SOLIDWORKS: A legend in the making.
May 03, 2019
SOLIDWORKS: A legend in the making.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SOLIDWORKS
SOLIDWORKS is our mainstay computer-aided design software package and is utilized by all of our office locations across the globe for Gardner Denver Medical. It replaced other leading 2D and 3D CAD platforms many years ago; complimentary add-in packages from DS-SOLIDWORKS have been added over the years and are part of our day-to-day engineering work. Being the number one PC-based 3D solid modeling CAD package on the market, we use SOLIDWORKS, Simulation, Enterprise PDM (product data management), Inspection, and Composer to create, edit, manage, and document our engineering designs. We rely upon SOLIDWORKS' ability to open other CAD formats in our relationships with vendors and customers alike. And we lean upon our reseller's expertise to aid us throughout each year. Personnel outside of engineering takes advantage of eDrawings as a means of communicating 3D collateral. SOLIDWORKS has been, for the most part, easy to deploy and maintain and predictable with regards to cost of ownership.
- Having built themselves as the premier desktop CAD package, SOLIDWORKS has tools for almost every design-related.
- Learning SOLIDWORKS is very straightforward and there exists a large body of free tutorials and on-line help forums.
- SOLIDWORKS' partner program means having access to world-class software applications that run native within SOLIDWORKS.
- The FEA and CFD tools (Simulation) are best-in-class in-CAD analysis softwares and have helped shape that particular landscape since their adoption inside SOLIDWORKS.
- The reseller channel may, perhaps, be the greatest strength of SOLIDWORKS. It means guaranteed help/support, access to updates, a a vibrant user community.
- To date, the baked in surfacing tools lack power compared to dedicated surfacing software.
- In a similar vein, the core modeling kernel is not owned by SOLIDWORKS themselves and so there exists limitations with regards to implementing certain modeling/math.
- SOLIDWORKS is playing catchup to other online vendors of CAD (notable Onshape); instead of being the once leader, they are being forced to compare themselves. This, however, may work to their advantage and in turn allow them to produce a better on-line CAD tool.
- Budgeting for SOLIDWORKS is very predictive and affordable.
- Deploying a leased software with a fixed number of licenses can, sometimes, lead to aches when sudden changes in number of personnel blooms.
- Flexible licensing would alleviate day-to-day expenses of non-use but is not presently available.
Let's face it: SOLIDWORKS has shaped the direction and look of CAD for more than two decades. Even well-established 3D brands such as PTC and Siemens have, over the course of the years, modified their products to behave and look more like SOLIDWORKS. And newer entries in to the marketspace carefully craft their products to compliment or agree with SOLIDWORKS. Onshape is an odd story as it was created by peoples originally responsible for SOLIDWORKS. Hence, it has very agreeable form and function and yet the little oddities that SOLIDWORKS has have been overcome by Onshape. That and it is fully in the cloud, accessible anywhere by almost any modern device. Something SOLIDWORKS is only recently working towards. All this but it's the "new kid on the block" and engineers are slow to adopt new things. Give it 5 years and I think the story will be different. For now, we're sticking with what we know, love, and have invested in.