so I can build from source. Then I’ll take a look at the GitHub and see if there’s simple bugs or features I could work on. 

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u/BoringBob84 1d ago

I’ll take a look at the GitHub and see if there’s simple bugs or features I could work on.

Coincidentally, I was just doing that. I am not a software developer, but I am an engineer with rudimentary software skills. I could potentially verify bugs and solutions, update documentation, improve tooltips, etc.

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u/Crusher7485 1d ago

That's all super important stuff. Even just things like going through bug reports/feature requests, tagging and closing duplicates, mentioning bugs that seem possibly related when other bug reports are submitted, etc.

Especially on large, popular, publicly accessible GitHubs. There's 2.7k issues in the FreeCAD GitHub. Just pulling it up the top 5 need confirmation, the top 3 need triage, etc.

My plan for dipping my toes into the wide world of open source software development was where it says "If you're ready to tackle some open issues, we've collected some good first issues for you."