Autodesk Inventor vs. Ironclad

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

I think it worked realllly well at my previous company where we used it for a very simple form that just required one simple signature from both sides- this was a form used to record custom pricing/discounts for a product that typically was not discounted. In my current role, there are many more required fields on the form/contract, and can be multiple levels of approvals on one side, and then possibly multiple levels of approvals/signatures on the other side. I've never used another solution in the exact same way (like DocuSign) to be able to compare experiences, but on Ironclad, understanding where I am in the completion process can be confusing. Within the app, I wish it was more of just a checklist or schedule of what needs to happen, but it's not written out that clearly. Lastly, there is something wrong with our notifications (I'm not sure if this is specific to my company's settings)- I frequently get 'contract completed' or 'contract signed' email notifications even if that hasn't occurred. They seem to correlate with updating the form or refreshing the sync from SFDC.

• 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

• Keep track of legal documents versions
• Approve legal workflows
• Forward email threads to the legal workflow

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

• Contract link feature in the case of amendment/addendum.
• Auto document retention feature (expiration and deletion).

Incentivized

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

Ironclad is the best tool I have used to date, to manage workflow and tickets. It was very easy to use and navigate from the very first time I used it. My time is very valuable and I don't have time to sit in training sessions, simply to use a new product. I'm happy to say that I was never formally trained on Ironclad as it simply wasn't necessary.

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 haven't used the support services for IronClad, but I understand from our legal team, the support is very good, they have replied and provide solutions quickly and effectively. I have used the documentation and support pages which are very complete and which have been updated given the user interface updates.

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

Miles ahead of LinkSquares

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

• At Gusto, where we operated on no contracts for many years, Ironclad allowed us to create a very simple process for getting approval for, and keeping records of, customized pricing on our new, high-end plan.
• Wasn't part of the buying committee, but in my current role it's been heavily utilized externally for customer contracts, but also internally for employee agreements.
• I don't have any actual numbers, and don't have a way to compare it to any prior e-signature setup.