Great Product - Best of Drafting
May 28, 2021

Great Product - Best of Drafting

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Paid

Overall Satisfaction with DraftSight

My AutoCAD license was expiring, and I had to open highly detailed, very dense drawings of a 340 ft ship for modifications required for service on the Macondo well blowout. We were working 18 hour days and I had zero time to configure and learn a new drafting package. From the moment I had opened the drawings - I was fully productive. Very good job on the initial configurations and user experience! I continue to recommend this product every time I can.

Pros

  • Good configuration out of the box. Does not require fiddling to make it functional.
  • Drop in replacement for me from AutoCAD.
  • Runs fast - even on very large drawings!

Cons

  • I may have atypical tendencies for printing, but it seems I have to set a lot of bits each time I print.
  • There are some subtle object selection behaviors, right click behaviors, etc. that seem to be just a bit spread out in the configuration utility.
  • My wife and I work at the office and at home, and each of us use DraftSight on nearly a weekly basis. It would be very nice to have an automatic login/logout. If we forget to logout at the office, and our 'go to my PC' is having trouble, we get stuck pretty quick.
  • I would say the current price point is good. This has provided a sustainable means of 2d drafting without causing an existential crisis (i.e. how do I migrate my data to a new platform?). Point to note: movement above current pricing would leave a sour taste.
I have only used AutoCAD (for 30 years) and had a bit of introduction into Inventor. AutoCAD did great - but was hugely expensive, and ultimately bloated for how we use it. My glimpse at Inventor showed a package that was amazingly complex. It felt like it needed the complexity in order to work - like all of the features were 'scabbed on' to the surface of traditional AutoCAD, or that I was looking under the hood while I was running it. SOLIDWORKS strips away the complexity for a very straightforward experience.
We use it for schematics, label making, templates.

We use SOLIDWORKS for 3D design, drawings.

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