I personally never had a problem with Free cad. It’s the only cad software I ever used, so I can’t compare it to others but it just worked after I learned some basics.
FreeCAD requires a lot more clicks. Simple example: You want to extrude part of a sketch. In Fusion360 you select the part, hit extrude, done. In FreeCAD you can’t extrude a part of a sketch, only whole sketches, so you have to make a new sketch, important the geometry of your previous sketch, repaint over the imported geometry to make it an actually sketch and now you are allowed to extrude it. When you have an extrusion that would result in multiple bodies, you have to redo this produce for each and every body, since FreeCAD extrusions are only allowed to produce one body. This can easily turn a 5sec operation into a 10min operation.
On top of that you have the topological naming problem that forces you do basically remoddel your whole thing from scratch if you want to change anything in the early build steps.
There are numerous ways to ease the pain (MasterSketch, Datum planes, ShapeBinder), but they all require a lot of discipline and planing ahead. You can’t just YOLO your models in FreeCAD the way you can in Fusion360.
On the plus side, the discipline FreeCAD forces on you can result in cleaner results. In Fusion360 it’s quite easy to model yourself in a corner were everything is underconstrained and will just exploded if you touch anything. Fusion360 will let you get away with a lot until it is to late. FreeCAD will go “I can’t do that, Dave” a lot sooner and force you to clean up.
All that complaining aside, FreeCAD is my CAD tool of choice. I am never going to touch Fusion360 with its ever more restrictive licensing scheme ever again.
I personally never had a problem with Free cad. It’s the only cad software I ever used, so I can’t compare it to others but it just worked after I learned some basics.
FreeCAD requires a lot more clicks. Simple example: You want to extrude part of a sketch. In Fusion360 you select the part, hit extrude, done. In FreeCAD you can’t extrude a part of a sketch, only whole sketches, so you have to make a new sketch, important the geometry of your previous sketch, repaint over the imported geometry to make it an actually sketch and now you are allowed to extrude it. When you have an extrusion that would result in multiple bodies, you have to redo this produce for each and every body, since FreeCAD extrusions are only allowed to produce one body. This can easily turn a 5sec operation into a 10min operation.
On top of that you have the topological naming problem that forces you do basically remoddel your whole thing from scratch if you want to change anything in the early build steps.
There are numerous ways to ease the pain (MasterSketch, Datum planes, ShapeBinder), but they all require a lot of discipline and planing ahead. You can’t just YOLO your models in FreeCAD the way you can in Fusion360.
On the plus side, the discipline FreeCAD forces on you can result in cleaner results. In Fusion360 it’s quite easy to model yourself in a corner were everything is underconstrained and will just exploded if you touch anything. Fusion360 will let you get away with a lot until it is to late. FreeCAD will go “I can’t do that, Dave” a lot sooner and force you to clean up.
All that complaining aside, FreeCAD is my CAD tool of choice. I am never going to touch Fusion360 with its ever more restrictive licensing scheme ever again.
If you’ve used any mainstream CAD software like Inventor, NX, or Solidworks then FreeCAD is extremely clunky in comparison.