Autodesk Inventor vs. MicroStation

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.

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MicroStation is THE program to use for roadway and corridor modeling. Most departments of transportation and municipalities in my region require that the models be delivered in the dgn format, so it is MicroStation or bust. It is an absolute pain to use some of the add-in features though. Things that are easy in other programs like making smart tables that update with the latest information usually necessitate the use of Axiom or similar outside programs/add-ins. I design storm sewer systems, and it takes us 6 months to train up new hires on this software, because it is NOT intuitive. You need to know which buttons to press, since it is not designed to be easily command-based like AutoCAD Civil 3D.

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• 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.

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• Plethora of design alternatives to choose from right from design to completed models
• Detailed approach towards parametric, mesh and surface modelling
• Well integrated modelling workflows
• Intelligent parametric components with 2D and 3D designs

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• 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.

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• Some of the more complex models have had a few issues exporting.
• We've struggled with external consultants using the custom Autocad engineering tools, and it plays nicely with MicroStation.

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

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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.

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MicroStation is very hard to use for our newest employees. It is not intuitive, and you need to know where to find the buttons to perform the commands you would like to perform instead of typing in the commands like other similar modeling programs. Also, it has no good traffic turning add-ins. We continue to run ALL our turning in Autoturn, since this is not a usable feature with MicroStation.

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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.

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We haven't had to use it for many years, so not able to comment.

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

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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.

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The only general purpose CAD program that you can compare MicroStation with would be AutoCAD. MicroStation, in my opinion, is a superior product in every way but one. That one issue is that there are just more people who have and know how to use AutoCAD than there are ones who know MicroStation. This makes AutoCAD easier to get up and running for most firms.

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• 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.

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• MicroStation usage is primarily necessitated by our major client who also uses the program.
• Without using MicroStation there would be many times where we would not be able to provide our clients with what they need.
• Therefore, MicroStation has had an incredibly positive impact on the business I work for as its usage has continued to secure contracts.

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