Onshape

The unique configuration capabilities make Onshape very well suited when you have many similar versions of your designs. After having designed a configured assembly you can make one drawing and just change the configuration in it and the drawing will update to this new version. This can save you a lot of work with many drawings.

The support team in the Onshape organization is the best in the market. You just use the menu option 'Contact Support' and they will answer you within 24 hours, no matter where you are located in the world. Because everything is stored in the cloud you can choose to give the support guys access to your model so that they can help and/or correct specific issues if necessary.

I haven't required support from OnShape yet, but the tutorials and online references are excellent.

Onshape is likely suited for most options. ITAR projects or other high complexity modeling may suffer.

The Onshape team continues to amaze with their timely support and willingness to help. The forums and community at large fostered by Onshape has also been invaluable.

When you work in the field or office Onshape is great. If you work somewhere without no good internet, Onshape is not the right choice. We do not make big assemblies but I have seen Onshape can handle them also, in this area we do not have experience and cannot say yes or no if need to handle a huge whole.

Very good

Working with a group of people is great! File sharing is very good as well. Ability to save locally needed to be improved. Printing from the drawings menu would be great as well.

Very responsive so far.

Easier to use then SW

Onshape is best suited for collaborative design and tracking revisions of a design, especially restoring versions. You can manage permissions so that anyone can view them, instead of creating 3-D PDF files, which adds to the interactiveness of the platform.

Very responsive and efficient with questions.

Well suited to any standard CAD design and assembly needs. Organic surfacing and mesh work is not as strong. File management, application updating, and cloud accessibility is industry leading.

The application runs so well I have never needed to get support in 6 years...

Great tool for collaborating in real time with vendors, customers, and teammates. Full CAD system that fulfills all our design needs

The support is second to none. They are always very quick to respond, and they respond with well thought out answers. If they don't have an answer, they are open to submitting issues as an enhancement request.

Basic modeling is very quick and easy. I particularly like the top-down modeling approach and Onshape is architected with that in mind. Drawings are now much more fully featured and perform well, so no real issues there. I really like that we can share the environment within and outside the organization which allows for a high level of transparency with the project stake holders.
We don't use the release cycle aspect of Onshape since the rest of our organization is based on files and using PDM for controlling and distributing them. We have discussed how we might use Onshape for that whole workflow, but until it is the primary CAD tool, will not likely pursue that for now.

Without exaggeration, I think Onshape has the best support in the business. They have set new levels of expectation from how I view software support. We could not be happier with that aspect of our Onshape experience. In fact, I often refer to it when speaking to other software companies as an example for how they should model their support. It's that good.

Onshape is great for engineering product design, machine design, product development for small to medium sized firms.
Less suited for ship and building design.

The support team is very responsive and most of the time it gives very accurate and useful answers.

For me, Onshape is well suited for my work. I do not have a lot of extra money for yearly hardware upgrades. Incompatibility issues with different releases of software is not an issue as with other CAD packages. I do not need to uprgrade or downgrade software versions to work with clients. Obviously, connectivity to the internet is a must as a cloud based package. If unavailable or unstable, work/productivity can suffer.

Top notch support when needed. Extremely stable service, so little need for support. Very extensive learning library and user forums for additional help/support.

Onshape is well suited for design environments where cross-functional design teams; from either one location or multiple users across the globe, need to contribute to the product design. Most of the heavy lifting (i.e.. rendering and graphics performance) is done in the cloud so companies don't need to invest in expensive hardware and high-end graphics card workstations. Startup companies; in particular, along with other CAD-using organizations will appreciate how Onshape manages its own improvements without users needing to download and install software/service packs to keep Onshape up to date.

Onshape would not be suited for organizations that rely on highly configurable features (currently found in traditional high-end CAD software). Onshape does continue to make improvements to many features and listens to community feedback for those areas where more granular control is required.

Our organization was one of the early users of Onshape. We received pretty incredible support when issues came up and sometimes technicians/specialists were able to jump into issues within minutes (which might be hours or days for support from traditional CAD software tech support teams). Over the years - that support did not get worse as Onshape grew. Their product support continued at those high expectations while Onshape's development teams were tasked to develop a better product by listening to user community pushing for improvements.

Onshape is fantastic for engineering projects, collaboration, and file management making it a great choice for many companies. While their store of add-ons is impressive and growing, for some startup companies a solution such as Fusion 360 that has built-in CAD/CAM and rendering might be a better fit initially.

Onshape's support team is always very responsive and quick to offer potential solutions and troubleshooting.

COVID lockdowns hit and you need to work from home ASAP. With ONshape you already have cloud-based computing straight from your work computer; you can easily do this at home with your home computer, or just take your work laptop home and work on that. To go from "in office" to "at home" work takes near-zero time. Other CAD systems require lengthy installs or moving desktops around or ensuring you have VPN access to a work server. None of that is needed. Administration of this across the users is incredibly simple.

Support is built in. It lets you take a screenshot and mark it up in the support system. It lets me easily share a document with support and they will generally investigate the issue promptly (within 24 hours, sometimes within an hour). Generally they can fix it quickly as well. I also submit feature requests this way as well and get feedback with that. No email needed! All within Onshape.

