AutoCAD is a CAD product from Autodesk. It allows designers to work in 2D and 3D, and is available on Windows and Mac, but with extensive online collaboration tools.
$245
per month
Blender
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite available in under the GNU General Public License. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, video editing and 2D animation pipeline.
Blender Cloud is a related service accessible via subscription, and is a training and content platform providing access to expertise from the Blender Institute for advancing one's use of Blender.
$11.50
per month
BricsCAD
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
BricsCAD is a computer-aided design (CAD) toolkit, supporting 2D drawing, 3D modeling and visualizations, and is customizable as well as compatible with many 3rd party applications, developed by Belgian company Bricsys, a Hexagon company since late 2018.
AutoCAD has been around for over 30 years. AutoCAD was one of the first CAD programs that ran on a PC. Intergraph ran off a mainframe until MicroStation came in a PC version at a later date. By this time, AutoCAD had a market on smaller companies because of the cost and colleges …
AutoCAD has a more user-friendly approach to drawing, and the interface is easy to use and is understandable. BricsCAD is an exact replica of AutoCAD in terms of user commands, however, it is cheaper to license. The industry that we work in, though, expects a certain file type …
AutoCAD is the industry best and is well integrated with regular updates and fixes if required. Being very developer friendly and having a huge community of enthusiasts behind takes it miles ahead of the competition. Some might get an edge over price but due to this being an …
Again, Blender has a great advantage compared to other software which is being “ open source “ & free which can let anybody uses it without any worries. Compared to Ansys, Blender is ok since it doesn’t have all the features that Ansys got which is fine since Ansys is quite an …
The biggest advantage of Blender over these alternatives was how easy it was to learn, even for team members with no previous experience in 3D modeling, design, or any artistic field. The fact that it allows you to import or export files in most of the existing 3D model …
Very cost-effective solution, it even supports pointclouds natively and is something we will investigate further as time goes on and may in fact utilise it to replace AutoCAD with 3rd party add-ins at some point in the future, and we hope it can further reduce costs in the …
Features
AutoCAD
Blender
BricsCAD
Computer-Aided Design Software
Comparison of Computer-Aided Design Software features of Product A and Product B
Once again, for jobs/companies where you are doing a lot of design and modelling of tanks, pipework or filling machine or basic electronics its fantastic as a 3D and 2D modelling tool, however once again when it comes to testing these actual products in the real world, I feel like AutoCAD is let down by its clunky fitting and spec management and also in very limited in-house engineering simulations.
Blender is an excellent tool for everything from simple to complex 3D animations, the creation of 3D images, etc. It performs excellently in all of these areas. In the realm of 3D modelling, animation and rendering, there is very little that Blender is not suited for.
SMBs who do want to minimse their involvement with expensinve, inconvenient and bloated Autodesk products will find lots to love. The only hinderence is the market share of Autodesk means some 3rd party developers will not support it unfortunately, but it has it's own solutions to many things users of the AutoCAD ecosystem currenrtly rely on.
Creating complex polygonal geometries is very easy in Blender.
Edit Mode and Sculpt Mode helps in creating non uniform surfaces for objects like rocks, surfaces, terrains etc.
Blender can use various external plugins to make it work in more smoother way. For example to import any 3d object one can use sketchfab plugin and easily import the free assets from web after logging in.
Blender has a better rendering engine known as Cycles, it is far more better than any other stock rendering engine which can generate realistic lightning, shadows and reflections.
The animations can easily be generated with blender animation toolbar and also it incorporate any other animations made in any other software.
The bone generation and its behavior of animations can be achieved easily in blender.
User Interface Customisation: AutoCAD's user interface could benefit from more robust customisation options. Allowing users to rearrange toolbars, menus, and panels according to their specific workflows and preferences would enhance productivity.
