Autodesk Inventor vs. PTC Windchill

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Autodesk Inventor
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
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 Windchill
Score 7.1 out of 10
N/A
PTC offers Windchill, the company's Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) platform that includes BOM (a digital bill of materials) for cost and product quality control via parts-centric source of truth, dynamic and updated product change and configuration management to ensure up-to-date product information, industry standards and requirements validation and control, and role-based data access among other features.N/A
Pricing
Autodesk InventorPTC Windchill
Editions & Modules
Subscription - Monthly
$305
per month per user
Subscription - Yearly
$2440
per year per user
Subscription - 3 Years
$7320
3 years per user
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Autodesk InventorPTC Windchill
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsAlso available for limited use through tokens on a Flex plan.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Autodesk InventorPTC Windchill
Features
Autodesk InventorPTC Windchill
Computer-Aided Design Software
Comparison of Computer-Aided Design Software features of Product A and Product B
Autodesk Inventor
7.1
3 Ratings
1% below category average
PTC Windchill
-
Ratings
3D Modeling8.33 Ratings00 Ratings
2D Drafting6.73 Ratings00 Ratings
Rendering and Visualization7.13 Ratings00 Ratings
Parametric Design7.73 Ratings00 Ratings
Collaboration and Sharing5.33 Ratings00 Ratings
Compatibility with other software and formats7.43 Ratings00 Ratings
Assembly Design7.13 Ratings00 Ratings
Simulation and Analysis6.83 Ratings00 Ratings
Documentation and Annotation7.13 Ratings00 Ratings
Customization and Extensions7.73 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Autodesk InventorPTC Windchill
Small Businesses
Onshape
Onshape
Score 8.0 out of 10
monday dev
monday dev
Score 8.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Onshape
Onshape
Score 8.0 out of 10
Teamcenter
Teamcenter
Score 8.2 out of 10
Enterprises
Rhino
Rhino
Score 8.4 out of 10
Roadmunk
Roadmunk
Score 9.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Autodesk InventorPTC Windchill
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(28 ratings)
1.0
(6 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.2
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(2 ratings)
1.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
8.1
(12 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
6.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Autodesk InventorPTC Windchill
Likelihood to Recommend
Autodesk
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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PTC
This product is perhaps typical of something that seems as though it was conceived in the 90's and has seen various appendages since, none of which do their job particularly well. Nothing in this system is efficient and all its processes demand a huge, close to maximum possible level of human effort. No doubt many companies, such as my own are spend huge amounts of money for the debateable privilege of tripling their employees workload and making them as inefficient as possible to make the administration of the system seem more important than it actually is.
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Pros
Autodesk
  • 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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PTC
  • It is compatible with all devices and operating systems such as web-based, Android, and iOS.
  • It allows user to customize its interface based on their requirement.
  • It provides a digital part list with all required data like Part Name, Part No., Weight, Material, etc.
  • Searching data is so facile that one can get data without any trouble.
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Cons
Autodesk
  • 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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PTC
  • Extract partlist should be directly in Excel because everyone time we have to convert it to Excel.
  • ECN report formatting need improvement.
  • Many times part no doesn't go to ERP even after ERP released state.
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Likelihood to Renew
Autodesk
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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PTC
No answers on this topic
Usability
Autodesk
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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PTC
Windchill is an extremely verbose and unintuitive system, with masses of unnecessary duplication of fields, convoluted workflows, unclear roles and terrible search capabilities. It is one of the worst software products I have ever seen to propose solving something that is actually factors quicker to do with manual writing and paper work
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Support Rating
Autodesk
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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PTC
No answers on this topic
In-Person Training
Autodesk
I got the training during college, so mostly i learned on my own
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PTC
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Autodesk
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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PTC
Windchill is having a great market share & its UI is simple & neat, integration with Creo & ERP system. These are the main reasons of considering Windchill by our organization.
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Return on Investment
Autodesk
  • 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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PTC
  • Saves time as all of our drawings and business instructions and procedures are housed in a central location with check-in/out capability and version control.
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ScreenShots