Overall Satisfaction with SOLIDWORKS
As the principal (and only) design engineer at our small startup company, SOLIDWORKS helps me to easily show the other employees exactly what I am thinking as far as designs go. I also use SOLIDWORKS for my mechanical design consulting side business. It helps me experiment with ideas before I take them to the shop for physical prototyping.
- SOLIDWORKS 2019 is fantastic with 3D rendering. There is so little lag when exploring an assembly, it makes for an extremely efficient review process when showing your designs to other employees.
- All of the keyboard shortcuts make modeling in SOLIDWORKS so fast, and as an employee at a startup company, I really appreciate that. It helps me be efficient and get designs done quickly.
- SOLIDWORKS makes it easy to do CAM functions as well, which plays a crucial role in figuring our optimal production techniques for a company that has little money to waste on R&D.
- I wish there was a better run-down of quick keyboard controls in SOLIDWORKS. There is nowhere inside the program that shows all of these in one place or gives a list of what they are.
- When you draw a line in Sketch mode, there is no box that allows you to select the size. You have to double-click on the line again after you draw it and then enter the exact size you are looking to draw.
- When creating appearances in an assembly, the program always makes it unclear if you are making the change in appearance for just the assembly or the individual part.
- SOLIDWORKS leads to increased productivity for me because I can quickly model a part of our product to see if it fits well into the system really easily.
- We save lots of money on prototyping because I am able to draw things out before I prototype them.
- SOLIDWORKS does get expensive for a startup company like mine, because you have to pay for seats individually until you get to a certain amount of people, and my company does not have enough yet.
SOLIDWORKS is so much more advanced than either of the other programs. Fusion 360 and Inventor are great programs, but once you get to more complicated models, they do not stack up. There are so many more functions and ways to customize files in SOLIDWORKS for users to create files. Another benefit is that SOLIDWORKS is much more universal than either of the other software.