Overview
What is SOLIDWORKS?
Dassault Systemes offers SOLIDWORKS, a computer-aided design (CAD) system for education and manufacturing supporting 2D or 3D design, electrical design, simulations, and product development with collaboration tools.
A student's perspective on SOLIDWORKS
Solidworks ! Best to use for Parametric modelling & Configuration based Products.
SOLIDWORKS - Best Companion for Mechanical Engineers
Solidworks is a good choice
Solidworks and Injection Molding Analysis Review
My experience with SOLIDWORKS as a mechanical design engineer
Solidworks - solid modeling functions and features that work great
SolidWorks is the leading standard in 3D parametric solid modeling!
SOLIDWORKS works good
Solidworks is easy to use with great functions
SOLIDWORKS for the future generations
Sketch feature should be like DraftSight
SOLIDWORKS and its Capabilities
SOLIDWORKS Review
Awards
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Video Reviews
1 video
Pricing
Solidworks Annual Subscription
1,295
Solidworks Standard
3,996
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Details
- About
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is SOLIDWORKS?
SOLIDWORKS Video
SOLIDWORKS Technical Details
Deployment Types | On-premise |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Windows, Mac |
Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(409)Community Insights
- Recommendations
Users of Solidworks have made several recommendations based on their experiences with the software. The most common recommendations include evaluating other products to consider their benefits, especially for CAD software. Users also recommend utilizing Solidworks for 3D design work, highlighting its user-friendly interface and easy learning curve for new users. Additionally, users praise Solidworks for its active community and available support resources, which they recommend taking advantage of. Overall, these recommendations emphasize the importance of exploring different options, leveraging community support, and considering Solidworks for 3D design purposes.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-25 of 55)A perfect software for 3D modeling and large assemblies
- 3D modeling
- Manage of large assemblies
- Quick rendering without much knowledge
- Further improve the large assemblies management
- Quite a lot of requirements for the workstation
A student's perspective on SOLIDWORKS
- User Interface
- Accessibility
- Creating Drawings
- Ease of Use
- Battery Consumption
- Time taken to Start
- File Sharing
- Isolate feature
- Configuration Matrix
- Material Properties Selection
- Assembly
- Bill of Material
- Material Properties like Weight and Volume
- Self Verification of Design
- Design for Manufacturability Integration
- Web Version of SOLIDWORKS
- Mobile Version of SOLIDWORKS
- Integration with Sharepoint or onedrive for data
SOLIDWORKS - Best Companion for Mechanical Engineers
- Simple Modelling and Assembling of parts
- Contains large database of materials
- Design Library to import every important standard parts, hence reducing time in designing the same
- Allows every simulation, with results as per the real time scenario
- Animation wizard, to view the deformation and stress occuring in a precise way
- No need of manual calculation in calculating the weight and inertia of the component, SOLIDWORKS can do the work for you
- With increase in complexity of the mechanical components, the solving time also increases exponentially.
- With SOLIDWORKS, I can't do manual meshing by selecting the face of the components, unlike Ansys
- SOLIDWORKS is a high end software, hence requires system which can support the software.
Solidworks is a good choice
- Design solid model
- Generate 2D drawing
- Check parts fitment
- Sketch can be easier to use by adding more features
- Rotation by reference would be useful feature to be added
- Welding simulation would be helpful
Solidworks and Injection Molding Analysis Review
- While SOLIDWORKS has many features to learn, it is quite easy to start modeling if you're new to software.
- The UI has always been one of my favorite reasons to use it, as other 3D modeling software provides a more "industrial" feel to the process of CAD modeling.
- From the administrator side, managing licenses needs some major improvements. They offer 2 ways to manage: 1) per machine 2) online. Both are painful and need some feature development to improve both methods.
All in all, if you're not planning to design an entire airplane with large assembly files, then Solidworks is your tool!
- Comprehensive standard parts library (such as bearings, fasteners, etc.)
