Overview
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.
A student's perspective on SOLIDWORKS
Solidworks ! Best to use for Parametric modelling & Configuration based Products.
SOLIDWORKS - Best Companion for Mechanical Engineers
Solidworks is a good choice
Solidworks and Injection Molding Analysis Review
My experience with SOLIDWORKS as a mechanical design engineer
Solidworks - solid modeling functions and features that work great
SolidWorks is the leading standard in 3D parametric solid modeling!
SOLIDWORKS works good
Solidworks is easy to use with great functions
SOLIDWORKS for the future generations
Sketch feature should be like DraftSight
SOLIDWORKS and its Capabilities
SOLIDWORKS Review
Awards
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Video Reviews
1 video
Pricing
Solidworks Annual Subscription
1,295
Solidworks Standard
3,996
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Details
- About
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is SOLIDWORKS?
SOLIDWORKS Video
SOLIDWORKS Technical Details
Deployment Types | On-premise |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Windows, Mac |
Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(406)Community Insights
- Recommendations
Users of Solidworks have made several recommendations based on their experiences with the software. The most common recommendations include evaluating other products to consider their benefits, especially for CAD software. Users also recommend utilizing Solidworks for 3D design work, highlighting its user-friendly interface and easy learning curve for new users. Additionally, users praise Solidworks for its active community and available support resources, which they recommend taking advantage of. Overall, these recommendations emphasize the importance of exploring different options, leveraging community support, and considering Solidworks for 3D design purposes.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-25 of 35)A student's perspective on SOLIDWORKS
- User Interface
- Accessibility
- Creating Drawings
- Ease of Use
- Battery Consumption
- Time taken to Start
- File Sharing
SOLIDWORKS - Best Companion for Mechanical Engineers
- Simple Modelling and Assembling of parts
- Contains large database of materials
- Design Library to import every important standard parts, hence reducing time in designing the same
- Allows every simulation, with results as per the real time scenario
- Animation wizard, to view the deformation and stress occuring in a precise way
- No need of manual calculation in calculating the weight and inertia of the component, SOLIDWORKS can do the work for you
- With increase in complexity of the mechanical components, the solving time also increases exponentially.
- With SOLIDWORKS, I can't do manual meshing by selecting the face of the components, unlike Ansys
- SOLIDWORKS is a high end software, hence requires system which can support the software.
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
[SOLIDWORKS] is less appropriate for single users that could get similar results from a lower priced product. Also less appropriate for teams that only need the modeling basic features.
- 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.
Solidworks is easy to use with great functions
- 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.
SOLIDWORKS and its Capabilities
- 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
SOLIDWORKS Review
- 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
I know for building construction there are better suited, more specific computer applications that work far better.
Powerful tool for 3D design
- Visualisation
- Clash detection
- Easy modification
- Resource hungry
- Time consuming to load models
- Fault correction is difficult
- 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.
Definitely not worth it. Very Slow and the program is a crash-maniac
- 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
Best 3D prototyping software
- 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.
SOLIDWORKS! From a Solid User
- Part design.
- Instructional drawings.
- Ease of use.
- Slow.
- Expensive.
- Buggy.
SOLIDWORKS for manufacturing ease
- 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.
SOLIDWORKS is the top of the line 3D modeling software
- 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
3D CAD design software
- 3D modeling for mechanical designs.
- SOLIDWORKS has an excellent photorealistic rendering that helps you so much to see how your final product will be.
- Interface: I think they should make a friendlier interface to look more sophisticated. This is not a con; actually, it’s just an improvement.
SOLIDWORKS is a solid choice for 3D CAD
- 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.
It is too complicated to learn for simple sketches where precision is not important. For example, I was drawing a stepstool that would fold and it was faster to sketch it out on paper.
Designing with SOLIDWORKS
- 3D modeling.
- Automatic drawing creation.
- Integration with Mastercam.
- Needs more progressive die components in toolbox.
- Drawing layers and colors are difficult to work with.
- Complex sketches are still somewhat slow to rebuild.
SOLIDWORKS Review
- 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
- SOLIDWORKS gets very slow when using large assemblies, parts with many features, and sketches with many fully-defined entities.
- Saving can become extremely slow when there are STL files inserted into your part file. Has taken up to 10 minutes to save one part file. However, using the Save As option and giving the same part a new name will reduce save time by 10x. Seems to be some room for improvement here.
- When using the loft command without guide curves, there are two orbs that can be moved to determine how the profile twists from one face of the loft to the other(s). However, you cannot constrain these points and they can change position in different configurations. These points should be able to be constrained.