Onshape has a great multi-body part environment. If you have an assembly that is mostly static and does not have motion you can create it in its entirety in one part environment. This single environment approach allows you to easily fit components together without interferences.

Quick to respond every time. Get questions answered over the phone or even in the forum. Help is given by not only techs but also by the team members creating the features of the software.

Ideal for companies ready to invest in Product Data Management (PDM) database to handle CAD sharing and permissions Typically this is needed as the design team grows from 3 to 8 users. Beyond that, PDMs are necessary to keep data organized Onshape has data management deeply integrated and offers effortless cloud-native sharing, branching, and merging of designs. This is a unique feature not found in any other CAD system If companies have hundreds of employees that are deeply invested in a PDM system, Onshape may not be the best system for them. The company itself must be ready. People resist change and seek security in the familiar. Onshape is the best CAD system but larger companies need deep internal support and enthusiasm to sustain change and move forward into a new CAD future

Amazing support, beyond expectations No doubt this is supported by SaaS architecture. Support can directly see the same model and drawing I can if given permission They address issues almost immediately; it would be rare to even wait 1 hour before getting a direct, personal response Best customer service I have ever experienced

In our experience, Onshape is a powerful solution for products with parameters or configurations, partly due to the way that these can be modeled but particularly that the design can then be readily accessed by external applications for any given configuration. Moving engineering tools to the cloud has been an important step for many manufacturers during the pandemic, at the start of the pandemic our team picked up their laptops and went home, while we witnessed other companies having to set up complex IT systems for accessing workstations remotely.

Remote support is never easy as it is difficult to express exact issues in an email. We find Onshape technical support is normally responsive, we occasionally struggle to correctly explain the issue or fully understand the response. Where they have excelled is where there has been a technical issue they have been able to use software logs to identify what was happening in the software. No on-premise solution could achieve this.

It’s an all-around replacement for your present desktop CAD tool and works well for most geometry use-cases. Its best application is for machine design or those assemblies made of mechanical components. But don’t look down your nose at its ability to be used for more complicated 3D shapes (think consumer products and electronics).

Onshape is fantastic for remote teams, startups, or larger companies looking to unburden themselves from the traditional shortcomings of CAD. Since Onshape runs in the cloud, there are no hardware requirements. I can run it on a Chromebook as a daily driver without any issues. Similarly, there are no servers to set up or maintain for PDM access, further reducing the costs required to start using the program. Onshape also costs less yearly than Solidworks. If you/your team has access to a reliable internet connection at all times, you should seriously consider switching over. If you need offline CAD access, this will not work for you. Since it is a parametric modeling program, the learning curve is small if you come from Solidworks or Creo, but there are new terms and layouts to learn. Engineers hate learning new tools, and it does take time to get up and running. The only issue I have really run into is if a company has thousands of existing files from Solidworks or another CAD program. Importing these files into Onshape will load the geometry, but not the feature tree - which can be an immediate issue for some. I believe there is a program that can help import these files and preserve the tree, but it is expensive.

It has an easy learning curve, the guided tutorials are amazing, and the interface is easy to navigate.

OnShape is ideal for designing for 3d printing. It provides all the necessary tools for the job.
If a design needs collaboration, then OnShape could be a solution between you and your customer.
OnShape has no sculpting technics, so there is no option for the surface manipulations on a cad file.

If somewhere were to ask me what CAD software I would recommend for rapid prototyping, not for a high end engineering firm, I would recommend Onshape hands down. Its feature set, while not as strong as Autodesk software, is still extremely rich and allows you to do most things you could want on 3D parametric CAD. Its ease of use, accessibility through only a web browser, and collaborative workspace make it a no brainer for someone who is just starting out and needs an out of the box CAD software without much thought.

Quick community support was available through the forum for most issues we found that weren't extremely urgent. We did not have to use phone support, so I can not evaluate that. However, we didn't have many issues arise, and any support we did receive was well thought out and timely.

Onshape is well suited for startups and the modeling of components that don't require FEA analysis. I have not found a really good simulation suite for OnShape and we maintain legacy seats of SolidWorks for this. OnShape is not really suitable for large assemblies like circuit boards being imported from SolidWorks.

Onshape is well suited for large and small projects. Onshape is very good for collaborating with others outside of your organization. If you are a small company, Onshape is about the only game in town for team based development. If you find yourself in a situation with no internet connection, Onshape will obviously not work.

Onshape is great software and I have no trouble recommending it to CAD users and companies that need to do design work.

Configurations of a certain part assembly are very well thought out and integrated into Onshape. I haven't had much of a chance to use it, but this is only because in the two years I've used Onshape configurations, some features are fairly new and I just haven't had a chance to integrate this into our multiple builds of different part assemblies.

In my experience from using Catia, Pro E, Rhino, SOLIDWORKS, and now Onshape, I can say that Onshape suits me better. It is more intuitive - its a modern CAD on a modern platform. Even some of our associated factory partners are making the switch. Collaborating is the key I think!