CAD for collaboration, version-control and configurations

Remote support is never easy as it is difficult to express exact issues in an email. We find Onshape technical support is normally responsive, we occasionally struggle to correctly explain the issue or fully understand the response. Where they have excelled is where there has been a technical issue they have been able to use software logs to identify what was happening in the software. No on-premise solution could achieve this.

Not requiring installations makes a big difference, the other CAD solutions we run require us to either update installations or to manage multiple versions in order to be up-to-date.

In our experience, Onshape is a powerful solution for products with parameters or configurations, partly due to the way that these can be modeled but particularly that the design can then be readily accessed by external applications for any given configuration. Moving engineering tools to the cloud has been an important step for many manufacturers during the pandemic, at the start of the pandemic our team picked up their laptops and went home, while we witnessed other companies having to set up complex IT systems for accessing workstations remotely.