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April 30, 2021
We use SolidWorks as our primary CAD application throughout the organization including both our engineering and production (CNC programing) departments.
- Top of the line parametric solid modeling
- Intuitive interface
- Expansive feature set
- Excellent handling of both large and small design projects.
- Fantastic support network
- Stable and reliable
- Solidworks is continually improving its product, however, more focus could be put into traditional drawings as opposed to MBD.
- Crashes can at times happen without warning or symptoms.
- The newer focus on cloud-based applications is a bit late to the game and needs some work to bring it up to enterprise-class.
May 26, 2021
Although there are various departments in my company, including operations, electrical, and mechanical, SOLIDWORKS is mainly used by us in the mechanical engineering department. We use it mainly for 3D modeling of parts of our equipment if some sort of adjustment or modification is needed. We also use it in new projects and designing custom parts for our machinery. It helps us save money on outsourcing the design and development costs, and we just hand over these models and drawings to manufacturing companies. We always work in coordination with other departments and this helps us communicate vital and important information to them via drawings and models.
- Assembling different parts is my favorite of all features, as it helps us visualize the final outcome of our project and make decisions accordingly
- Ability to convert 3D models into 2D drawings
- Assembly animations help us understand our design better and let us know the constraints of design
- Another feature that I like is FEM analysis, which help us assess the limitations of our model
- Unexpected crashes sometimes frustrated me; if my work is not saved, I lose lots of time and hard work
- Rendering sometimes can be time consuming; it should be improved
- Addition of text to the model and drawing needs improvement
April 15, 2021
Solidworks is used to review 3D model files by estimating and engineering. Also used in production to create flat patterns from customer-supplied sheet metal model files and create in-house shop drawings to define limited dimension drawings from customers.
- Review and measure model files.
- Convert sheetmetal model file to flat patterns.
- Create in-hose drawings.
- Export model characteristics more easily.
- Easily convert surfaces to extrusions.
April 14, 2021
Both my university and workplace use SOLIDWORKS and SOLIDWORKS products. In the university setting, the engineering students use and SOLIDWORKS as the go-to program for 3-D modeling. In the workplace however, my group uses SOLIDWORKS as it aid and assists out scope of work and projects. Due to the complex nature of the SOLIDWORKS software package, our team only uses specific features such as modeling and analyzing and often don't utilize the vast majority of extra features that the software has.
- EASY TO USE/LEARN
- Excellent features
- Great product support
- Expensive
- Many features are unnecessary to the common user
- Could use software support for auto dimensions
April 11, 2021
SOLIDWORKS is utilized solely by the Engineering Department to evaluate, measure, and flatten customer 3D models so we can turn them into 2D drawings and fabricate the parts on our laser and brake presses. A lot of our customer models are very lackluster and must redraw the parts with SOLIDWORKS to be able to create the 2D prints. We also will use it in conjunction with customer prints to get missing dimensions on the customer-supplied prints to ensure we meet quality requirements.
- Heal corrupt 3D models.
- Feature recognition is invaluable to correcting corrupt models.
- Drawing 3D models made easy.
- Some 3D models are completely impossible to repair via feature works and healing. Understanding all the different 3D modeling software and convincing customers to set standards for all models drawn by employees would be ideal even though it is outside of SOLIDWORKS control, some people that model parts are plain and simply not suited or managed properly to ensure the end customer has the ability to work with their model.
April 09, 2021
Our company uses SOLIDWORKS to design parts and assemblies for our packaging equipment. I am the only user of the program in the company with most work being done on DraftSight. SOLIDWORKS is helpful for visualizing large assemblies but is not as helpful for quick iterations like DraftSight is.
- Functionality
- Visualizing large assemblies
- Sheet metal bend parts
- Eliminating odd assembly bugs
- Minimizing the size of the program for faster processing
- Modularity between 2D and 3D imports and exports
We use SOLIDWORKS to model our product from individual components up to full assemblies and how they will fit in with our customer's product, especially when we have to design bracketry for installation. As our customers provide us with the models of their vehicles, we can see that our signs will fit and line up with mounting positions and viewing apertures.