SolidWorks 2001-2018 experience
- 3D modeling.
- Assemblies.
- Drawing updates.
- Integration for parts, assemblies and drawings.
- Some software stability.
- Version conversion to earlier releases for file exchange.
- Subscription value for the money.
- As a mainstream design tool for the mechanical industry, it is a top tier option
- Collaboration with other users
- File format flexibility for data exchange
- Various industry-driven tools for design
- Design for manufacturing driven
- Civil engineering applications very limited
- Not suitable for design by code application, especially if FEA modules are used.
- Strangely, does not collaborate well or at all with Catia even as a part of the same company
- File Organization
- Hot Key Programming
- Rendering through Visualizer
- The user interface can look very busy sometimes compared to Inventor
- There are annual updates and sometimes the redesign of the interface is difficult to get used to
- Very expensive and you have to be on a subscription
- I think it is the best CAD tool in terms of design of extreme technical details.
- Its system of assembly of pieces is very useful when it comes to show off or create high-quality simulations.
- Particularly I think sketch tools are excellent for create 2D drawings of pieces, thanks to this the process of creation of 3D objects is streamlined.
- Its rendering system is very professional and provides very great visual details.
- Very unfavorable not being able to open versions of modern SOLIDWORKS in older versions.
- Sometimes it is difficult to understand the process of rendering 3D parts.
- It is not capable of processing solid pieces of STL format with many surfaces.
For companies that need to make designs of small mechanical parts it is very useful. We can create these pieces in less than hourly, and therefore give quick responses to our customers. Also to show mechanical simulations to companies.
Less appropriate:
Creating 3D objects as sculptures is not very appropriate since it does not have mesh design. Do not try to modify STL format files, since it causes many design errors.
SOLIDWORKS: A legend in the making.
- Having built themselves as the premier desktop CAD package, SOLIDWORKS has tools for almost every design-related.
- Learning SOLIDWORKS is very straightforward and there exists a large body of free tutorials and on-line help forums.
- SOLIDWORKS' partner program means having access to world-class software applications that run native within SOLIDWORKS.
- The FEA and CFD tools (Simulation) are best-in-class in-CAD analysis softwares and have helped shape that particular landscape since their adoption inside SOLIDWORKS.
- The reseller channel may, perhaps, be the greatest strength of SOLIDWORKS. It means guaranteed help/support, access to updates, a a vibrant user community.
- To date, the baked in surfacing tools lack power compared to dedicated surfacing software.
- In a similar vein, the core modeling kernel is not owned by SOLIDWORKS themselves and so there exists limitations with regards to implementing certain modeling/math.
- SOLIDWORKS is playing catchup to other online vendors of CAD (notable Onshape); instead of being the once leader, they are being forced to compare themselves. This, however, may work to their advantage and in turn allow them to produce a better on-line CAD tool.
First Class Design Software
- For starters, it is easy to learn compared to other solid modeling software platforms. SolidWorks has great learning tools and an easy to follow interface.
- The Weldment design environment is very robust and flexible.
- Working with model configurations is much easier to manage than other software platforms.
- FeatureWorks makes easy work of importing CAD geometry from other modeling packages. It recognizes the features and provides a feature-based model, unlike other programs that simply allow you to import block geometry without access to the model base features.
- More flexible options for renting or leasing the software.
- Provide small firms with older versions of the software with credits toward software upgrades. The current system penalizes those who have chosen not to upgrade over time. Many small firms can't afford to do so as often.
SOLIDWORKS - use for heavy equipment design and production
- Creates detailed renderings of parts.
- Production drawings can be made from renderings.
- Assemblies allow you to see if all the pieces fit together prior to production.
- We were not using a CNC for any parts now, but I do remember back in school we had to use AutoCAD for the CNC we had at school. I don't know if that was a SOLIDWORKS or a CNC issue, and I would assume this has been done in the last 5 years, but if not, that integration would really be my only complaint.
A user-friendly modelling software
- It has very good graphical user interface and thus is very user friendly.
- It offers a lot of options to create your models and for each option, there are examples and suggestions as to how these options work.
- It can be easily integrated with any finite element software and allows the user to print the model which can be used for testing in labs.
- It enables the user to make very complex 3D parts with minimum effort. There are a lot of tutorials also available for the software.
- I would want Solidworks to add a library within itself where users can see examples and solve their problem.
- While working with very heavy models, the software becomes slow and leads to unnecessary lag while moving around the model.
- It should allow a person to easily integrate their models with models from other users.