Altia vs. Autodesk Inventor vs. PTC Creo

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.

Incentivized

PTC Creo is great for assemblies that multiple users are collaborating on. Models can reference other models that someone in another department has released and when those models are changed, the referenced parts and assemblies are changed. These changes are very helpful when working on collaborative machine designs and comparing forging dies with the final parts.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• PTC Creo contains many advanced tools with better optimization for creating part models and other production related drawings.
• The initial concept designs can be done more adequately.
• The parameters of 2D drawings can be changed easily by editing the 3D model.
• The productivity can be increased by customized tools for modeling.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• No autosave
• No clear message if it has problems saving the file
• Not so easy to use
• In my experience, has a lot of things missing that other CAD already have in years
• In my experience, it's extremely easy to lose work/time

Inventor continues to meet our enterprise needs. I don't see a need to change unless we change our business model significantly.

Incentivized

It is quite user-friendly as long as you have the computing power to download and use it. However, this makes it quite inconvenient if you are trying to access files on different devices, as Inventor has to be loaded on all of those devices. While the program itself works just fine, it would be much better for my application if it, or a version, were web-based and allowed users to access and modify projects from anywhere.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I liked the training manuals I used to learn some, as I didn’t have CAD background in college or before this job. My coworkers were able to share with me what they learned in PTC training and I was able to get support online and through reading.

Incentivized

I got the training during college, so mostly i learned on my own

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Learning curve of SOLIDWORKS is higher compared to Creo, however, stability and more design control is provided by Creo. Creo also have more robust and stable interfaces. For larger assemblies, Creo works better than SOLIDWORKS. New upgrades of Creo has given liberty to open different file data of different software without any file conversion. Creo costs comparable to SOLIDWORKS cost, with more capabilities.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Having PTC Creo as our primary tool positions us as forward thinking and creative in the eyes of our clients.
• PTC Creo constantly evolves in the ability to increase our productivity; new capabilities and features are added, which reduce our level of effort for some tasks.

Incentivized