I'm a big fan of FreeCAD and have been using it to design and sell 3d printed parts. The learning curve was kinda steep because FreeCAD really wants you to things the "FreeCAD way" but once I got past that I started to enjoy using it.
My only gripe with FreeCAD is that the program runs on a single CPU core as far as I can tell and it's easy to lock up the program for multiple seconds if you do too complex of an operation. This isn't usually an issue for me though.
What kind of parts do you sell? Do you print them yourself?
I'm a occasional hobbyist maker and i've used Autodesk Fusion, Solid Edge, OpenSCAD and other niche parametric programs, but always felt FreeCAD was too complex. But I really wanted it to work for me because it's FOSS and 100% offline. So with the new FreeCAD 1.1 RC I found an hour long tutorial and dove in.
(1.1 is supposedly much easier to work with)
After doing the tut I can say that 1.1 is very nice, i can uninstall Fusion and Solid Edge finally :)
I switched from Fusion to FreeCAD when I bid Windows goodbye (this video inspired me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEfNRST_3x8).
Fusion does a LOT of stuff for you that FreeCAD doesn't - i.e. extrude a pad from two intersecting shapes in a sketch. While this is annoying at first I feel it forces me to design smarter.
I've had a few crashes and the constraint solver sometimes seems to behave weird and takes a ctrl+z and a second attempt at the same action to properly add a constraint but overall my experience has been pretty positive.
> extrude a pad from two intersecting shapes in a sketch
You can do that in FreeCAD 1.1. Select the sketch, enable "Make Internals" in the data tab. You can also enable it permanently in settings.
This shows a general problem that FreeCAD still has: Inside an initially off-putting and frustrating UI experience is a really good application trying to get out, but at the moment a new user still has to dig it out themselves.
For example, problems like this one. Or the confusing 3D navigation (switch to Gesture or TinkerCAD mode in the Settings), or the non-interactive view cube. And many other gotchas and paper cuts that can almost all be changed with a few clicks to make it more intuitive, or just more similar to popular competition (e.g. the OpenTheme add-on gets you that Fusion look you see in many FreeCAD tutorial videos).
It's a classic pattern with long-running FOSS projects. The authors get somewhat blinded to the pain because they're used to it, plus change is difficult for the established userbase. There's also a feeling that emulating competitors is surrendering one's own identity, and the idea that some of the rough edges are justified by "the powerfulness". Thus radically changing defaults, streamlining, simplifying and even just matching user expectations is often perceived as "taking the power away" and really difficult to have the daring-do to just do. Even though on the other side of the transition a much larger and happier userbase awaits.
A lot of FOSS projects eventually do mature to the point where they can pull this off, and I think there's real signs that FreeCAD is starting to get there. The upcoming 1.1 release has a ton of modern UI catch-up, such as on-canvas gizmos, and a few good defaults changes.
There's a lot more work to do, but like others I have the feeling that FreeCAD may well be approaching its Blender/KiCAD moment. I suspect becoming a contributor right now could be good fun.
I speak from experience! We've to some extent been on a similar journey with the Plasma desktop.
I agree with you.
But there's also potential downsides to digging in and fixing the UI.
For instance: I've made a few simple boards with KiCAD. The first one was frustrating as hell and took forever, because my distro had helpfully installed the very latest version of KiCAD.
Meanwhile, the tutorials and videos were generally all about older versions. Which is fine, I guess, except way too many of them didn't even specify a version number.
So I (a complete newb) spent way too much time trying to find nonexistent UI widgets and being mystified that a given tutorial often seemed to be written by someone who was using different software entirely.
(The answer here is, of course, to have decent-enough official tutorials that stay in lock-step with software releases, so as to always get people started on the right page. But doing/enforcing that feels like work, and that's not usually what people want to feel when they volunteer to help write CAD software.)
> It's a classic pattern with long-running FOSS projects. The authors get somewhat blinded to the pain because they're used to it, plus change is difficult for the established userbase.
Thanks for putting into words something I've definitely felt for a long time. It's like a junky old car with broken dash controls- you get used to having to bang on things to make them work, but if someone needs to borrow your car they're like "this is how you live!?".
Well said. It seems to me, many FOSS projects suffer from long time contributors which are extremely conservative and don't like any kind of change. Hence every new or improved feature becomes merely a setting (which barely anybody will discover) which is not enabled by default. The UX does only worsen this way because old cruft coexists with its replacement, settings grow fast, the combinatorial explosion of all feature combinations produces tons of bugs and new users will always be turned off by the first use experience.
To make the necessary overhaul, someone with the "power to decide" is needed, which is somewhat incompatible with unpaid open source development. I think this video about Audacity's redesign is informative in this regard:
Please be careful about voicing generic complaints in a discussion of a specific product. IMO, FreeCAD 1.0 took some huge leaps in ergonomics. I was surprised about how much work had been done. The workers behind FreeCAD don't deserve lazy sniping that doesn't even apply to their creation.
My guess is that they might appreciate specific criticism. It would probably help focus the work they are doing. But don't generalize them to have all the usual problems everybody else always seems to have. That isn't very helpful to anybody.
But I mean it. In my opinion, all the criticism of my post also applies to FreeCAD, not just other projects. Look what brought this up: a hidden feature someone wanted but wasn't aware of.
I'm not trying to blame anyone. I think this is a structural problem with FOSS projects in general (and it also applies to FreeCAD specifically).
I think freeopinion is right, though. I don't think "Make internals" is off by default only because the developers are conservative, but because the meaning and behavior of it changed a few times recently around the merger of the RealThunder forks and the TNP work. I did a casual search and 2025 comments are full of it doing nothing.
So a more productive specific thing would perhaps be indeed to strike up a "It seems to work nicely now, why isn't it default?" convo and maybe figure out the remaining bugs.
> So a more productive specific thing would perhaps be indeed to strike up a "It seems to work nicely now, why isn't it default?"
That may be. It's just not what I'm interested in. I don't have the energy to fight lots of little battles to improve some minor things, when – in my perception – the end result would still *suck. I think a major rework is needed. For example, I don't think simply enabling "Make Internals" would be the best thing to do. IMO it should be always on AND the setting should be removed AND the toggle from the data view should be removed AND that would imply that it must always work bugfree so that nobody has a need to disable it. I don't think this is ever gonna happen if I start a discussion or even make a pull request.
* I'm not a hater, I'm a FreeCAD user. Out of all the offerings that exist, it's my preferred CAD tool for my private hobby use. I just wish it was better, because I see untapped potential.
> To make the necessary overhaul, someone with the "power to decide" is needed,
FOSS is a doer-cracy. If you have a pain point, patch it, and it will go away.
It seems like you've only read this half-sentence before replying.
What you say is part of the problem. It leads to "patchwork software" without a clear vision.
Vision is overrated if it’s not solving users’ problems. Software with a vision is kinda the bane of the industry right now (macos tahoe, copilot, windows 11,…)
> The authors get somewhat blinded to the pain because they're used to it, plus change is difficult for the established userbase. There's also a feeling that emulating competitors is surrendering one's own identity, and the idea that some of the rough edges are justified by "the powerfulness". Thus radically changing defaults, streamlining, simplifying and even just matching user expectations is often perceived as "taking the power away" and really difficult to have the daring-do to just do. Even though on the other side of the transition a much larger and happier userbase awaits.
I think it is unfair to say that they are "blinded to the pain". They are well aware of it from what I've seen of the Dev discussions on Discord. But the vast majority of the devs are volunteers so they can only do so much so fast. There are also some very nice usability improvements as of late that borrow from other programs, like the Solidworks-style navigation settings and the on-screen draggers for pad / pocket / transform type operations. Yes there are tons of preferences and some of the defaults might not be great, but they've added a "Search Preferences" field to help sort through them all. Then there are issues like in the link below where the discussion of how to improve FreeCAD considers comparisons with other pieces of software.
Another point I'll add is their creation of a Design Working Group to help sort through usability issues and generate a consensus for devs to subsequently implement.
I would think it would be beneficial to the companies that make 3D printers and CNC machines to help fund some of these efforts... I've found it often takes the input of commercial interests to get general UX improvements into open-source.
ex: really impressed with the direction of Audacity as an example, though I can also understand why a given community would reject such influence from a single org.
> I think it is unfair to say that they are "blinded to the pain".
I mean it more in the sense that it's very difficult to truly conceive of what a new user of the app would stumble over or dislike, if you're very used to it yourself.