- Easy to work with (intuitive)
- Comprehensive and easy to use hole drilling and tapping options
- The GD&T options could be updated to latest ASME standards
- PDM interface could be modernized
- Simulation for static finite element analysis could be expanded to provide more contact options.
Mainly used in the mechanical department
- Great interface
- Intuitive menus, tool bars and features
- Import many file types
- Large assemblies and complex part are slow to load
- Limited collaboration ability
- Needs a powerful PC to run it
[SOLIDWORKS] is less appropriate for single users that could get similar results from a lower priced product. Also less appropriate for teams that only need the modeling basic features.
- Top of the line parametric solid modeling
- Intuitive interface
- Expansive feature set
- Excellent handling of both large and small design projects.
- Fantastic support network
- Stable and reliable
- Solidworks is continually improving its product, however, more focus could be put into traditional drawings as opposed to MBD.
- Crashes can at times happen without warning or symptoms.
- The newer focus on cloud-based applications is a bit late to the game and needs some work to bring it up to enterprise-class.
SOLIDWORKS works good
- Simple to use.
- Great for sheet metal.
- Good training support.
- Problems with large assemblies.
- Sometimes crush.
- Problems with the video card.
Solidworks is easy to use with great functions
- Review and measure model files.
- Convert sheetmetal model file to flat patterns.
- Create in-hose drawings.
- Export model characteristics more easily.
- Easily convert surfaces to extrusions.
SOLIDWORKS for the future generations
- Heal corrupt 3D models.
- Feature recognition is invaluable to correcting corrupt models.
- Drawing 3D models made easy.
- Some 3D models are completely impossible to repair via feature works and healing. Understanding all the different 3D modeling software and convincing customers to set standards for all models drawn by employees would be ideal even though it is outside of SOLIDWORKS control, some people that model parts are plain and simply not suited or managed properly to ensure the end customer has the ability to work with their model.
Sketch feature should be like DraftSight
- Opens many file types.
- Easy to convert into 2D DWG files.
- Fast 3D rendering for complex assemblies.
- Save DWG 2D files in inches or metric easily, defaults to metric and has to be manually converted to inches
- When using the sketch feature, the ability to disable ALL references. If I don't know the exact shape and I want to draw/adapt my design, it harshly interprets the references which have no value to me. The easiest exact is to think about when you have a Microsoft Word document that has a lot of formatting, photos, tabs, etc. If you accidentally hit the "enter" key, you can explode the formatting and everything goes crazy. SW does this to me, I just want to "doodle" my sketches, edit/delete/etc and not be bound by arbitrary references.
- For the sketch feature, ability to use a DraftSight plugin of some sort. I'm super fast in DS, if I could draw using the commands in SW then I would probably never open DS again and convert to SW full time. Currently, I only use SW as a way to convert 3D files so I can build everything in DraftSight.
SOLIDWORKS and its Capabilities
- Functionality
- Visualizing large assemblies
- Sheet metal bend parts
- Eliminating odd assembly bugs
- Minimizing the size of the program for faster processing
- Modularity between 2D and 3D imports and exports
SOLIDWORKS Review
- Generate bill of materials that can be sent to Microsoft Excel
- It has a very user friendly interface
- It gives the ability to visually depict a design
- Large assembly load time could be improved
- Importing .dwg files is fairly clunky
- File management without having to buy an add-on program
I know for building construction there are better suited, more specific computer applications that work far better.
Powerful tool for 3D design
- Visualisation
- Clash detection
- Easy modification
- Resource hungry
- Time consuming to load models
- Fault correction is difficult
- SOLIDWORKS offers solid support through 3rd party vendors. I've yet to find a time where I wasn't able to find a satisfactory answer for an issue I was having.
- Stable releases with continuing improvements in the software.
- Communication with us on a yearly basis to see how the software is working for us and what improvements we would like to see.
