Best Basic Design for Learning
March 09, 2023

Best Basic Design for Learning

Andrew Defever | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Onshape

Students use Onshape to learn basic CAD skills and designing parts for additive manufacturing. They use mostly basic functionality of the software, but do utilize the collaborative component. As the teacher the monitoring and support aspects are developing and getting much better than when I was first introduced to the program. I can now send students starter documents and set up collaborate groups. I don't limit available features, but I know that is also available. The biggest problem for me that this program addresses is it's capability to operate completely within a web browser. Most students only have school chromebooks that don't have the memory space to support a downloaded program so being able to access through a web browser is a big plus despite any limitations that creates.

Pros

  • Ability for user to collaborate on documents.
  • Ease of access to all documents from any web connected device.
  • Straightforward and easy to navigate user interface within document.

Cons

  • Administrative page for enterprise users is hard to add users or change user permissions.
  • Alerts for failed features are sometimes difficult to find.
  • Improved access to design software with platform being 100% onlie
  • Recent release of content built for Onshape has lessened learning curve.
  • Increased IT issues over desktop based program.
Been fairly standard experience with support team. Issues have always been addressed, but is understandably focused on business side applications which typically has different issues than education applications. I have very few IT issues with the design side of the software, my issues are more often with the control of users and access.
Ability of sso with enterprise is very convenient, however the default sign-in is the generic site not our enterprise site. So this has resulted in documents being lost or access to documents not being available when they sign-in. And documents cannot be shared between enterprise and non-enterprise accounts.

Do you think Onshape delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Onshape's feature set?

Yes

Did Onshape live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Onshape go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Onshape again?

Yes

Onshape has been great as a learning platform for students as they are typically using fairly basic functions and smaller projects. As projects get more complicated or documents contain more parts or larger assemblies the program does use more bandwidth and processing power, which has let to some lag and loading issues.

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