Often that means small things that would not be that hard to address become invisible, because there's obvious higher priorities. Other times, things are considered small fries that actually are consistently wrong and need a holistic re-think.
One of the best things to do is to actually watch novice users use your software. This was also a big boost to the "Blender moment", when the Blender studio started inviting over artist and just watched them work in the software. This used to be really hard to do, but has now become a bit easier with screencasting and conferencing tools. I bet FreeCAD is also starting to do more of this.
Thanks for adding additional info! I forgot to mention the Design Working Group as another sign. In KDE we also set up a similar "Visual Design Group" years ago that was behind a lot of the improvements.
It would be interesting if FreeCAD could iterate towards something that is also easy for agents to use. I have seen cases of people doing this with Blender.
I too feel like the latest versions are quite a big improvement and I finally lost that feeling of slowing myself down just for the sake of using OSS.
But I still hope for a "blender moment" where a concerted effort gets rid of old cruft, improves UI/UX and jump-starts growth (also in developers/funding) and further improvements.
It's probably impossible for FreeCAD to catch up with the industry-standard CAD systems (SOLIDWORKS, NX, Fusion) unless they somehow pour a stupendous amount of money into their geometry kernel [1].
All major CAD systems use mature geometry kernels like Parasolid [2]. Parasolid was developed for 40 years and is still in active development. This is the piece of code that enables CAD systems to do things like computing an intersection of a G3 smooth fillet with embossed text, handling all corner cases.
FreeCAD runs on OpenCASCADE [3], which is both less sophisticated today and is slower to gain new features than Parasolid, being seemingly maintained by one person [4]. FreeCAD's geometry is hard limited by what OpenCASCADE can do.
This is the main difference from Blender. Blender ultimately operates on vertices, which doesn't require nearly the same level of inherent complexity. Blender isn't bottlenecked in what it can do like FreeCAD is.
It feels like all those 3D modeling apps like 3DSmax,Fusion even Zbrush share like 90% of their feature set but your are forced to literally juggle(for videogame dev at least) because of one or two arguably extremely niche capability.
It may look like they're all easily interchangable because the UI and actions are similar (you have a viewport and can do extrudes, etc..) but fundamentally, they're all working on very different objects at their core. Blender and 3DS Max are the most alike, but Zbrush is an entirely different paradigm and so is parametric CAD. An extrude in Blender is massively different from a pad in FreeCAD.
Maybe, with a ton of time and effort the blender UI could be abstracted from most of the box-modeling approach and then pasted over a different paradigm, but It'd take tens of thousands of hours I imagine,.
You can do sculpting in Blender as well as parametric objects, similarly you can emulate most of substance designer with shaders, maybe just not _quite_ good enough that's the thing.
It feels like we have been so so close to an unified 3D content creation tool kit for many years now!
Blender is a mesh editor at its heart. That isn't suitable for CAD work.
>> I kinda wish blender could just do CAD honestly
Have you tried the "CAD sketcher" add-on? I think Blender should have similar functionality built-in, but for now this looks like a nice add-on.
Blender is a very very long way from being used as a general purpose CAD tool, and IMHO it should not strive to be that. But having this ability to do simple CAD designs without opening and learning a different program is cool.
That's my opinion but I think that game/cinema/whatever 3D modeling should lean more and more toward CAD like workflow.
If we want to bring those medium to the next level.
Yeah, I avoided Fusion (etc.) because of the usual bait-and-switch I've seen with commercial applications that claim to be "free" at some point. If I'm going to invest in learning a new application, I'd rather it be an open one.
I dove into FreeCAD with either version 1.0.0 or earlier. It was… rough.
To be sure, it was a whole new app so I expect initial navigation around the app to be challenging. But, wow.
Nonetheless, I did get a few things modeled up [1]. And for that I have to thank LLMs for steering me through using the app. I suggest others to try an LLM as a guide if you are learning (and I still am learning, of course). I like tutorials, but so often you can spend hours watching tutorials that cover all manner of ground where you simply want to complete a specific task—unable to find the tutorial covering how to do it.
Having said that though, I am eager to try this 1.0.2 version. (I'm also eager to fix a few minor MacOS-specific nits that I've already seen.)
I've spent a decent amount of time on the FreeCAD Discord and more than one advanced user on there suggests treating FreeCAD like a rolling release. So I've been using the weekly FlatPack builds and have had a great experience. FreeCAD has been taking some big steps recently and by sticking with 1.0.0 / 1.0.2, you're basically missing out on almost a year's worth of improvements.
And the tutorial by Mango Jelly Solutions on YouTube are fantastic. They are generally very focused on one particular task per video so I think you'd find them really useful.
Thanks, I'll both pull down the dev builds and will check out Mango Jelly's channel.
> If I'm going to invest in learning a new application, I'd rather it be an open one.
I wouldn't worry about it too much. The concepts are very transferrable.
At work I used to use SolidWorks exclusively, now I'm using Onshape and will probably switch to Inventor soon. At home I typically use Fusion 360. They all work more-or-less the same and moving between them isn't too hard.
I find SOLIDWORKS for Makers [1] a great middle ground between bait-and-switch "free" Fusion and the real, very expensive, deal. SW is one of industry standards, its interface is much better than FreeCAD's, and it's more powerful than both FreeCAD and Fusion. For example, both FreeCAD and Fusion struggle with G2/G3 smoothness [2] where SW doesn't even blink. Fusion doesn't allow to pattern features on sketch points (it's gated behind an expensive add-on [3]) when it's a built-in feature in SW.
Have you tried SolveSpace? It's easily my favorite open source CAD program. The main things it's missing are shells, fillets, and chamfers. But I've been able to 3D print quite a few parts using it!
You might want to check out Dune3D. It advertises itself as combining the constraint solver from SolveSpace with a OpenCASCADE geometry kernel supporting fillets and chamfers. :)
Haven't used it much apart from some minor tests (I tend to prefer MoI3D, but that's in a different category in several ways...), but as far as FOSS solid modelers it seems like the most promising to me.
I do remember some small UI quirks, but overall it felt very approachable and streamlined, and looking at the GitHub repo, development is active. FreeCAD IMHO is just too sprawling and complex, with seemingly little tought paid to UI/UX.
Agreed: The Dune3D developers made the wise decision to start from scratch implementing a parametric modeling UI. Extremely robust software; very fast, and almost intuitive (high praise for CAD).
The problem with FreeCAD, on the other hand, is that it's a "just two more weeks and it'll be great" solution.
The developers are clearly talented in a raw-math kind of way, but FreeCAD offers the eternal promise of usability in the next release; while never delivering it.
Those who are profoundly cynical might consider the possibility that the legacy CAD industry has infiltrated the FreeCAD development team and run Pied-Piper ops there to prevent a Blender-moment stealing their revenue.
This would perfectly explain why the FreeCAD experience is so consistently bizarre.
This. I just can’t bring myself to use FreeCAD for anything. It’s been almost a decade of occasional attempts during vacation breaks and it is still one of the worst, most counter-intuitive pieces of 3D software I’ve ever used (and I paid my way through college doing early multimedia work, some 30 years ago).
Dune3D is by the same developer as HorizonEDA, a KiCad alternative.
Has anyone tried that too?
>Those who are profoundly cynical might consider the possibility that the legacy CAD industry has infiltrated the FreeCAD development team and run Pied-Piper ops there to prevent a Blender-moment stealing their revenue.
If you've been around on the FreeCAD forums, you'll see that the majority of users essentially believe that all comparisons of FreeCAD with commercial CAD software is illegitimate and become incredibly defensive. They have developed a huge arsenal of coping strategies to avoid improving FreeCAD and the results speak for themselves.
It's like they've got the Steve Jobs attitude but without the good taste that justified it.
>They have developed a huge arsenal of coping strategies to avoid improving FreeCAD and the results speak for themselves.
Exactly. These FreeCAD "strategies" you mention align themselves perfectly with the objectives of the legacy CAD industry: To delay; break; and obfuscate opensource CAD.
In other words: The FreeCAD team may not be infiltrated by the legacy-CAD industry, but its behavior is entirely consistent with such a state.
One solution is to fork the behemoth; but if FreeCAD is a hedge-maze-by-design, the only way to win is not to play the game: Build alternatives elsewhere, from scratch.
FreeCAD feels like a time-drainer honeypot. Though whether by accident, or malice, is unknown.
