Likelihood to Recommend If its already part of your organization, and they have a license for Creative Cloud, its worth learning. It doesnt take long to get started, but compared to other software in the same field, its lacking in many ways, from quality of life features to just simply not having the option for Darkmode. Even for website design, UX/UI, and mocking up proof-of-concepts, there are much better tools like
Figma .
Read full review Autodesk Inventor is a great tool for students and faculty for engineering areas that don't require great precision or development of more thorough scientific results. Is you are conducting research, or deal with very intricate and complex systems I would recommend a more robust platform that complies more to industry standards.
Read full review Pros Easy and simple animations. Good tool for website mock-ups. Easy user interface and tools that are like most Adobe products. You can share a dev link and it displays all assets for developers to download or user like it's very own style guide. Read full review The program is very good at simplicity. Each of the buttons, menus, and options has an explanation of exactly what the feature does, and even a more advanced description if you desire to learn more about what each one does. Autodesk Inventor is a very fast program. Everything renders extremely quickly and there are no delays when examining a 3D model, part, or assembly. This is especially useful when giving a presentation about a product or design, and you need to be able to show a concept to an audience in real time. The software has an extremely accurate simulation feature that lets users do stress analysis on a 3D model. It can calculate precisely where the stress concentrations are going to be in a particular model and even give you an accurate depiction of where the part could likely fracture and/or fracture during loading. Read full review Cons Doesn’t have image editing tools, so having to go back to Photoshop or Lightroom just to make a sight edit can be a pain. Could add some text editing functionality. It feels silly that I have to draw a line under text when I should just be able to underline. Would be nice to have some real-time collaboration functionality. Read full review most if it still runs on a single core. Please fix this Crashes. In our experience, too many crashes. We have high end machines and crashes are way too common. Autosave. I think it is simply unacceptable that Autodesk Inventor combines common crashes with no autosave functionality. We feel this pain all the time. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We utilize many of the applications in the Adobe CC suite and our usage of this application came about simply because it was the one that was already paid for. Bearing that in mind we will definitely be renewing the software upon the expiration of the licensing. I am not sure if this is the solution we would go with were it not already included, we would have to evaluate all other options
Read full review Inventor continues to meet our enterprise needs. I don't see a need to change unless we change our business model significantly.
Read full review Usability Adobe XD is basically on life-support now, there are much better software out there that do everything XD can do, and a few that you don't even have to pay a monthly subscription fee on. While Adobe XD is great as shortcuts that are used in other CC software works, and its integration with CC is great. But it still lacks compared to its closest competitor.
Read full review It’s easy and very good for mechanical design
Read full review Support Rating I have not had a need to connect with the Adobe XD support team as of yet, but from past experience when dealing with the other products, the support has been very very good, and I would have no reason to think that this product would be any different. There are a good number of training videos on the Adobe site for this product as well as on other social media sites so a quick search should let you find the answers in several different ways.
Read full review I think the support for Autodesk Inventor is very good. The staff at our reseller were very knowledgable and able to walk us through problems pretty easily. The training we received was very good also. I will say that there were a couple of times we reached out to support with a question or challenge we had, and the support agent was not able to resolve our problem, and after touching base back we found out that there was not a solution for the problems we were experiencing. One of them was just how Inventor represents colors inconsistently at times, all things being equal. Another was that Inventor would not let decals on parts transcend to the assembly level. they just would not show up.
Read full review In-Person Training I got the training during college, so mostly i learned on my own
Read full review Implementation Rating Implementation was a snap
Read full review Alternatives Considered Before XD came to the company, screens were designed in Illustrator or Photoshop and a PDF presentation was generated, which was extremely time-consuming. XD saved us a lot of time (and money) by generating interactive prototypes, which are much more tangible for the client than a PDF. The "fight" with
Figma is frequent. Both have features in which they are better than their competition. And, while I still choose Adobe XD, don't rule out moving to
Figma with its multiple updates.
Read full review When it comes to solid modeling, the bad choices died out years ago. So we looked at the total ecosystem and chose Autodesk Inventor because of the integration with Nastran, HSM (machining), Autodesk CFD, MoldFlow, and
AutoCAD . This means our legacy data (2D) is still a valid part of our design methodologies going forward, and we have the full breadth of engineering tools at our disposal. Other solutions in this space have similar offerings but not nearly as potent of a portfolio in total. It's worth saying that we do not consider Inventor in the same space as
CATIA or NX, but that the entire Autodesk portfolio (e.g. Alias, PowerMill, etc) includes a total toolset that exceeds these industry giants.
Read full review Return on Investment Ease of use means we are up and running in no time. Integrates and is a part of the Adobe CC platform (which we already subscribe to) so there was no additional cost. Online proofing and developer handoff links are the icing on the cake. Keeps everything in one place. Handles all our assets (mostly created in Illustrator) like a dream. Even imports native Photoshop docs, too, so that saves us so much time round tripping. Read full review Working on a project designed with Inventor provides a modular design platform that can quickly be configured or changed as required. This allows for the quick turn around time for the design and revision of drawings. We've used Inventor over the years (since 2013) and the updates and newly released versions of Inventor do not require re-training or restrict use. Autodesk follows an intuitive approach and users or designers who have worked on other design platforms like SolidWorks can transition easily to Inventor. Read full review ScreenShots