- SOLIDWORKS is extremely particular is what video cards and versions of Windows they will support. It seems as though they are looking for reasons to not have to support their software.
- Missing functionality would be the stress analysis portion that requires additional licenses. Aside from that, everything is pretty good with it.
Definitely not worth it. Very Slow and the program is a crash-maniac
- Large community
- Program Stability (Very Unstable)
- User Interface is dated and impractical
- Every new version introduces many new bugs and makes the program even slower
- Insufficient official support despite the large cost of the program
- Very Slow
- Text Editor is dated and impractical
- Solidworks Corp does not support customers
SOLIDWORKS Review
- Allows you to rotate a 3D part to see any angle you need
- Can easily generate a 2D drawing, showing each face of a part
- You can view entire assemblies from any angle you want
- Dimension based drawing so you can change a dimension without redrawing an entire part
- It's a little bit complicated when you're used to simple 2D drawings
- The program crashes quite frequently - SAVE OFTEN!
- Updates are tied to a subscription that must remain active
SOLIDWORKS has a very good sheet metal system, as well as a weldment feature for building tubing structures. And on top of the default sheet metal thicknesses and tubing sizes, you can make your own custom sizes that will fit your specific needs.
We use SOLIDWORKS mostly to build sheet metal parts. In SOLIDWORKS, you can build the part in 3D, in its finished state, then export the part to a .dxf file as a flat pattern so that you can cut/form the piece.
Best 3D prototyping software
- Easy to model ideas due to user-friendly interface and multitasking tools.
- Can save work with many available formats which can be referred to many other compatible software and devices.
- Lots of learning and helping materials are readily available when issues are raised.
- Needs to be lightweight in order to run on low performance machines with out sticking.
- Needs to improve 2D drawing tools to be more user friendly.
- Needs to improve inbuilt rendering software to be more realistic.
Easy to learn
- I have been using the Weldments feature recently, and I was surprised by how easy it is to make a weldment using a simple 3D sketch.
- Our product contains over 200 components, and many of them have lots of details in them. SOLIDWORKS loads and runs smoothly.
- There are extensive online forums to help you build whatever you need to. It is very useful.
- Getting the right parameters set when doing an FEA is always challenging for me. Attaching conditions to a face, for example, covers it with little arrows. On complex assemblies, I can't tell what is even selected.
- The license management software could use an update in UI. It seems like some tabs are unnecessary and it is not immediately clear what is and isn't checked out.
The highly intuitive, visual UI and seamless backend integration into my 3D printing workflow, meant that alongside my familiarity from my earlier career, it was the obvious choice.
- Highly visual and intuitive UI--my 10-year-old son can use it to create complex designs!
- Has very wide integration of CAD to all the other things you'd use CAD for (fluid dynamics, stress testing, CNC, 3D printing).
- It has very useful presentation modes to be able to present working concepts.
- Resource hungry (but then you should expect that!)
- So full-featured that sometimes it's a little confusing
- Community support is vibrant, but could benefit from more structure.
SOLIDWORKS - great software for design!
- SOLIDWORKS has an intuitive UI with very good online tutorials and training courses.
- SOLIDWORKS PDM does a great job at managing revision histories.
- SOLIDWORKS is great for creating models of parts and assemblies.
- Sometimes SOLIDWORKS pushes through too many updates and it can cause issues when working with files from older versions.
SOLIDWORKS! From a Solid User
- Part design.
- Instructional drawings.
- Ease of use.
- Slow.
- Expensive.
- Buggy.
SOLIDWORKS for manufacturing ease
- Focus on ease of use allows the user to produce a 3D design in a fastest and easiest way.
- Provides a seamless and integrated workflow
- Create, validate, manage, and transform ideas to produce an excellent product design.
- It can be slow, sometimes gets stuck while processing multiple parts.
- Its time consuming to form an object from different parts.
- File import from other software can be tricky and does not work very well.