I was excited about dune3d but one of the things I needed to do I had to import an SVG as a path to extrude (or similar) and I couldn't see a way to do it.
I managed to do it (painfully) with freecad, so that's what I settled with.
Does anyone know if that's a feature yet?
Dune 3D developer here. Use inkscape to convert the SVG path to DXF and import that.
Yeah I actually have. I really liked the concept, but I designed a cylinder with many holes (think a robust sieve) and it just crashed when the number of holes grew too great. Even the OpenCL/MP version. I felt it being unstable in other ways too so I did not make it my go to tool. Sadly it also seems it's not being developed much.
EDIT: Missing fillets and chamfers we're also a big problem for me - probably I'm just a newbie maker and want unreasonable things, but still.
Just checked it out [1] but it appears the last version released was in 2022? Makes me wonder if it is still active.
We have been very close to version 3.2 final for far too long. Development has slowed but not stopped. I would try a nightly/development build.
Solvespace is nice, but missing fillets and chamfers is kind of a deal-breaker. Last time I tried it it also had issues with small holes turning into diamonds.
That said, pre-1.0 FreeCAD had a terrible UX so it was the best FOSS CAD option.
With the 1.0 release of FreeCAD the UX is much better though. There are still a few WTFs (e.g. it took me quite a while to figure out rollback is done via right-click->set tip, or something like that)... But overall it's better than Solvespace now.
If you want a solvespace with chamfers and fillets, then give Dune 3D a try.
Disclaimer: Dune 3D developer here.
Yeah, I use FreeCAD when I need fillets/chamfers... before that, I usually model my 3d printer stuff using OpenSCAD.
Set tip makes sense if you think of the steps taken to build up a parts as a history. Setting the tip isn't a rollback. It is saying "I want to insert a new step in the history".
For me, as a beginner in Freecad and 3d modelling I kept being unable to interpret/remember all the tool icons, and remember the shortcuts while learning.
I found this command palette that helped me discover the different commands and actually get to (beginner) proficient.[0].
Again, no relation, but it's what made it stick for me after a few aborted learning attempts. (and I had a lot of fun with freecad! Especially by my second or third model where I could actually just sit down and start modelling without having to learn any extra things. Now I just need an excuse to find something else to model...)
I've been treating FreeCAD like a rolling release by using the weekly Flatpack builds and it has been a pretty good experience so far. Based on a good model I was given as a starting point and a lot of Mango Jelly Solutions videos, I've developed a detailed model of the Virtual Pinball machine I'm building now. It has been huge in saving me from countless mistakes in the actual build.
Yeah I have been able to use it as a complete novice with CAD, albeit making planning out quite simple household things.
I feel like most of the opinions about FreeCAD online are out of date, since at least 1.0 if not later.
I mainly use it for planning things to make out of wood or print out of plastic.
I can never leave Solid Edge. Synchronous editing is simply the best for 3d printing and fast iteration when you're experimenting with designs.
Yeah I still consider Solid Edge very good. Easy to work with, does not require internet, no stupid limitations (like the 10 model limitation for Fusion). Many tutorials, etc. But still, they might revoke their free license at any moment and I am out of a tool, and wasted experience.
I think Dune 3D making constraints available in 3D space is not quite the same, but at least a bit adjacent.
OnShape?
Similar experience. I tried to learn FreeCAD a while ago. People recommended Mango Jelly's tutorials. I used those among others and dove in. However, it was a pretty frustrating experience. Things never worked quite right. I would drill into a certain point and then realized you couldn't get there from here, and had to start over.
I recently had a desperate need to 3D print a part and tried FreeCAD again. A couple of things changed: 1) 1.1 came out and 2) Mango Jelly created a playlist that essentially was "bare bones what you need to know to get started." It was slightly over an hour of the fundamentals of navigating and just enough tools.
I think FreeCAD was basically just way too buggy initially, especially on macOS. Things never worked like tutorials said, or even dot updates sometimes broke what was being taught in tutorials. Also, while great, MJ's other previous videos deep dove into specific tools. Over half of any particular video would discuss features that helped you become an expert, but overwhelming when it came to getting up and running.
Since then, I've felt much more confident about FreeCAD and have used it to knock out other pieces.
Yeah the tutorial I linked was from Mango Jelly for FreeCAD 1.1 :) He seems to have a perfect balance of getting it done, and you understanding what you are doing.
This. 1.0 and 1.1 are monumental improvements over the decades of releases that came before.
I struggled through the earlier releases and now I use OnShape because I can seamlessly switch between work and personal computers. If I ever can drop that requirement I'd love to go back to FreeCAD now that it's "good".
(I’ve posted this before on HN but it’s worth repeating)
I’m an CAD hobbyist, and I’ve tried to work with FreeCAD multiple times over past years, always failing….
…until I saw this video and learned about version 1.1:
FreeCAD is now in the same ballpark of capability and usability as Solidworks. It can still be a bit clunky and frustrating sometimes, but then so can most CAD programs, in their own ways.
Side note: the creator of the video above also has a video on optimising the FreeCAD interface. (There are some frustrations related to the interface generally, and this would seem to be a low hanging fruit for the FreeCAD team to address.)
In terms of ux as a beginner what made me able to learn effectively was a command palette add-on (outlined here)[0].
It really sped up learning for me. (because I'd know what the thing I wanted was called, but couldn't find them, and having to google and search before every click is... not fun)
I have, like, an old married couple relationship with SolidWorks. Stockholm syndrome may be more accurate. It shaped how I think, it aggravates me as only a long-time companion could, but overall I'm fond of it.
It gives me hope that others have made the switch. I've wanted to love FreeCAD for a long time, too.
I recently gave CadQuery (a Python wrapper around OpenCASCADE) and its Jupyter and VSCode integrations another try. Two years ago installation was a mess across conda, Docker, and pyenv, and the API itself felt like a dense, bespoke DSL you had to fight.
This time everything just installed, and Claude Code turned out to be pretty good.
Designing with code is sometimes more work upfront, but iteration is so much better. You get proper abstractions: functions, encapsulation, loops. You can drop in a SAT solver to optimize part placement or grab data from an excel sheet. No more clicking through a GUI that crashes and loses your session. I've spent time with Fusion, SolidWorks, NX, OnShape, FreeCAD, and Rhino, and each has its merits, but none of them can benefit from the LLM revolution the way a code-first tool can.
I asked Claude Code to generate a set of Lego bricks in various sizes, apply a nice color palette, and pack them optimally into a grid. It needed some steering, but all in all I was impressed
I believe there's a cadquery workbench for freecad, I messed around with it about a year ago but ran into similar struggles as you describe. I'll have to give it another try.
not really. cadquery started as a freecad workbench, but moved out a long while ago. So current cadquery isn't usable inside freecad (which is a shame).
also worth a look: build123d
Yeah, I found it much more interesting when it was in FreeCAD --- wish there was some nice, graphical alternative (something like Grasshopper).
I just learned about build123d from another comment here, very excited to try it out!
I wish they would just copy the gui format of Solidworks, Creo, NX, etc. Every time I open it to try and learn it, it frustrates the crap out of me and I close it until it's been long enough that I'm willing to try again.
I only used it for some hobby modeling, but I have to say it's fantastic and very impressive.
It seems like it's fully community-maintained, there is no big company or foundation behind it. Honestly it's hard to believe!
There was just one major problem, the infamous "topological naming problem" which caused issues downstream is you edited a non-leaf node. That was pretty frustrating to deal with, but in later releases they fixed it I think. (Have not tried it since because I didn't have anything to model)
The solution for Topological Naming Problem (TNP) was merged just before the 1.0 release. A lot of other significant changes were also merged in at the same time. Some people have reported that the UX has improved a lot since then.
I don't know much about the internal architecture of FreeCAD. As far as I know, FreeCAD does a lot of heavy lifting including managing TNP. It's supposed to be handled by the CAD kernel - OpenCASCADE in this case. I suspect that the reason why open source CAD lags behind their proprietary counterparts is really the CAD kernel. Many proprietary CAD software share the same kernel, in fact. For example, SolidWorks, Solid Edge and OnShape use Parasolid. It tells you how critical the kernel is.
Perhaps we should be focusing more on a more capable open source CAD kernel. There are a few projects around that are trying this. But they either have very limited scopes, or don't have enough support and momentum.
Not a solution, but could be one of the problems we should tell the "LLMs will replace software engineers" crowd to implement.
