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
PTC Creo
Score7.6 out of 10
N/A
PTC offers Creo, the company's line of computer-aided design (CAD) products that support the product lifecycle management (PLM) process with 2D and 3D design kits (Creo Elements and Creo Direct), an augmented reality module, Creo Illustrate for technical illustrations, Creo Sketch, Creo Schematics and Creo View for diagramming and sharing information, Creo simulate for running simulations, and other modules.
$2,480
Pricing
Autodesk Inventor
PTC Creo
Editions & Modules
Subscription - Monthly
$305
per month per user
Subscription - Yearly
$2440
per year per user
Subscription - 3 Years
$7320
3 years per user
Design Package
$2,480.00
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Autodesk Inventor
PTC Creo
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
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.
Mechanical Designer in Engineering at Gemcor (Mechanical or Industrial Engineering, 51-200 employees)
Chose Autodesk Inventor
I've listed SOLIDWORKS, SDRC Ideas and Pro/Engineer as alternative and comparable applications. SDRC Ideas is an extinct product, and Pro/E is available as it's descendent, PTC Creo, I think. Of the two alternatives, SOLIDWORKS is easier for me to use and I can do more with it, …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Verified User
Chose Autodesk Inventor
Autodesk Inventor is by far the best CAD package when it comes to mechanical design. The product development that requires small mechanical details, including electronic components. The user interface is much more intuitive and clean when compared to SOLIDWORKS or PTC Creo. …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Verified User
Chose Autodesk Inventor
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 …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Verified User
Chose Autodesk Inventor
As previously mentioned in an earlier question, Autodesk Inventor has found the happy middle ground for my 3D CAD needs. Autodesk is easy to pick up but complex enough to allow for all our CAD needs to be filled. I personally didn't select Autodesk Inventor (it was what the …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Manufacturing Engineer (Forging) in Manufacturing at Federal-Mogul Powertrain (Global Valvetrain) (Automotive, 5001-10,000 employees)
Chose PTC Creo
PTC Creo is much better than other software at allowing collaboration across multiple users, even multiple plants/locations. We went from an older non-parametric industry standard software to PTC Creo because we could save massive amounts of time by using the parametric …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Lead Engineer in Engineering at VEGAZVA ENGINEERING (Mechanical or Industrial Engineering, 51-200 employees)
Chose PTC Creo
As a service provider, we provide our services on many platforms. My client is using this software for manufacturing their products and this software helps them a lot.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Verified User
Chose PTC Creo
PTC Creo has two main advantages. First, large assemblies with lots of different parts files, and its file structure that can handle these large assemblies without bogging the software done. Second, its ability to do advanced simulations without having to export the files to do …
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Autodesk Inventor and PTC Creo are computer-aided design (CAD) tools that help businesses design, test, and manage physical products. Autodesk Inventor is a standalone product that offers core CAD features, such as parametric design, stress analysis, and sheet metal design. PTC Creo is a set of tiered software packages, with higher tiers adding extra features such as flow analysis, machining, and nonlinear material analysis. Autodesk Inventor’s user base is split between small and mid-sized businesses, likely because its availability as a standalone product and popularity with university students creates a natural adoption path for startups and entrepreneurs. PTC Creo is used mostly by enterprise-level organizations, who can afford and get the most use out of PTC Creo’s complete product suite.
Features
Both Autodesk Inventor and PTC Creo can be used to model and simulate 3D objects, but they each have standout features.
Autodesk Inventor is praised for being a quick and intuitive design tool. Its interface for parametric design and modeling automation tools make it easy to create and revise designs. Autodesk Inventor also includes scripting capabilities that can help automate repetitive tasks, such as creating business-specific drawing layouts. Its component library helps users sort and filter through commonly-used parts, prevent the ordering of the wrong part, and manage BOMs.
PTC Creo’s users appreciate the software’s integration with the larger PTC offering. Its integration with PTC Windchill makes product lifecycle management (PLM) easy. The software works well for sheet metal and mold design, and optional augmented reality features help users visualize how their final creation will fit into real-life scenarios. It also plays well with other CAD file formats, making it easy to collaborate with stakeholders who might be using different modeling tools. Finally, at higher tiers, PTC Creo offers advanced features outside the scope of Inventor’s feature set.
Limitations
Although both Autodesk Inventor and PTC Creo are fully-realized CAD products, they each have limitations as well. Consider their drawbacks carefully before choosing a solution.
First and foremost, Autodesk Inventor doesn’t have the same set of features offered by the higher tiers of PTC Creo. You’ll need licenses for products and add-ons like Autodesk CFD, Inventor CAM, and Inventor Tolerance Analysis to perform advanced tasks like machining simulation and fluid dynamics analysis. Inventor can also struggle with the application of meshes for designing complex faces, and requires a lot of computing power, especially for complex or large designs. Finally, some users find its rendering tools antiquated, with limited options for visual display of different materials and long render times for videos.
PTC Creo offers advanced functionality in its higher tiers, but this may be frustrating to some users who purchase an entry-level package only to find that the functionality they need is locked behind a higher subscription that includes products they don’t want. The software can suffer from mysterious crashes and errors during rendering and when working on large assembly files. Some users also found its component library difficult to navigate, with limited sorting and filtering options. Many users find PTC Creo’s user interface to be unintuitive in general, with a steep learning curve for newcomers to the software.
Pricing
Autodesk Inventor uses a subscription-based single-user license model for pricing with discounts for longer subscriptions. A month-to-month subscription costs $260 per month. A yearly subscription is $2,085 annually or $174 per month. A three-year subscription is $5,630 or $157 per month.
PTC Creo uses a tiered package subscription model for pricing. The starter tier includes standard parametric CAD capabilities and augmented reality visualization. Higher tiers add new products and features, such as multi-surface milling, tolerance analysis, mold machining, and computational fluid dynamics. For complete feature details and pricing quotes, contact the vendor.
Features
Autodesk Inventor
PTC Creo
Computer-Aided Design Software
Comparison of Computer-Aided Design Software features of Autodesk Inventor and PTC Creo
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
PTC Creo is great for assemblies that multiple users are collaborating on. Models can reference other models that someone in another department has released and when those models are changed, the referenced parts and assemblies are changed. These changes are very helpful when working on collaborative machine designs and comparing forging dies with the final parts.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I liked the training manuals I used to learn some, as I didn’t have CAD background in college or before this job. My coworkers were able to share with me what they learned in PTC training and I was able to get support online and through reading.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Learning curve of SOLIDWORKS is higher compared to Creo, however, stability and more design control is provided by Creo. Creo also have more robust and stable interfaces. For larger assemblies, Creo works better than SOLIDWORKS. New upgrades of Creo has given liberty to open different file data of different software without any file conversion. Creo costs comparable to SOLIDWORKS cost, with more capabilities.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
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.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Having PTC Creo as our primary tool positions us as forward thinking and creative in the eyes of our clients.
PTC Creo constantly evolves in the ability to increase our productivity; new capabilities and features are added, which reduce our level of effort for some tasks.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
