Autodesk Inventor 3D CAD software offers professional-grade 3D mechanical design, documentation, and product simulation tools. These blend parametric, direct, freeform, and rules-based design capabilities. Inventor includes integrated tools for sheet metal, frame design, tube and pipe, cable & harness, presentations, rendering, simulation, and machine design. It also features TrustedDWG® compatibility and Model-Based Definition capabilities for embedding manufacturing information directly in…
$300
12 days over 1 year via Flex pricing 100 tokens
Figma
Score 9.1 out of 10
N/A
Figma, headquartered in San Francisco, offers their collaborative design and prototyping application to support digital product and UI development.
$15
per month per editor
Pricing
Autodesk Inventor
Figma
Editions & Modules
Subscription - Monthly
$305
per month per user
Subscription - Yearly
$2440
per year per user
Subscription - 3 Years
$7320
3 years per user
Professional
$144
per year
Organization
$540
per year
Starter
Free
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Autodesk Inventor
Figma
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Also available for limited use through tokens on a Flex plan.
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.
Figma is the best product design tool! It has fantastic coverage across the different verticals required for product design and the team seems to be consistently leveling up those areas all the time. If you are looking for more intensive motion design or illustration tooling, Figma has them but there are definitely tools that do them better. Although, for my team, Figma is more than enough. It allows us to go from conceptual design & collaboration to high fidelity designs & user testing in one tool and that feels awesome.
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.
Collaboration! we stopped sharing screen in zoom, now we all jump into Figma and magically everything connects and flow way better.
Memory management! Figma manage all the assets so well, that we sometimes have all project assets in one single file with multiple pages and it loads instantly. Keeping everything in one place, easy to access and to developers or designers complain about they stations running out of ram!
Sharing!, getting a link to an exact pixel is magical, discussion can now have way more context than what it had before.
Auto-layouts! Although is not new in the ecosystem, Figma does a pretty awesome job with molecules and particles, so you can create better design systems that can stretch to any screen, making it a design once for all devices!
Inventor demonstrates a lack of fluidity in the process of transferring data between programs.
Inventor shows some lack of sophistication that certain features that are readily available in other design software packages are limited in use in Inventor.
Inventor can often have difficulty in creating models that show true color, as in blacks can come out as dark grays in certain renders, even when the material and appearance settings are the same from part to part.
Our designers and developers love this tool because it eliminates the need to package designs into a separate folder. We used to upload all PSDs or In Design files in a dropbox folder, and this tool changes that. However, as a project manager, I find it a little clunky. Most of the time, all I want to do is view a specific design, but Figma defaults to be zoomed out and then you have to zoom in and scroll to the specific design in order to see it
I'm giving the overall support rating a 5 only because I rarely have to use it. Trying to find the answer on the help pages hardly ever helps me because any problem I have is usually too deep for what the help offers. Given the popularity of Autodesk, I have always been able to find an answer online after doing enough looking!
I haven't used their support lately but in the past, they had a chat that I used often. They often responded in a few hours and were able to give a satisfactory solution. I would imagine it's less personal now but the community has expanded drastically so there are more resources out there to self serve with a bit of Google magic.
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.
I have previously used InVision paired with Sketch, Adobe's XD platform, and other workflow or diagram-based tools as well. Each product or service has its own version of what Figma has, but nothing compares to the ease-of-use, collaboration tools, and future-proof thinking Figma's product team is able to deliver consistently.
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.