Maybe then they'll notice that without Open Source training data it won't be able to solve the problem.
It's possible that the training data (and research data) is already out there, just not (yet) combined into a single open source CAD kernel.
Then again, the success of such a project might depend on other factors. Given the complexity of the task, I can imagine that just "lucking into" the right design decisions early on could have a major impact.
I feel CAD is one area where open source does not shine. The problem space is too complex, and the UIs demand continuous, thoughtful development driven from customer demands rather than developers scratching their own itches.
Not least there are free (as in beer) solutions available, like fusion 360, that are enormously capable.
Theres certainly a place for open source, and openscad would be a great tool to reach for for procedurally generated models. But in all honesty, Freecad doesn't compare well to the professional tools in this space - not in the way that say, gimp does to its commercial competitors.
The reason being that Open Source is a bunch of people who approach EVERYTHING as a programming problem, and they are chronically allergic to graphics, graphical UIs, and any kind of sense of what user interactions are a good experience.
They don't start with "how do users want this to operate?" They start with a weekend of coding, applying their preconceived notions, a library of fancy algorithms that are not directly motivated by an actual feature, and they go from there. This does not lead to a good product, as in something that could earn you money on an open market. It only prevails, in spite of nobody wanting to pay for it, because they give it away for free, and they sink their own "disposable time" (and maybe even income) into the project.
The real problem is that BREP CAD kernels are hard. A few of proprietary kernels dominate the scene: Parasolid powers NX, SolidWorks, Fusion, and Onshape, while ACIS (owned by Dassault) is used by Inventor and BricsCAD. Catia uses Dassault's own CGM kernel. The open-source world relies mostly on OpenCASCADE, which is unfortunately a lot less capable than any of these.
Fillets and chamfers are a good example. They seem simple but are geometrically non-trivial, and OCC will fail on cases that Parasolid handles without complaint. You can push either kernel to its limits if you try hard enough, but OCC hits that ceiling much sooner. So any CAD tool built on top of it inherits that ceiling too.
> Fillets and chamfers are a good example. They seem simple but are geometrically non-trivial, and OCC will fail on cases that Parasolid handles without complaint.
A long time ago I interviewed at one of the large CAD companies. I remember getting an office tour and the person showing me around pointed into a corner with six desks and said "that is the team that does fillets".
Open source tools can handle some cases, but to handle the full complexity of real world problems is a huge extra step that I doubt they will manage any time soon.
Do you think this is why CAD software UI/UX is often so clunky? The kernels are complicated and error-prone given the incalculable number of edge-cases, which puts error reporting at a disadvantage, leads to counter-intuitive feature wizards with some having way too many parameters and others being very single-purpose?
That's one of the real problems. The other real problem is an active resistance to UI improvement simply because another CAD package did something similar.
> the UIs demand continuous, thoughtful development
The current AutoCAD GUI is essentially unchanged from the 80s, so this shouldn't really be much of an issue. They added a ribbon probably 15 years ago at this point, but I can't think of any other major/recent changes. (But maybe there are some changes that I'm not familiar with, since I don't use AutoCAD very often and only started using it relatively recently)
People aren't talking about AutoCAD, but things such as Autodesk Inventor, AD Fusion 360, ...
> I feel CAD is one area where open source does not shine.
Many such cases, not only in CAD area. Good non-dev FOSS software is exception, not a rule, and these exceptions pretty often have some corporate backing and are not purely community-driven. And even for dev tools there are proprietary offerings that are light-years ahead of anything FOSS, though people here are never going to admit it, as TTY clone running vi clone is supposedly all you need.
I don't state this with satisfaction, quite the opposite, but it is long since I became disillusioned.
fusion 360 is exactly "free" for that reason, to make people reason like you do. They do not want a blender moment.
Note as a Linux user, the only version of Fusion you can really use is the (bad) browser one, which requires a $900/year subscription. I like Fusion, but this is a powerful motivator to make due with FreeCAD or Dune3D.
Fusion 360 and my golf sim software are the only two reasons I have windows dual boot.
I'm use Vectorworks professionally, but that's because it's become the de-facto program for drawing in the entertainment / production space, and uses Parasolid. I'd love to have any, ANY alternative to VW and Nemetschek's awful pricing / subscription scheme, but I don't see FreeCAD being a competitor in this space for many, many years. Maybe for hobbyists, but I agree that the problem space is oversized for a community project like FreeCAD.
Another advantage of OpenSCAD (if you can call it that) is that LLMs seem to be able to work with it pretty well. A few days ago I asked chatgpt to make me a box for storing batteries, and it came out perfect on first try without any modification. It also made an okay-ish looking 3D pelican after some back-and-forth.
The problem with openSCAD is that you cannot modify it easily. I had made a complex geometry several years ago in openSCAD and I have been waiting for a model that can actually convert it into a python script that generates freecad parametric sketches that recreate it in an editable way. All frontier models fail at this, some more spectacularly than others (gemini never spent 40 minutes / $4 trying and failing, but opus 4.6 did).
OpenSCAD is ideal for making models that can be modified! You have to program your models with the mindset of parametric CAD though, if I was making a battery case I would start by defining variables for battery length, diameter and count and work from there.
Your ball looks well parametrized to me, what kind of editing are you missing from it? Unless you want to change the shape of the locking mechanism altogether, which I think would be a chore in any format.
Yeah the lock is what needs iterating. It was always marginal and took several rounds of prototyping to even get to a printable state. I'd like to experiment with something like a keyed screw.
The issue with this scad file is that I built the geometry up with no functions. I tried and failed to get them working so I just pushed through, so now it is mind melting to try to refactor it. I'm hoping to one day melt a mechanical mind to get it done. Until then, it's a fun challenge prompt for these models.
Openscad models are a bit like complex regexps, write only artifacts that do the job at the time but are regarded with trepidation afterwards.
I never understood this UI problem.
Because... You can copy the UI of the leader and problem solved.
There you have GIMP with an absolute nightmare UI to use, but people keep saying, just get used to it. On the other hand, a single developer, in javascript, made a copy of photoshop, and most people I know prefer to use that over GIMP...
Just copy the UI that works, if you can't research your own UI.
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I use GIMP and FreeCAD quite often and find them very powerful programs, but maybe I'm some sort of genius? I think where these programs don't do well is among the crowd who expect to be able to just click around an advanced piece of software and somehow it just works to get things done! For basic apps this is a reasonable expectation, but CAD is not a simple process.
PS: I've still not managed to learn Blender, not put enough hours in, it is a hugely complex beast of a program that basically requires keyboard shortcut use imho. That interface (beautiful as it is) has so many options that even if I know what I'm looking for I can't find it!
Yeah, to use these UIs you gotta think like a programmer.
Part of what made Blender accessible around 2001-2002 when I was using it regularly was a really great paperback book[1] that served as a tutorial and reference. The UX was strange to be sure but after reading through the ~200 pages and getting acclimatized, it all began to feel sensible. If not for that book I would have bounced off Blender and never looked back.
>Because... You can copy the UI of the leader and problem solved.
For whatever reason, the FreeCAD community is explicitly against taking note from competitors. Copying the UI of the leader is a thoughtcrime.
No it isn’t, stop being silly.
> There you have GIMP with an absolute nightmare UI to use, but people keep saying, just get used to it.
Which is something I find odd that so many people seem to assume GIMP as the de-facto open source photoshop alternative when Krita is more analogous and much easier to use.
Do you mean photopea?
Great alternative in-browser.
I do, it is indeed. I'm always surprised that a single developer in javascript managed to do it.
Why do you think GIMP is a nightmare? I don’t find it problematic at all. The only issue I’m hitting once in a while is that I click on a button on the toolbar, and I guess I hit its edge, as I doesn’t switch modes. Other than that, I don’t have any complaints at all. What are yours?
Adding a text that has a couple of pixel white borders is something possible in GIMP, yet a nightmare compared with photopea which just copy cs2 way of doing it.
And that is without having to edit the text in case you made a tipo.
Now, if we are talking about doing batch image editing in python. Gimp us the best tool I've found.
It's mostly a received holdover opinion from the days when Gimp still defaulted to being strongly multi-windowed. The people who keep repeating it probably haven't used Gimp for a while. The usability may still not match Photoshop, but at this point the Gimp UI is largely conventional for this genre of software.
Popular opinions take ages to shift sadly.
I don’t know, I tried FreeCAD a few months ago and it was buggy as hell. I did some really basic extrusions and distance constraints. But ended up with non-perpendicular entities despite not constructing it like this.