- Visualisation
- Clash detection
- Easy modification
- Resource hungry
- Time consuming to load models
- Fault correction is difficult
SOLIDWORKS is used by the technical office to design all of our tanks and by production to view the drawings in 3D in the workshop.
- Simple to use.
- Great for sheet metal.
- Good training support.
- Problems with large assemblies.
- Sometimes crush.
- Problems with the video card.
July 30, 2021
SOLIDWORKS is used by certain departments. Primarly, it's used by our Technical Applications team in order to perform Injection Molding draf analysis when required, on 3D files provided by customers.
- While SOLIDWORKS has many features to learn, it is quite easy to start modeling if you're new to software.
- The UI has always been one of my favorite reasons to use it, as other 3D modeling software provides a more "industrial" feel to the process of CAD modeling.
- From the administrator side, managing licenses needs some major improvements. They offer 2 ways to manage: 1) per machine 2) online. Both are painful and need some feature development to improve both methods.
May 18, 2021
[SOLIDWORKS] is being used to create 3D models and 2D drawings. We use 3D models to create plastic parts for molding and sheet metal parts for stamping. The 3D model allows us to see how parts in assemblies interact with each other, allowing us to control the fit and feel of the assembly. 2D drawing allow us to communicate with suppliers for tool creation and QA.
Mainly used in the mechanical department
Mainly used in the mechanical department
- Great interface
- Intuitive menus, tool bars and features
- Import many file types
- Large assemblies and complex part are slow to load
- Limited collaboration ability
- Needs a powerful PC to run it
April 10, 2021
We are an OEM so we do not design our own products. We use SOLIDWORKS to open our customer's files, and it has a wide variety of supported 3D files it can open. This is very useful since we cannot control what file types our customers create, but we need to be able to open and convert everything to use within MasterCAM and design tooling for these parts.
- Opens many file types.
- Easy to convert into 2D DWG files.
- Fast 3D rendering for complex assemblies.
- 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.
SOLIDWORKS is being used to design skid mounted, pre-piped, water systems - for labs, manufacturing companies, and industrial buildings. Not only is it used to just design the skid frame, which we send to an outside welding company, but actually all of the components that make it up. It helps drastically which manufacturing and knowing how parts fit in addition to being able to show customers what they'll be receiving. As a small company only I use it.
- Generate bill of materials that can be sent to Microsoft Excel
- It has a very user friendly interface
- It gives the ability to visually depict a design
- Large assembly load time could be improved
- Importing .dwg files is fairly clunky
- File management without having to buy an add-on program
July 05, 2021
SOLIDWORKS is being used in my company for designing parts, modelling of assemblies, and preparing 2D production drawings.
- Comprehensive standard parts library (such as bearings, fasteners, etc.)
- Easy to work with (intuitive)
- Comprehensive and easy to use hole drilling and tapping options
- The GD&T options could be updated to latest ASME standards
- PDM interface could be modernized
- Simulation for static finite element analysis could be expanded to provide more contact options.
December 11, 2020
SOLIDWORKS is used as our primary 3D rendering software for design and development. It is used by our engineering department only and suits our needs perfectly fine.
- SOLIDWORKS offers solid support through 3rd party vendors. I've yet to find a time where I wasn't able to find a satisfactory answer for an issue I was having.
- Stable releases with continuing improvements in the software.
- Communication with us on a yearly basis to see how the software is working for us and what improvements we would like to see.
- SOLIDWORKS is extremely particular is what video cards and versions of Windows they will support. It seems as though they are looking for reasons to not have to support their software.
- Missing functionality would be the stress analysis portion that requires additional licenses. Aside from that, everything is pretty good with it.
