LightningCAD vs. Designcenter Solid Edge vs. Tacton Design Automation

For simple steel construction, it is great. When you want to do other stuff like electrical wiring, factory planning, etc. it's not great, and the solution you can buy does not fit our needs so we need to develop our own.

Incentivized

Tacton works best with products that always look the same and use a large number of the same shaped parts, but those parts are often a custom size. Tacton can also work extremely well with products with parts that don't need to be resized, but just have different options of parts.

Incentivized

• Allows designers to work as they choose and not have to acclimate their work for the product's requirements. This results in productive use of Edge, thus an ROI for the company.
• Manage large (high count of components) assemblies very well. Users spend little to no time trying to overcome speed issue with respect to assemblies.
• Synchronous Design! This highly productive design process is unique to Edge and very addictive

• Tacton has a non-linear solver, meaning it can solve lots of equations without them being is a particular order. This enables the software to be incredibly flexible.
• Tacton has a great interface to set up configurators for people to use. No knowledge of programming languages is required. The configurator uses equations similar to Excel equations to control what the users options are.
• Tacton has the ability to easily add lists of data like product lists, beam or pipe sizes that because available for user selections or for calculations.
• The Tacton configurator also automatically builds the user interface as you set up user inputs making it much easier to set up then competitor software.

Incentivized

• Being used to 2-key and 3-key commands from the keyboard, it would be nice if this was more robust in Solid Edge. The capability of programming keystroke commands exists in Solid Edge, but it would be more user friendly in that regard.
• Editing hatches can be a challenge.
• I'm not a fan of the ribbon bar, but that seems to be a feature across software platforms in Windows.

Incentivized

• Layout mode is probably the most lacking aspect of the software (within Tacon Design Automation Engineer). Something so powerful as having modular parts should be more heavily supported. Although, I've heard Tacton is focusing on updating this with better functionality.
• The constraint editor does not display complex/lengthy constraints very well. I end up using Excel to visually break out in cells the different aspects of the constraint.

Incentivized

As mentioned previously, Siemens Solid Edge is not the most user-friendly of products at all. It requires intense training to make sure that the basics are understood, and after that, there are numerous other training interventions needed to be able to perform expert-level CAD functions. The GUI is not intuitive, as many other packages are, and the features built-in are not well defined. The process to use many of these features is counter-intuitive and requires a mind-shift.

Incentivized

I have been involved with support and training of Solid Edge for 24 years. Given that I based my business model on support, and have been successful for all these years, I know excellent support. Siemens support for Solid Edge, "GTAC", is the definition of support for a product in every aspect.

SOLIDWORKS has a really intuitive interface for a traditional CAD package. It is easy to use, easy to learn and is perfectly suited for any user. Solid Edge lacks this ease of use. Autodesk Inventor is great for personal use as well as in small businesses. It is easy to learn, produces great models quickly and is very reasonably priced. My personal favourite, Onshape has redefined what CAD is meant to be, as well as the way in which it is meant to be used. It is highly functional, intuitive, and changes the way in which CAD is perceived by the user. It is much more interactive than traditional CAD packages.

Incentivized

My company initially purchased DriveWorks and I was trained. However, a year later we found Tacton Design Automation. Based on the same points mentioned in this review we left DriveWorks for Tacton. Briefly those points are: Tacton, at the time, was the only design automation software integrated (meaning the interface for programming and running Tacton) within SOLIDWORKS; GUI creation is streamlined; automatic error handling is huge; layout mode; multi-unit support.

Incentivized

• We have purchased a server version of solid edge so for one license 6 people can operate it at a time which is economically all viable.
• We have integrated it with PLM Teamcenter so we can share drawings and other files across other factories.
• Solid edge is less famous than Solid Works so sometimes you have to convert it into step files.
• It is very productive and easy to lean application for everyone.

Incentivized

• Time to produce submittals went from 1-2 weeks down to a couple of days. Then, once approved, normally to produce the fabrication drawings (70+ unique parts) it would take from 4-6 weeks. We can get it down to as little as a few days.

Incentivized