I assure you that my 3d prints look like what I designed them.
FreeCAD is the first program I ever used where I actually drafted hate mail to the devs (but the oss nature gave me restraint in actually pressing send)
I spent 2 days crash coursing freeCAD (this is with a general understanding of the theory of 3D design already) to try and make an adapter plate for my car. A plate with 6 holes in precise spots and tapped. It was absolutely brutal and after the first 3D print trial had the a couple holes misaligned, I trashed freecad got the free fusion360.
No shit, in 20 minutes I had made the exact part I needed. The program actually worked the way you would expect. I didn't even need a tutorial it was so intuitive. Even if I hadn't spent the previous 2 days getting bent by freecad, I'm pretty sure it would have taken me only an hour max with a blank slate mind in fusion.
Now I'm getting angry writing this. If the FreeCAD guys see this, thanks for the hard work, but understand your minds must work completely differently than even the average engineers.
I am not trained to be a mechanical engineer. I wanted to explore 3D printing. The usual suspects (FOSS missionaries with a deep-rooted hotly burning hate for capitalism) gave me OpenSCAD, which was okay to dick around with but QUICKLY showed its clunkiness ("compiling"... what a joke). So then I gave FreeCAD a look, because everyone said it's just like the commerical programs. It was not. Documentation and tutorials were a mess. The program itself was a mess. UX that makes you want to strangle someone.
So then I looked for free student versions of commercial software. They had a clear UI and UX, clear tutorials. It was a joy to model the parts I needed.
If I needed 3D modeling for engineering in the future, I would absolutely pay for a commercial program. FreeCAD was simply no competition. I don't know if it is now. Nor do I have any motivation whatsoever to even bother to give it another look.
If I need a license for hobbyist purposes, I'm sure some of the commercial offerings are happy to give me one for free because that would translate into commerce for them if I ever needed it professionally.
I learned CAD (formally, in a classroom) on Solidworks/AutoCAD, and once I understood the difference between part and part design, I didn't have major issues with FreeCAD-the concepts of good modeling are the same. I had some "okay, what does this software call this function" moments, but it wasn't nearly as bad as when I learned NX and couldn't find the constraints menu. I personally find the shortcomings in techdraw & assembly to be a much bigger problem than the UI-frankly, if I compare it to every engineering software I've used, it is solidly middle-of-the-pack in UI. The worst ones were commercial, expensive software. At least with FreeCAD if something is unbearably stupid I can go in and _fix_ it.
I will try the newer version again. Last I tried 2 years or so back, it was crashing for me.
Personal Context: I am a civil enginer, and our requirement from CAD softwares are a lot simpler than Mechanical Engineering. Here on HN, whenever I see people discussing CAD, its the mechanical version of parts and 3d printing.
Shameless Plug:
I have decided to try building my own! Over a long enough timeline, it is doable, including the UI/UX part.
UI/UX is not the difficult part. The hard part is the geometric modeling kernel.
The history of FreeCAD proves that UI/UX is the hard part.
In practice everybody uses an off the shelf modeling kernel like Parasolid, ACIS, C3D, or OpenCascade.
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Is there a reason you don't just use FreeCAD, SolveSpace, Dune3D etc instead of attempting to develop all of this from scratch given that all of this software is open source in any case?
As I said, all these are optimized for Mechanical engineering, to the best of my knowledge. In civil, there are lots of standardization in 3D part and a lot more focus on 2D side. Major part of building design is using standard steel section. Mechanical side, apart from nut bolts, everything seems to be custom. Software interfaces prioritize these use cases.
Think of I beams, all major countries have national standards of shapes and sizes. There are many "devil in detail" nuances.
So, giving it a go myself. If not for others, at least for my own itch. This is one aspect of open source.
Spent hours and hours learning how to use it to draw a part. Got it done, but then didn't use it for a long time. Next time, couldn't remember how.
Finding Cadquery less of a hurdle for casual use. Wish I could run it from Termux though.
Traditional CAD software feels vaguely like programming -- it took a _lot_ of work to understand the fundamentals.
But once I did (on commercial software), switching to Freecad really wasn't that bad.
I used it once or twice to open an existing .step file just to know if I was exporting it correctly from KiCad.
Speaking of KiCad, I am convincing lots of people to move from EAGLE to it now that EAGLE is about to be killed by AutoDesk, and everyone seem to be having a good time.
I am hoping FreeCAD can become good to the point I can convince people to move to it too.
Autodesk should have started their own ECAD from scratch. They have mountains of CAD know-how in house. Their acquisition of EAGLE did nobody any favors.
I am not sad to see it go. The only ones I know of who used to use EAGLE were those who got hooked on it when it was either free or the cheapest option for hobbyists and small businesses. It didn't win any UI/UX competitions, certainly not against the joy that is modern programs for solid CAD.
KiCad is frustrating because it’s actually good enough to make a lot of models but it’s just unfriendly enough to make it take way too long to do… but it’s also still way easier than learning how to do it in a full-featured cad program.
I would kill for something like KiCad with more refined controls.
I wish KiCad had a constraint solver built-in for defining footprints and placing some key parts of a PCB. A better library management system would also be nice. That aside, I think their interactive router is pretty great, and a huge improvement over older versions. I first tried KiCad in 2016 or 2017 and routing traces was pretty dire, especially if you had to redo them for whatever reason.
Got any specific pain points for KiCad?
There's HorizonEDA. Just be prepared to spend a ridiculous amount of time setting parts up.
I can second Horizon EDA. It's not perfect, but it has the good KiCAD kernel without the abysmal UX.
FreeCAD may also be good - it's the only other one I haven't tried.
On the other hand if you're convincing EAGLE users to move they'll probably be happy with KiCAD because they're already used to an even worse UX, as if such a thing were possible.
Cadquery looks interesting. In particular STEP support compared to OpenSCAD. Thanks for mentioning.
Yep. I am doing all my CAD work with build123d. I think it is much more capable than OpenSCAD due to BREP and Python. A shame that it is still relatively unknown.
Wow this looks awesome! Thanks for the link.
FreeCAD is not great, it's painful to use but it's free and it works. I'm thankful for it.
I’ve really enjoyed Shapr3D (built on Parasolid). Nothing particularly better than the usual competitors but the interface is really intuitive and you can realistically develop on an iPad. Curious if anyone else has had experiences with it.
I like it to. I am just not happy with how they handle model history. And it is missing many of the tooling I like from things like Fusion. A thread tool would go a long way for hobbyists.
It’s my default. It is hands down the easiest to use modern CAD software today, and I’ve tried most of them. I too use it on the iPad and Mac, wish I could get it to install under WINE.
A very powerful feature of FreeCAD is its Python console. It is very useful when debugging software that uses/produces 3D solids. With it I was able to:
- colorise solid faces with random colors
- colorise faces by type (cylinder, plane, etc.)
- add 3D labels in the scene
I like freecad. I'm just not very good at using it. I rarely do sketches and part design. I end up doing stuff the kiddie way with just joining and cutting out basic shapes from the parts bench.
In a space that's being taken over by cloud shit where you have no privacy, FreeCAD is one of the last good CAD engineering tools left, let alone being FOSS.
I've crashed and burned in FreeCAD each time I've tried it (to be fair, that's happened in every other traditional 3D CAD program I've tried except Dune 3D) --- hoping that someone will update:
The thing which would really help me in FreeCAD would be having a graphical programming workbench as a first-class citizen, something like Grasshopper for Rhino3D, or the node editor in Moment of Inspiration 3D, or Dynamo as used for AutoDesk software --- any word on that?
> for the new UI --- any word on that? (Just an annotated copy would be great)
IMO it's a big improvement (I have it configured to only show small sized icons with labels) but then again I know not everyone is a fan of this type of toolbar because of the amount of screen space it takes up.
FreeCad - the Dark Souls of cad software.
Nice too see this here. I've been using FreeCAD a lot recently for various personal 3d projects.
I can't compare to any of the paid competitors as I've not used those, but in my opinion FreeCAD is slightly disappointing when it comes to UI, bugs and stability.
It's fine for simple stuff, but man, it can be frustrating to work with especially when working on something more complicated then running into random bugs or application crashes.
It's a great project though and very powerful.