November 05, 2020
We use it to design our new products. We mainly use Sheet metal / Large assemblies and plastic part modeling
- Large community
- Program Stability (Very Unstable)
- User Interface is dated and impractical
- Every new version introduces many new bugs and makes the program even slower
- Insufficient official support despite the large cost of the program
- Very Slow
- Text Editor is dated and impractical
- Solidworks Corp does not support customers
- Online training
- in-person training
Our R&D department uses SOLIDWORKS daily for design, validation and training. New products come to life in SOLIDWORKS, before being manufactured. Drawings are utilized in SOLIDWORKS to send parts out to suppliers or create instructions for the technicians. Tools and fixtures are designed and validated in SOLIDWORKS as well.
- Part design.
- Instructional drawings.
- Ease of use.
- Slow.
- Expensive.
- Buggy.
I am currently the only person in our company using SOLIDWORKS. We mostly use 2D drawings for our jobs, but with more and more companies going to 3D modeling, it was important for us to be able to decipher what those customers are sending us. SOLIDWORKS has been very handy in that it allows us to not only open individual part files, but we can open an assembly file and see how exactly the parts are going to fit together.
- Allows you to rotate a 3D part to see any angle you need
- Can easily generate a 2D drawing, showing each face of a part
- You can view entire assemblies from any angle you want
- Dimension based drawing so you can change a dimension without redrawing an entire part
- It's a little bit complicated when you're used to simple 2D drawings
- The program crashes quite frequently - SAVE OFTEN!
- Updates are tied to a subscription that must remain active
I use SOLIDWORKS to make prototypes and create actual drawings related to machine developments.
- Easy to model ideas due to user-friendly interface and multitasking tools.
- Can save work with many available formats which can be referred to many other compatible software and devices.
- Lots of learning and helping materials are readily available when issues are raised.
- Needs to be lightweight in order to run on low performance machines with out sticking.
- Needs to improve 2D drawing tools to be more user friendly.
- Needs to improve inbuilt rendering software to be more realistic.
Our company designs and manufactures mechanical batteries for energy storage. SOLIDWORKS is primarily used by the design teams. They use it to design components and assemblies, make engineering drawings, and conduct finite element analyses (FEA). I work in the manufacturing department, and we use SOLIDWORKS to design equipment, fixtures, gauges, or other custom tools for the manufacturing process.
- I have been using the Weldments feature recently, and I was surprised by how easy it is to make a weldment using a simple 3D sketch.
- Our product contains over 200 components, and many of them have lots of details in them. SOLIDWORKS loads and runs smoothly.
- There are extensive online forums to help you build whatever you need to. It is very useful.
- Getting the right parameters set when doing an FEA is always challenging for me. Attaching conditions to a face, for example, covers it with little arrows. On complex assemblies, I can't tell what is even selected.
- The license management software could use an update in UI. It seems like some tabs are unnecessary and it is not immediately clear what is and isn't checked out.
March 16, 2020
I first used SOLIDWORKS nearly 20 years ago (!!) while earning my engineering degree, and then later in my engineering consulting work. After a break of a few years, I've returned to using SOLIDWORKS for personal/entrepreneurial use, primarily for 3D printing of custom parts for radio-controlled aircraft.
The highly intuitive, visual UI and seamless backend integration into my 3D printing workflow, meant that alongside my familiarity from my earlier career, it was the obvious choice.
The highly intuitive, visual UI and seamless backend integration into my 3D printing workflow, meant that alongside my familiarity from my earlier career, it was the obvious choice.
- Highly visual and intuitive UI--my 10-year-old son can use it to create complex designs!
- Has very wide integration of CAD to all the other things you'd use CAD for (fluid dynamics, stress testing, CNC, 3D printing).
- It has very useful presentation modes to be able to present working concepts.
- Resource hungry (but then you should expect that!)
- So full-featured that sometimes it's a little confusing
- Community support is vibrant, but could benefit from more structure.
