Courtesy to Twitter user XdanielArt (date of publication: 8 June 2024)
this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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I've spent the better half of six months trying to answer this question. (not continuously, just passively)
For some background, I used fusion 360 for a number of years, so I witnessed it turn to absolute shit, but that means parametric CADs are my cup of tea.
Here's my thoughts.
FreeCAD: I tried this, but I'll admit I gave up quickly.
It doesn't feel like a complete solution. It feels like more and more tools have been tacked on without the realisation that people who haven't been using it for years are going to have even less of an idea of where to start.
I do want to come back and give it another shot, as it hit 1.0 recently.
Plasticity:
I was originally interested in it because if how easy it could be to model something. After having used it for a number of days, I agree that it's relatively intuitive to get something going, but it lacks the precise feeling of a parametric CAD. Don't get me wrong, you can be precise with it, but it feels something akin to a 3D paint and less like a CAD program.
I can imagine if you just want to do something small, it would be sufficient.
OpenSCAD: I've been a programmer for 15+ years, and I expected to like this.
Sadly, if you lack a strong maths background, you'll find this difficult to master.
I'll be the first to admit my maths isn't as great as it used to be.
The beauty of a parametric CAD is that I don't need to know how to position everything exactly, I can just give it the constraints and it manages it for me.
With this, it felt like I kept on testing a value, measuring the resulting dimension that I was trying to go for, tweaking it again, rinse and repeat.
Didn't feel like I was programming, it felt like I was writing the 3D model itself with a DSL.
The lack of fillets and chamfers was also frustrating.
And this brings me to my current recommendation:
SolveSpace:
I've been using it for about a month now, and I've been happy with it.
It didn't take much to understand what it's trying to do.
It's completely parametric and I felt at home pretty quickly.
You can do fillets and chamfers easily, it just requires a bit of creative work.
Let me know if you have any other questions.
I'd be happy to answer them.