Greatest bargain in the 2d drafting world.
February 16, 2018
Greatest bargain in the 2d drafting world.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with DraftSight
DraftSight is the software I have personally installed on my own computer. When I first started using DraftSight it was for freelance work. Now I use it for working at home and on the road because it is the best .dwg compatible software you can get for the price. On my recommendation a couple of my colleagues have installed it on their own computers to use when they are away from work b DraftSight access drawings to deal with after hours emergency calls. If you are an Autocad LT user you can open DraftSight and be working productively in minutes, especially if you use keyboard shortcuts. If you're a SOLIDWORKS user it gives you a way to view and edit 2D .dwgs exported from SOLIDWORKS.
- Full 2D .dwg compatibility. You can open and manipulate any drawing that you can with the leading brand's LT software.
- It has a small stable footprint on your computer that dosn't consume valuable resources like some other CAD programs.
- DraftSight is available for multiple operating systems, including Linux!
- Let's face it price matters, even enterprise installations of DraftSight are less than individual licenses of most software in its class. For the individual user for working at home or freelancing it is the deal of the century. Even the free version is great although you lose some of the functionality of the paid version.
- The best part of all is that you don't sacrifice quality and performance to get the low price. It's 99% as capable as software costing 10 times as much.
- The hardest thing for me to get used to was setting up printing layouts because the menu & commands are just different enough that there's a little learning curve to that menu. This is not really a problem but it still trips me up when switching back & forth between software brands.
- Occasionally I try a .dwg keyboard command that does not match what I am expecting but the help menu always points me in the right direction.
- The most annoying thing is not caused by DraftSight, but when you open your saved drawing the next day at work with Autocad it will give you a warning that the .dwg is not a trusted .dwg this is not the fault of Draftsight but it is annoying.
- It has allowed me to work after hours for a negligible cost.
- When free lancing if I had to pay leading national brand prices for CAD software I couldn't make enough money to justify doing it.
- Always remember that when you put the paper drawing in the end users hand, they don't care if the software that created it was $149 or $1499 dollars. The finished product is worth the same fee regardless.
- AutoCAD LT
DraftSight has 99% of LT's capability, lacking mainly the very rudimentary 3D manipulation capability that LT possesses. There are a few of the rarely used 2D commands that DraftSight does not have but in all honesty, 99% percent of users will never notice any of these things. An experienced LT user can switch back and forth between the 2 with ease needing only to learn the commands that are named differently in the menus. Even so I have to admit my personal reason for choosing it for my own use was the price.