Enhanced 3D Modeling Tools: While AutoCAD is capable of 3D modeling, it's not as intuitive or feature-rich as dedicated 3D modeling software. Streamlining the process and adding more advanced modeling tools would be a welcome improvement.
Enhanced Collaboration and Version Control: AutoCAD could improve its collaboration tools, such as real-time editing and version tracking, to facilitate smoother teamwork, especially in multi-disciplinary projects.
Intelligent Object Libraries: AutoCAD could benefit from an expanded and more intelligent library of standard objects and components. This would save time for designers who often have to create custom components from scratch.
It's really a hard question, but it could be: a game engine. Older versions used to have it; I would use it to simulate machines game-like.
I'm struggling to find another one; maybe the fact that it is so powerful and has so many features that learning it can be daunting; better documentation WITH examples and/or a map of Blender capabilities would help to know where you are in terms of knowledge and the planning the roadmap to where you want to go.
Precision modeling. Coming from CAD and using Blender as part of my design workflow, I'd love to be able to model inside Blender as I model with CAD tools. At this moment, it's simply impossible.
there is not full compatibility with dynamic blocks but it isn't so bad -we can create them in AutoCAD and use them to some extent anyway
it doesn't look as "sexy" and the interface looks kinda orimitive in some screens but the functionality is all there and the some
there is the hurdle of users thinking they are getting a lesser product so more marketing pozazz is needed to get the message over it is a very capable product
Because rarely we [would] rather wait for a whole year to update, sometimes the new updates don't bring many new features and we are still ok with the current version. Also the change of interface is always something that takes time for every partner in the company to get comfortable with. So those are the main reasons we may want to keep the same version.
It is very usable once you understand the program. I believe there is room for improvement in the 2D to 3D modeling capability. We have to use other apps to 3D model and that can be time consuming and sometimes AutoCAD doesn't transfer work that well between apps. They can improve there.
Because while it's a pretty good piece of software, the default built-in commands, the interface layout, and certain functions aren't as logical in their way of being arranged and executed. This, of course, doesn't diminish its use or effectiveness in your field of work, but it is quite awkward at first. A big advantage is that Blender lets you customize the interface however you want as well as keyboard shortcuts and several general program parameters.
it's exteremly useable. AutoCAD users will carry over many eisting skills and learn some new ones on the cross over. It's fast adn lightweight meaning ot can be run on just about any PC. The help and support are realy good and problems are usually responded to within a day by experts.
AutoCAD has the issue of crashing or slowing down the design procedure once a heavy design that includes several disciplines or multiple families/blocks is involved. Customer services gets the feedback from the crash reports but this issue seems like it has never been addressed in the software updates past several years.
the implementation was realy easy , to set up our workstation we pay for the licenses we are about to use , there was a little bit of delay to get the payment processed to receive the serial but after that the install runs without any problem , so you can fell secure there will be not issue with the implementation.
I use Revit far more than I use AutoCAD. AutoCAD is great for simple linework, but even then I will often create the lines in Revit and then export to AutoCAD for final touches and printing. AutoCAD is a bit easier for large-format prints, which is why I almost always end up using it after starting in Revit.
We've only used the consumer (non-pro) version of SketchUp, which we love, but is very limited in features and output capabilities compared to Blender. While Blender's learning curve is MUCH steeper than SketchUp, it feels like truly complete, professional design software.
Very cost-effective solution, it even supports pointclouds natively and is something we will investigate further as time goes on and may in fact utilise it to replace AutoCAD with 3rd party add-ins at some point in the future, and we hope it can further reduce costs in the long-run as it continues to develop and mature.
As it is a beginner-friendly software with increasing demand in the animation sector again, it positively impacts the business.
Except in some specific cases, no one will use Blender on their own at a professional level.
When I was a beginner, it took me a lot of time to learn, consequently designing the creation. But if we want to learn to master Blender, we can do it. As long as we have time and a lot of willpower, since, we repeat, it is not a simple program and hides thousands of tools and possibilities.