March 14, 2020
My organization uses SOLIDWORKS for all of our CAD needs, to design parts, create drawings, build assemblies, etc. SOLIDWORKS is used by the product development team only.
- SOLIDWORKS has an intuitive UI with very good online tutorials and training courses.
- SOLIDWORKS PDM does a great job at managing revision histories.
- SOLIDWORKS is great for creating models of parts and assemblies.
- Sometimes SOLIDWORKS pushes through too many updates and it can cause issues when working with files from older versions.
February 27, 2020
The Engineering department is using SOLIDWORKS. It is effortless to use, user-friendly and fast you can do a lot of things in it. Complex assemblies are easy to make, user-defined drawing paper, good quality rendering, realistic simulation, suitable for designing small parts, for 3D print, realistic-looking rendering, materials, scene, animation (motion) is good, and decent report of simulation.
- Focus on ease of use allows the user to produce a 3D design in a fastest and easiest way.
- Provides a seamless and integrated workflow
- Create, validate, manage, and transform ideas to produce an excellent product design.
- It can be slow, sometimes gets stuck while processing multiple parts.
- Its time consuming to form an object from different parts.
- File import from other software can be tricky and does not work very well.
February 10, 2020
Our engineering department uses SOLIDWORKS for mechanical design and simulation needs for consumer electronic products. We design components and full assemblies, analyze the parts for manufacturability using inspection tools, and conduct simulation to determine thermal performance of products, which often include both active and passive cooling features (heatsinks and fans) designed as part of the component. We use SOLIDWORKS to communicate with suppliers and some customers within the SOLIDWORKS format.
- Ease of use.
- Flexibility.
- Compatibility for files with annual software versions.
- Load/startup time.
October 25, 2019
EAA offers it for free to EAA members but we also use SOLIDWORKS in our Aircraft Maintenance area to draw parts for FAA approval of replacement owner-manufactured parts. The product is a powerful tool from sketch to manufacturing. Even with all this power, it is pretty straightforward to learn how to use it.
- Makes changes fast. It adapts the assembly to part modifications and then saves the changes back to the part models.
- Interface checking and analysis are simple yet effective.
- Parts and template lists are quick and easy to generate.
- CAM is only 2.5 axis.
- The import of scanned objects should require less work.
- Adding features could be more intuitive. Tube trims and weldments take too much tinkering.
January 29, 2020
We use SOLIDWORKS for designing mechanical components, building assemblies of those components, stress testing new and existing designs as well as rendering images for Sales and Marketing. The 3D models we create are used to create 2D drawings for manufacturing or machining shops. We also send our models to consultants looking for a layout or part files can be sent out to program CNC machinery.
- Creating models in steps that are easily modified later
- Assembling part files and keeping them organized
- Drawings need some flexibility on creating annotations in a certain way
- Sometimes there are unexplained crashes
SOLIDWORKS Scorecard Summary
What is SOLIDWORKS?
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.
Categories: Simulation, Computer-Aided Design (CAD)
SOLIDWORKS Video
SOLIDWORKS Features
SOLIDWORKS Pricing
- Does not have featureFree Trial Available?No
- Does not have featureFree or Freemium Version Available?No
- Does not have featurePremium Consulting/Integration Services Available?No
- Entry-level set up fee?No
| Edition | Pricing Details | Terms |
|---|---|---|
| Solidworks Standard | 3,996 | per standalone license |
| Solidworks Annual Subscription | 1,295 | per year |
SOLIDWORKS Technical Details
| Deployment Types: | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems: | Windows, Mac |
| Mobile Application: | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
What is SOLIDWORKS?
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.
What are SOLIDWORKS's top competitors?
What is SOLIDWORKS's best feature?
Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 7.8.
Who uses SOLIDWORKS?
The most common users of SOLIDWORKS are from Mid-size Companies and the Mechanical Or Industrial Engineering industry.