AutoCAD mobile (formerly AutoCAD 360) is an easy to use drawing and drafting app from Autodesk. It enables users in design, construction, and engineering industries to view, create, mark-up, edit, and share drawings on mobile devices.
$10
per month
SketchUp
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
SketchUp is 3D modeling software with an emphasis on usability. SketchUp is a Trimble product.
$119
per year
Pricing
AutoCAD Web
SketchUp
Editions & Modules
Premium
$5.00
Per User Per Month
Ultimate
$15.00
Per User Per Month
Free
$0.00
per year
For Schools (free with G Suite or Microsoft education account)
The best thing about AutoCAD is that it can create a Universal Output for any related software, irrelevant if it was created by Autodesk. Just about any software can interface with dwg or dxf file types to name a few. AutoCAD doesn't have a direct 1:1 that's comparable in my …
It's great to give the customer an overview of how a project will look, but it will never replace the information that a blueprint or engineering drawing can convey. SketchUp is great for the casual user or someone who is just getting started in design work. Other high …
AutoCAD 360 has multiple functionalities that adapt to circumstantial conditions. It has a focus on available tools at all times and deserves to be updated to be at the forefront of technological platforms. It is very useful in some aspects of functionality to have access to less dense and capable tools to develop environments and improve visualization.
SketchUp is great for individually studying options for building design. It is an awesome conceptual tool to be able to quickly model and manipulate a building to study different designs. It is not good for complex geometries, especially curves. Surfaces have a hard time registering and cutting into one another. It also eventually needs to go into Revit to be more realistic as it is not good as a documentation tool
Quickly exploring solutions in 3D: We get a lot of "what if" and "what would that look like" questions. While hand-sketching and hand-drafting can be fairly quick, SketchUp allows me to quickly create 3D and 2D views of a detail or solution, change dimensions and materials in a flash, and show a client or installer the plan in minutes.
Creating professional design documents in LayOut: Projects of any scale need good documentation. Using a combination of SketchUp and LayOut, I can create a Design Intent Set, plans for permitting, a set for mechanical trades to mark-up, etc. Having clear, appropriately-scaled drawings with dimensions or notations is a must, and we don't always have the time or budget to get an architect involved!
Using live files to guide discussions: Not all clients are "visual" people, so opening their model and orbiting around their space in real time has been extremely helpful. Clients and trades enjoy the perspective views so much that we often include them in the full-sized drawing sets to give a good "overall" view of the project intent. For complex or tight spaces, sometimes un-rendered plans and elevations just aren't enough!
It'd be nice to be able to use AutoCAD 360 to leave comments on peoples files, such as being able to annotate a certain part of it and mark it for review, so then its author can look at the note and make necessary changes.
This is so useful so we would like to keep renewing as Autocad 360 does. In fact we are very optimistic about the tools that come in every renewal because we will then have even more features available.
We typically wait a few years in between renewing, as even older versions are powerful tools for modeling, and we make sure the amount of feature changes are worth the re-investment.
It is very user friendly and easy to learn. It's simplicity allows for a low learning curve so more people can learn it faster. The downside is that most schools are no longer teaching it, so many younger professionals come out of school not knowing it and knowing more complex software and they have a hard time "dumbing down" their skillsets
Sketchup is so intuitive; I can't recall ever looking for official support. However, there are many user forums online that can answer more questions. The usefulness of the online forums is, however, tempered by the fact that there have been many versions of the software under different ownership and support regimes, and thus finding the right information for the right version of the software can be a challenge.
Although there are lots of alternatives to AutoCAD mobile on the Google play store and the app store, many of these alternatives are not professionally developed and are associated with shady developers. So there might be a privacy or security risk with the usage these alternatives. However, DWG FastView is a worthy competing alternative.
We have not evaluated any other competing software to this one. I heard about this software from a friend who teaches how to use it. She showed me in just a few minutes and I was HOOKED. I saw immediately the possible help it would be to my business. Thank you.