Few points that I've not seen being factored in over the past decade-
* This needs a better renderer in today's day & age
* Need cross-device/web support
* Topology Optimization w/ pure physics code
-----
Hopefully LLMs can work on forking this or adding better features with AI-assists
The last thing FreeCAD needs is AI integration. LLM contributions to the project have been of poor quality so far (just like most LLM contributions to FOSS)
I really want to support open-source CAD, but it's so hard to take FreeCAD seriously. It reminds me of POV-Ray, which was (and still is) a parametric raytracer. An impressive feat of engineering completely derailed by the choice of a "UI" paradigm that made the simplest things unreasonably hard.
Designing 3D parts is hard enough, and while parametric modeling has uses... come on.
Parametric modelling is not the cause of the bad UI in FreeCAD, Fusion 360, Onshape, etc are also parametric. No, the main problems (last I tried it around 1.0) were that it had a clunky UI and that it was buggy. It would refuse to chamfer or bevel edges for no apparent reason that other CAD software wouldn't have issues with. There were occasionally crashes. Editing previous steps would destroy the later steps much more often than in other CAD software. Etc.
I would love to go back to FreeCAD, but for now I'm using Onshape (I run Linux, so Fusion isn't an option).
> It would refuse to chamfer or bevel edges for no apparent reason that other CAD software wouldn't have issues with.
I'm guessing you're trying to set a fillet which would completely consume one of the faces adjacent to the edge being filleted. In these cases I've found that a workaround is to make the fillet 0.001mm smaller than the size which would consume the entire face. You end up with a very very small amount of flat area but it's so small it doesn't show up during machining or 3d printing.
Usually the issue seemed to be with compound curves or where a filet tapers out as it meets up with a face going in another direction (such as a handle that sticks out).
FreeCAD relies on OpenCascade kernel to actually deal with the models, and yes, there's still room for improvement..
As I understand it, there are no other open source alternatives around. On the commercial side there are some, perhaps the foremost being the venerable Parasolid, which is used by Onshape, Solid Edge, Solid Works, Siemens NX, Shapr 3d and others.
Creating a solid 3d kernel is hard. Parasolid is from 1986.
> It would refuse to chamfer or bevel edges for no apparent reason that other CAD software wouldn't have issues with.
These are almost all caused because they use Open Cascade under the hood
I'm a big fan of FreeCAD and have been using it to design and sell 3d printed parts. The learning curve was kinda steep because FreeCAD really wants you to things the "FreeCAD way" but once I got past that I started to enjoy using it.
My only gripe with FreeCAD is that the program runs on a single CPU core as far as I can tell and it's easy to lock up the program for multiple seconds if you do too complex of an operation. This isn't usually an issue for me though.
What kind of parts do you sell? Do you print them yourself?
I'm a occasional hobbyist maker and i've used Autodesk Fusion, Solid Edge, OpenSCAD and other niche parametric programs, but always felt FreeCAD was too complex. But I really wanted it to work for me because it's FOSS and 100% offline. So with the new FreeCAD 1.1 RC I found an hour long tutorial and dove in. (1.1 is supposedly much easier to work with)
After doing the tut I can say that 1.1 is very nice, i can uninstall Fusion and Solid Edge finally :)
The guide i followed, no relation to it whatsoverer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxxDahY1U6E
I switched from Fusion to FreeCAD when I bid Windows goodbye (this video inspired me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEfNRST_3x8). Fusion does a LOT of stuff for you that FreeCAD doesn't - i.e. extrude a pad from two intersecting shapes in a sketch. While this is annoying at first I feel it forces me to design smarter. I've had a few crashes and the constraint solver sometimes seems to behave weird and takes a ctrl+z and a second attempt at the same action to properly add a constraint but overall my experience has been pretty positive.
> extrude a pad from two intersecting shapes in a sketch
You can do that in FreeCAD 1.1. Select the sketch, enable "Make Internals" in the data tab. You can also enable it permanently in settings.
This shows a general problem that FreeCAD still has: Inside an initially off-putting and frustrating UI experience is a really good application trying to get out, but at the moment a new user still has to dig it out themselves.
For example, problems like this one. Or the confusing 3D navigation (switch to Gesture or TinkerCAD mode in the Settings), or the non-interactive view cube. And many other gotchas and paper cuts that can almost all be changed with a few clicks to make it more intuitive, or just more similar to popular competition (e.g. the OpenTheme add-on gets you that Fusion look you see in many FreeCAD tutorial videos).
It's a classic pattern with long-running FOSS projects. The authors get somewhat blinded to the pain because they're used to it, plus change is difficult for the established userbase. There's also a feeling that emulating competitors is surrendering one's own identity, and the idea that some of the rough edges are justified by "the powerfulness". Thus radically changing defaults, streamlining, simplifying and even just matching user expectations is often perceived as "taking the power away" and really difficult to have the daring-do to just do. Even though on the other side of the transition a much larger and happier userbase awaits.
A lot of FOSS projects eventually do mature to the point where they can pull this off, and I think there's real signs that FreeCAD is starting to get there. The upcoming 1.1 release has a ton of modern UI catch-up, such as on-canvas gizmos, and a few good defaults changes.
There's a lot more work to do, but like others I have the feeling that FreeCAD may well be approaching its Blender/KiCAD moment. I suspect becoming a contributor right now could be good fun.
I speak from experience! We've to some extent been on a similar journey with the Plasma desktop.
I agree with you.
But there's also potential downsides to digging in and fixing the UI.
For instance: I've made a few simple boards with KiCAD. The first one was frustrating as hell and took forever, because my distro had helpfully installed the very latest version of KiCAD.
Meanwhile, the tutorials and videos were generally all about older versions. Which is fine, I guess, except way too many of them didn't even specify a version number.
So I (a complete newb) spent way too much time trying to find nonexistent UI widgets and being mystified that a given tutorial often seemed to be written by someone who was using different software entirely.
(The answer here is, of course, to have decent-enough official tutorials that stay in lock-step with software releases, so as to always get people started on the right page. But doing/enforcing that feels like work, and that's not usually what people want to feel when they volunteer to help write CAD software.)
> It's a classic pattern with long-running FOSS projects. The authors get somewhat blinded to the pain because they're used to it, plus change is difficult for the established userbase.
Thanks for putting into words something I've definitely felt for a long time. It's like a junky old car with broken dash controls- you get used to having to bang on things to make them work, but if someone needs to borrow your car they're like "this is how you live!?".
Well said. It seems to me, many FOSS projects suffer from long time contributors which are extremely conservative and don't like any kind of change. Hence every new or improved feature becomes merely a setting (which barely anybody will discover) which is not enabled by default. The UX does only worsen this way because old cruft coexists with its replacement, settings grow fast, the combinatorial explosion of all feature combinations produces tons of bugs and new users will always be turned off by the first use experience.
To make the necessary overhaul, someone with the "power to decide" is needed, which is somewhat incompatible with unpaid open source development. I think this video about Audacity's redesign is informative in this regard:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYM3TWf_G38
Please be careful about voicing generic complaints in a discussion of a specific product. IMO, FreeCAD 1.0 took some huge leaps in ergonomics. I was surprised about how much work had been done. The workers behind FreeCAD don't deserve lazy sniping that doesn't even apply to their creation.
My guess is that they might appreciate specific criticism. It would probably help focus the work they are doing. But don't generalize them to have all the usual problems everybody else always seems to have. That isn't very helpful to anybody.
But I mean it. In my opinion, all the criticism of my post also applies to FreeCAD, not just other projects. Look what brought this up: a hidden feature someone wanted but wasn't aware of.
I'm not trying to blame anyone. I think this is a structural problem with FOSS projects in general (and it also applies to FreeCAD specifically).
I think freeopinion is right, though. I don't think "Make internals" is off by default only because the developers are conservative, but because the meaning and behavior of it changed a few times recently around the merger of the RealThunder forks and the TNP work. I did a casual search and 2025 comments are full of it doing nothing.
So a more productive specific thing would perhaps be indeed to strike up a "It seems to work nicely now, why isn't it default?" convo and maybe figure out the remaining bugs.
> So a more productive specific thing would perhaps be indeed to strike up a "It seems to work nicely now, why isn't it default?"
That may be. It's just not what I'm interested in. I don't have the energy to fight lots of little battles to improve some minor things, when – in my perception – the end result would still *suck. I think a major rework is needed. For example, I don't think simply enabling "Make Internals" would be the best thing to do. IMO it should be always on AND the setting should be removed AND the toggle from the data view should be removed AND that would imply that it must always work bugfree so that nobody has a need to disable it. I don't think this is ever gonna happen if I start a discussion or even make a pull request.
