Onshape provides awesome CAD and it's cloud based!
February 22, 2019
Onshape provides awesome CAD and it's cloud based!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Onshape
At Hirebotics we use Onshape to drive the design of all our robot-as-a-service customer installations. We use Onshape across the engineering and operations organization as well as with our vendor base. One of the issues that we needed to address was having collaborative access to all of our design documents regardless of where engineers are physically located. Since we deploy turn-key robotic workcells in just a few weeks we need to be able to collaborate on the design with several engineers all working on the same models at the same time. With the built-in PDM we are also able to control our release to procurement cycle from directly within the application. The cloud nature of the software suits our business perfectly as our engineers are often traveling to customer sites but they are always able to get into the system and collaborate with other engineers.
- Cloud-connected - we never have to worry about updating our design computers or upgrade the software as the upgrades happen automatically every few weeks. We are always on the latest version and get access to the newest features.
- Analytics, we are able to see how we are using the tool, how long projects are really taking to complete and how much time we are spending in the system.
- Extensible, we are able to use FeatureScript and write functions for our own features. We have used this to automate repetitive tasks so that we save time on designing features that we use over and over.
- Electrical schematics, currently there is no easy way to create electrical schematics in the system
- Performance, as with all software we are always wanting it to do more in less time.
- Allows us to deploy additional engineers into the system easily and cost-effectively. We do not need to spend a lot on specialized engineering work stations to get our team up and running with great performance.
- Even though its cloud-based, when dealing with complex machines and assemblies the speed of the GPU still matters. The nice thing though is instead of specialized engineering work stations having a good 3D gaming type GPU is preferred and gets much better performance.
- No need to store files locally and create back-ups of those files. No need for local PDM or servers.
When we started the business we knew we wanted to use Macs for our day to day computer as we do a lot of programming both robot software as well as mobile apps and embedded firmware. This choice limited the number of selections we could look at as companies such as SOLIDWORKS do not provide adequate solutions for running natively on Mac.