SOLIDWORKS

SOLIDWORKS

406 Reviews and Ratings

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
SOLIDWORKS	Score 8.2 out of 10	N/A	Dassault Systemes offers SOLIDWORKS, a computer-aided design (CAD) system for education and manufacturing supporting 2D or 3D design, electrical design, simulations, and product development with collaboration tools.	$1,295 per year

Pricing

SOLIDWORKS

Editions & Modules

Solidworks Annual Subscription: 1,295
per year
Solidworks Standard: 3,996
per standalone license

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
SOLIDWORKS
Free Trial
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

—

More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	SOLIDWORKS
Considered Both Products	SOLIDWORKS GP Giuliano Peressini CTO (Chief Technical Officer) Chose SOLIDWORKS It's faster, easier and a little bit cheaper. Dramatic increased performance on large assemblies management Helpful? PP Prey Patel Student Chose SOLIDWORKS SOLIDWORKS is actually used by major corporations to design and create products for wide release, whereas Autodesk Inventor is usually only seen as an instructional tool to teach students the basics of 3d modeling so that they can adapt to more complex software with less effort … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose SOLIDWORKS Creo is basically focusing on pure solid 3D modeling, while on the other hand the SOLIDWORKS' modeling approach is more parametric type and it is suiting for my purpose of use. Easy to use interface of SOLIDWORKS as compared to Creo. Features are easy to use. Just one click … Incentivized Helpful? AAKIF SHAIKH Subject Matter Expert Chose SOLIDWORKS SOLIDWORKS is the best suited for the beginners,as it provides the simplest interface and simulation procedure. With SOLIDWORKS every simulation can be done easily and no professional training is required. SOLIDWORKS also has a drawing tab, which we can use to make General … Incentivized Helpful? EC Edison Chen Mechanical Engineering Technologist Chose SOLIDWORKS SOLIDWORKS is easier to use with just enough useful features to work with, the designing process is fluid like regular flow of design thinking. The other two software are very similar to SOLIDWORKS, Inventor and Solid Edge are more advanced in certain areas of application, … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose SOLIDWORKS Our team in China uses Siemens NX for the same reason our U.S. counterparts use SOLIDWORKS. Siemens provides similar features as SOLIDWORKS from the 3D CAD usage and Injection Molding Analysis. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose SOLIDWORKS Creo offers easier design for surface modeling. Inventor is simpler to use, however, it is much more limited in modeling. Overall, I find SOLIDWORKS has a good balance of simplicity and completeness at the same time. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose SOLIDWORKS Onshape is a direct competitor. It has great entry level pricing and it is easy to access with no installation required. Being a web based app there is sometime some lag being based in NZ. Management also have concerns over where the data is stored on the cloud. With SW we can … Incentivized Helpful? CB Chris Bartch Product Development Lead Chose SOLIDWORKS In many scenarios, SolidWorks and Inventor actually compare fairly evenly to each other. However, I believe that where SolidWorks really stands out is the fact that it was designed from the start as a 3D parametric solid modeling application whereas Inventor comes from a … Incentivized Helpful? MD Michele De Losa SEO Chose SOLIDWORKS We have chosen SOLIDWORKS for its diffusion (many of our partners use it), for its ease of use, for its great experience in the development of sheet metal, and for its excellent after-sales service. Incentivized Helpful? CD Christian Denning IT Chose SOLIDWORKS PTC Creo was used for several years but was too complex for users even when simple tasks were required. Incentivized Helpful? JS Jes Salmons Senior Engineering Manager Chose SOLIDWORKS SOLIDWORKS is way less complicated and easier to use, overall if you have had any computer training anyone can easily sit down and be trained within a minimal time to be able to use it efficiently and effectively. One of my employees went so far as to teach his 10-year-old … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose SOLIDWORKS We use both actually. SW is great for 3D, but given we do not design products, just tooling/processing to make products, we use SW to convert 3D into 2D then do all the work in DraftSight. Incentivized Helpful? JW Jeff Watkins Project Engineer Chose SOLIDWORKS I have not used alternatives to SOLIDWORKS. I've used SOLIDWORKS for the past 7 years as it was the standard in my past job. It has many more capabilities than 2D software and is a staple of our engineering department. I plan to continue to use SOLIDWORKS for many years to … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose SOLIDWORKS DraftSight is the 2-d equivalent of SOLIDWORKS. Its main competitor is AutoCad by Autodesk, however I find DraftSight to be more user friendly. AutoDesk also makes Inventor, a 3-d software more similar to SOLIDWORKS however my experience with it was only limited to high … Incentivized Helpful? MJ Mark Jackson Mechanical Engineer Chose SOLIDWORKS SOLIDWORKS is simple to use and new users become proficient in a short amount of time. Operation is intuitive and with the aid of the built-in tutorials, most of the skills required for day-to-day use become second nature. The ability to collaborate and communicate ideas to … Incentivized Helpful? Tracy Burton Network Administrator Chose SOLIDWORKS SOLIDWORKS seems to be the choice from my engineers in terms of the 3D aspect vs AutoCAD. If the software meets the needs of the users, I try not to change things. Incentivized Helpful? Konstantinos Aggelis Mechanical Design Engineer Chose SOLIDWORKS I have previously worked with Autodesk Inventor for designing very complex door mechanisms and large assemblies of drilling machines. I did not face any stability or performance issues Helpful? Verified User Employee Chose SOLIDWORKS I only used Inventor for the 30-day free trial, which admittedly is not enough time to really give it a fair shot, especially since I had almost no 3D drawing experience before I used Inventor. There were two main things that pushed us toward SOLIDWORKS. First was the support … Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose SOLIDWORKS SOLIDWORKS provides not only aesthetic appearance of a product but also provides the capability to analyze behavior of structural and material components. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose SOLIDWORKS AutoCAD, in many ways, still looks and feels like you are designing something in the 1980's. It definitely caters more to the generation of people who are used to drafting. SOLIDWORKS is much more visually appealing, which counts for a lot when you will have lots of engineers … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Strategist Chose SOLIDWORKS I chose SOLIDWORKS after trying a few open-source solutions. They were great, however sometimes lacked in a few vital areas, in a way that a commercial, well-funded product shouldn't. Given my previous familiarity and confidence with SOLIDWORKS, I didn't bother looking any … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose SOLIDWORKS Originally my company was using Onshape for CAD but many of our engineers were not familiar with the program and found it more difficult and less intuitive to use. SOLIDWORKS PDM vault works well so the cloud-based aspect of Onshape wasn't that unique. Incentivized Helpful? Jacob Smith Mechanical Engineer Chose SOLIDWORKS Fusion 360 is a cloud-based CAD software with built-in rendering, simulation, and CAM programming functionality. SOLIDWORKS has all of these options at an additional cost. Fusion 360 may be a cheaper option; however, being in the cloud, simulations are costly and larger … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Professional Chose SOLIDWORKS SOLIDWORKS enables manufacturers to become more productive in a relatively short amount of time. Incentivized Helpful?
Top Pros	Pro 3d modeling Pro User friendly Pro Easy to use
Top Cons	Minus Time consuming Minus Needs to improve Minus High end