* I'm not a hater, I'm a FreeCAD user. Out of all the offerings that exist, it's my preferred CAD tool for my private hobby use. I just wish it was better, because I see untapped potential.
> To make the necessary overhaul, someone with the "power to decide" is needed,
FOSS is a doer-cracy. If you have a pain point, patch it, and it will go away.
It seems like you've only read this half-sentence before replying.
What you say is part of the problem. It leads to "patchwork software" without a clear vision.
Vision is overrated if it’s not solving users’ problems. Software with a vision is kinda the bane of the industry right now (macos tahoe, copilot, windows 11,…)
> The authors get somewhat blinded to the pain because they're used to it, plus change is difficult for the established userbase. There's also a feeling that emulating competitors is surrendering one's own identity, and the idea that some of the rough edges are justified by "the powerfulness". Thus radically changing defaults, streamlining, simplifying and even just matching user expectations is often perceived as "taking the power away" and really difficult to have the daring-do to just do. Even though on the other side of the transition a much larger and happier userbase awaits.
I think it is unfair to say that they are "blinded to the pain". They are well aware of it from what I've seen of the Dev discussions on Discord. But the vast majority of the devs are volunteers so they can only do so much so fast. There are also some very nice usability improvements as of late that borrow from other programs, like the Solidworks-style navigation settings and the on-screen draggers for pad / pocket / transform type operations. Yes there are tons of preferences and some of the defaults might not be great, but they've added a "Search Preferences" field to help sort through them all. Then there are issues like in the link below where the discussion of how to improve FreeCAD considers comparisons with other pieces of software.
https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD/issues/19440#issuecomment...
Another point I'll add is their creation of a Design Working Group to help sort through usability issues and generate a consensus for devs to subsequently implement.
I would think it would be beneficial to the companies that make 3D printers and CNC machines to help fund some of these efforts... I've found it often takes the input of commercial interests to get general UX improvements into open-source.
ex: really impressed with the direction of Audacity as an example, though I can also understand why a given community would reject such influence from a single org.
> I think it is unfair to say that they are "blinded to the pain".
I mean it more in the sense that it's very difficult to truly conceive of what a new user of the app would stumble over or dislike, if you're very used to it yourself.
Often that means small things that would not be that hard to address become invisible, because there's obvious higher priorities. Other times, things are considered small fries that actually are consistently wrong and need a holistic re-think.
One of the best things to do is to actually watch novice users use your software. This was also a big boost to the "Blender moment", when the Blender studio started inviting over artist and just watched them work in the software. This used to be really hard to do, but has now become a bit easier with screencasting and conferencing tools. I bet FreeCAD is also starting to do more of this.
Thanks for adding additional info! I forgot to mention the Design Working Group as another sign. In KDE we also set up a similar "Visual Design Group" years ago that was behind a lot of the improvements.
It would be interesting if FreeCAD could iterate towards something that is also easy for agents to use. I have seen cases of people doing this with Blender.
I too feel like the latest versions are quite a big improvement and I finally lost that feeling of slowing myself down just for the sake of using OSS.
But I still hope for a "blender moment" where a concerted effort gets rid of old cruft, improves UI/UX and jump-starts growth (also in developers/funding) and further improvements.
It's probably impossible for FreeCAD to catch up with the industry-standard CAD systems (SOLIDWORKS, NX, Fusion) unless they somehow pour a stupendous amount of money into their geometry kernel [1].
All major CAD systems use mature geometry kernels like Parasolid [2]. Parasolid was developed for 40 years and is still in active development. This is the piece of code that enables CAD systems to do things like computing an intersection of a G3 smooth fillet with embossed text, handling all corner cases.
FreeCAD runs on OpenCASCADE [3], which is both less sophisticated today and is slower to gain new features than Parasolid, being seemingly maintained by one person [4]. FreeCAD's geometry is hard limited by what OpenCASCADE can do.
This is the main difference from Blender. Blender ultimately operates on vertices, which doesn't require nearly the same level of inherent complexity. Blender isn't bottlenecked in what it can do like FreeCAD is.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_modeling_kernel
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasolid
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Cascade_Technology
[4]: https://github.com/Open-Cascade-SAS/OCCT/commits/master/
I kinda wish blender could just do CAD honestly,
It feels like all those 3D modeling apps like 3DSmax,Fusion even Zbrush share like 90% of their feature set but your are forced to literally juggle(for videogame dev at least) because of one or two arguably extremely niche capability.
It may look like they're all easily interchangable because the UI and actions are similar (you have a viewport and can do extrudes, etc..) but fundamentally, they're all working on very different objects at their core. Blender and 3DS Max are the most alike, but Zbrush is an entirely different paradigm and so is parametric CAD. An extrude in Blender is massively different from a pad in FreeCAD.
Maybe, with a ton of time and effort the blender UI could be abstracted from most of the box-modeling approach and then pasted over a different paradigm, but It'd take tens of thousands of hours I imagine,.
You can do sculpting in Blender as well as parametric objects, similarly you can emulate most of substance designer with shaders, maybe just not _quite_ good enough that's the thing.
It feels like we have been so so close to an unified 3D content creation tool kit for many years now!
Blender is a mesh editor at its heart. That isn't suitable for CAD work.
>> I kinda wish blender could just do CAD honestly
Have you tried the "CAD sketcher" add-on? I think Blender should have similar functionality built-in, but for now this looks like a nice add-on.
Blender is a very very long way from being used as a general purpose CAD tool, and IMHO it should not strive to be that. But having this ability to do simple CAD designs without opening and learning a different program is cool.
That's my opinion but I think that game/cinema/whatever 3D modeling should lean more and more toward CAD like workflow.
If we want to bring those medium to the next level.
Yeah, I avoided Fusion (etc.) because of the usual bait-and-switch I've seen with commercial applications that claim to be "free" at some point. If I'm going to invest in learning a new application, I'd rather it be an open one.
I dove into FreeCAD with either version 1.0.0 or earlier. It was… rough.
To be sure, it was a whole new app so I expect initial navigation around the app to be challenging. But, wow.
Nonetheless, I did get a few things modeled up [1]. And for that I have to thank LLMs for steering me through using the app. I suggest others to try an LLM as a guide if you are learning (and I still am learning, of course). I like tutorials, but so often you can spend hours watching tutorials that cover all manner of ground where you simply want to complete a specific task—unable to find the tutorial covering how to do it.
Having said that though, I am eager to try this 1.0.2 version. (I'm also eager to fix a few minor MacOS-specific nits that I've already seen.)
[1] https://engineersneedart.com/blog/3dprinting2025/3dprinting2...
I've spent a decent amount of time on the FreeCAD Discord and more than one advanced user on there suggests treating FreeCAD like a rolling release. So I've been using the weekly FlatPack builds and have had a great experience. FreeCAD has been taking some big steps recently and by sticking with 1.0.0 / 1.0.2, you're basically missing out on almost a year's worth of improvements.
And the tutorial by Mango Jelly Solutions on YouTube are fantastic. They are generally very focused on one particular task per video so I think you'd find them really useful.
Thanks, I'll both pull down the dev builds and will check out Mango Jelly's channel.
> If I'm going to invest in learning a new application, I'd rather it be an open one.
I wouldn't worry about it too much. The concepts are very transferrable.
At work I used to use SolidWorks exclusively, now I'm using Onshape and will probably switch to Inventor soon. At home I typically use Fusion 360. They all work more-or-less the same and moving between them isn't too hard.
I find SOLIDWORKS for Makers [1] a great middle ground between bait-and-switch "free" Fusion and the real, very expensive, deal. SW is one of industry standards, its interface is much better than FreeCAD's, and it's more powerful than both FreeCAD and Fusion. For example, both FreeCAD and Fusion struggle with G2/G3 smoothness [2] where SW doesn't even blink. Fusion doesn't allow to pattern features on sketch points (it's gated behind an expensive add-on [3]) when it's a built-in feature in SW.
[1]: https://www.solidworks.com/solution/solidworks-makers
[2]: https://www.printables.com/model/1490911-g0-g3-corners-visua...
[3]: https://www.autodesk.com/uk/products/fusion-360/design-exten...
Have you tried SolveSpace? It's easily my favorite open source CAD program. The main things it's missing are shells, fillets, and chamfers. But I've been able to 3D print quite a few parts using it!