Best Alternatives
	SOLIDWORKS
Small Businesses	Onshape Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Onshape Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises	Rhino Score 9.1 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	SOLIDWORKS
Likelihood to Recommend	9.3 (55 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew	10.0 (2 ratings)
Usability	1.1 (2 ratings)
Support Rating	5.2 (16 ratings)
In-Person Training	9.0 (1 ratings)
Online Training	9.0 (1 ratings)

User Testimonials
	SOLIDWORKS
Likelihood to Recommend	Dassault Systemes As a mechanical engineer, it is one of the best tools to just start modeling and engineering with. The UI tools are intuitive and engineering analysis such Mold Analysis, FEA, are great! Other 3D CAD modeling tools have a longer learning curve to master. All in all, if you're not planning to design an entire airplane with large assembly files, then Solidworks is your tool! Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Pros	Dassault Systemes The collaborative work environment is a cool and useful feature where groups of people can work on the same model at the same time, and SOLIDWORKS ensures that you don't overwrite each other's work. The ease and amount of customization options are very useful for creating a personalized and intuitive user interface, whether SOLIDWORKS is your native CAD package or not. It is very easy to quickly edit a model you have already created. The software allows sketch and feature editing without having to take the time to actually enter the sketch/feature environment. The use of configurations and configurations-specific dimensions in the same sketch is very useful for creating different forms of the same part Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Cons	Dassault Systemes Save DWG 2D files in inches or metric easily, defaults to metric and has to be manually converted to inches When using the sketch feature, the ability to disable ALL references. If I don't know the exact shape and I want to draw/adapt my design, it harshly interprets the references which have no value to me. The easiest exact is to think about when you have a Microsoft Word document that has a lot of formatting, photos, tabs, etc. If you accidentally hit the "enter" key, you can explode the formatting and everything goes crazy. SW does this to me, I just want to "doodle" my sketches, edit/delete/etc and not be bound by arbitrary references. For the sketch feature, ability to use a DraftSight plugin of some sort. I'm super fast in DS, if I could draw using the commands in SW then I would probably never open DS again and convert to SW full time. Currently, I only use SW as a way to convert 3D files so I can build everything in DraftSight. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Likelihood to Renew	Dassault Systemes We have absolutely no reasons to not keep with SolidWorks for the foreseeable future. Incentivized CB Chris Bartch Product Development Lead Read full review
Usability	Dassault Systemes SOLIDWORKS is very user-friendly. The user interface is intuitive. Many sources for help are available in the event you are attempting something new. Michael Greene Progressive Die Designer and Consultant Read full review
Support Rating	Dassault Systemes We have an unusual arrangement. We don’t pay for support, but we’re partnered with a VAR for second-tier support. I work with other users if I have questions but when we’ve had to ask the VAR, they always have answers. It appears that all of the VARs have access to a support platform from DS SOLIDWORKS that helps them answer most questions. Incentivized Cory Puuri Membership Development Manager Read full review
Alternatives Considered	Dassault Systemes Onshape is a direct competitor. It has great entry level pricing and it is easy to access with no installation required. Being a web based app there is sometime some lag being based in NZ. Management also have concerns over where the data is stored on the cloud. With SW we can control where it is stored Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Return on Investment	Dassault Systemes Creation of small 3D pieces to generate cash flow. Not being able to create 3D sculptures with this tool, and not being able to fulfill the client's requirements. To be able to sell high visual quality simulations for companies that hire the service. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
ScreenShots