You might want to check out Dune3D. It advertises itself as combining the constraint solver from SolveSpace with a OpenCASCADE geometry kernel supporting fillets and chamfers. :)
Haven't used it much apart from some minor tests (I tend to prefer MoI3D, but that's in a different category in several ways...), but as far as FOSS solid modelers it seems like the most promising to me. I do remember some small UI quirks, but overall it felt very approachable and streamlined, and looking at the GitHub repo, development is active. FreeCAD IMHO is just too sprawling and complex, with seemingly little tought paid to UI/UX.
Agreed: The Dune3D developers made the wise decision to start from scratch implementing a parametric modeling UI. Extremely robust software; very fast, and almost intuitive (high praise for CAD).
The problem with FreeCAD, on the other hand, is that it's a "just two more weeks and it'll be great" solution.
The developers are clearly talented in a raw-math kind of way, but FreeCAD offers the eternal promise of usability in the next release; while never delivering it.
Those who are profoundly cynical might consider the possibility that the legacy CAD industry has infiltrated the FreeCAD development team and run Pied-Piper ops there to prevent a Blender-moment stealing their revenue.
This would perfectly explain why the FreeCAD experience is so consistently bizarre.
This. I just can’t bring myself to use FreeCAD for anything. It’s been almost a decade of occasional attempts during vacation breaks and it is still one of the worst, most counter-intuitive pieces of 3D software I’ve ever used (and I paid my way through college doing early multimedia work, some 30 years ago).
Dune3D is by the same developer as HorizonEDA, a KiCad alternative.
Has anyone tried that too?
>Those who are profoundly cynical might consider the possibility that the legacy CAD industry has infiltrated the FreeCAD development team and run Pied-Piper ops there to prevent a Blender-moment stealing their revenue.
If you've been around on the FreeCAD forums, you'll see that the majority of users essentially believe that all comparisons of FreeCAD with commercial CAD software is illegitimate and become incredibly defensive. They have developed a huge arsenal of coping strategies to avoid improving FreeCAD and the results speak for themselves.
It's like they've got the Steve Jobs attitude but without the good taste that justified it.
>They have developed a huge arsenal of coping strategies to avoid improving FreeCAD and the results speak for themselves.
Exactly. These FreeCAD "strategies" you mention align themselves perfectly with the objectives of the legacy CAD industry: To delay; break; and obfuscate opensource CAD.
In other words: The FreeCAD team may not be infiltrated by the legacy-CAD industry, but its behavior is entirely consistent with such a state.
One solution is to fork the behemoth; but if FreeCAD is a hedge-maze-by-design, the only way to win is not to play the game: Build alternatives elsewhere, from scratch.
FreeCAD feels like a time-drainer honeypot. Though whether by accident, or malice, is unknown.
I was excited about dune3d but one of the things I needed to do I had to import an SVG as a path to extrude (or similar) and I couldn't see a way to do it.
I managed to do it (painfully) with freecad, so that's what I settled with.
Does anyone know if that's a feature yet?
Dune 3D developer here. Use inkscape to convert the SVG path to DXF and import that.
Yeah I actually have. I really liked the concept, but I designed a cylinder with many holes (think a robust sieve) and it just crashed when the number of holes grew too great. Even the OpenCL/MP version. I felt it being unstable in other ways too so I did not make it my go to tool. Sadly it also seems it's not being developed much.
EDIT: Missing fillets and chamfers we're also a big problem for me - probably I'm just a newbie maker and want unreasonable things, but still.
Just checked it out [1] but it appears the last version released was in 2022? Makes me wonder if it is still active.
[1] https://solvespace.com/index.pl
We have been very close to version 3.2 final for far too long. Development has slowed but not stopped. I would try a nightly/development build.
Solvespace is nice, but missing fillets and chamfers is kind of a deal-breaker. Last time I tried it it also had issues with small holes turning into diamonds.
That said, pre-1.0 FreeCAD had a terrible UX so it was the best FOSS CAD option.
With the 1.0 release of FreeCAD the UX is much better though. There are still a few WTFs (e.g. it took me quite a while to figure out rollback is done via right-click->set tip, or something like that)... But overall it's better than Solvespace now.
If you want a solvespace with chamfers and fillets, then give Dune 3D a try.
Disclaimer: Dune 3D developer here.
Yeah, I use FreeCAD when I need fillets/chamfers... before that, I usually model my 3d printer stuff using OpenSCAD.
Set tip makes sense if you think of the steps taken to build up a parts as a history. Setting the tip isn't a rollback. It is saying "I want to insert a new step in the history".
For me, as a beginner in Freecad and 3d modelling I kept being unable to interpret/remember all the tool icons, and remember the shortcuts while learning.
I found this command palette that helped me discover the different commands and actually get to (beginner) proficient.[0].
Again, no relation, but it's what made it stick for me after a few aborted learning attempts. (and I had a lot of fun with freecad! Especially by my second or third model where I could actually just sit down and start modelling without having to learn any extra things. Now I just need an excuse to find something else to model...)
[0] https://github.com/ddfisher/FreeCAD-CommandPalette
I've been treating FreeCAD like a rolling release by using the weekly Flatpack builds and it has been a pretty good experience so far. Based on a good model I was given as a starting point and a lot of Mango Jelly Solutions videos, I've developed a detailed model of the Virtual Pinball machine I'm building now. It has been huge in saving me from countless mistakes in the actual build.
https://github.com/dekay/vpin-cabinet/
Yeah I have been able to use it as a complete novice with CAD, albeit making planning out quite simple household things.
I feel like most of the opinions about FreeCAD online are out of date, since at least 1.0 if not later.
I mainly use it for planning things to make out of wood or print out of plastic.
I can never leave Solid Edge. Synchronous editing is simply the best for 3d printing and fast iteration when you're experimenting with designs.
Yeah I still consider Solid Edge very good. Easy to work with, does not require internet, no stupid limitations (like the 10 model limitation for Fusion). Many tutorials, etc. But still, they might revoke their free license at any moment and I am out of a tool, and wasted experience.
I think Dune 3D making constraints available in 3D space is not quite the same, but at least a bit adjacent.
OnShape?
Similar experience. I tried to learn FreeCAD a while ago. People recommended Mango Jelly's tutorials. I used those among others and dove in. However, it was a pretty frustrating experience. Things never worked quite right. I would drill into a certain point and then realized you couldn't get there from here, and had to start over.
I recently had a desperate need to 3D print a part and tried FreeCAD again. A couple of things changed: 1) 1.1 came out and 2) Mango Jelly created a playlist that essentially was "bare bones what you need to know to get started." It was slightly over an hour of the fundamentals of navigating and just enough tools.
I think FreeCAD was basically just way too buggy initially, especially on macOS. Things never worked like tutorials said, or even dot updates sometimes broke what was being taught in tutorials. Also, while great, MJ's other previous videos deep dove into specific tools. Over half of any particular video would discuss features that helped you become an expert, but overwhelming when it came to getting up and running.
Since then, I've felt much more confident about FreeCAD and have used it to knock out other pieces.
Yeah the tutorial I linked was from Mango Jelly for FreeCAD 1.1 :) He seems to have a perfect balance of getting it done, and you understanding what you are doing.
This. 1.0 and 1.1 are monumental improvements over the decades of releases that came before.
I struggled through the earlier releases and now I use OnShape because I can seamlessly switch between work and personal computers. If I ever can drop that requirement I'd love to go back to FreeCAD now that it's "good".
(I’ve posted this before on HN but it’s worth repeating)
I’m an CAD hobbyist, and I’ve tried to work with FreeCAD multiple times over past years, always failing….
…until I saw this video and learned about version 1.1:
https://youtu.be/VEfNRST_3x8
FreeCAD is now in the same ballpark of capability and usability as Solidworks. It can still be a bit clunky and frustrating sometimes, but then so can most CAD programs, in their own ways.
Side note: the creator of the video above also has a video on optimising the FreeCAD interface. (There are some frustrations related to the interface generally, and this would seem to be a low hanging fruit for the FreeCAD team to address.)
In terms of ux as a beginner what made me able to learn effectively was a command palette add-on (outlined here)[0].
It really sped up learning for me. (because I'd know what the thing I wanted was called, but couldn't find them, and having to google and search before every click is... not fun)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47088675
Awesome, thanks for repeating.
I have, like, an old married couple relationship with SolidWorks. Stockholm syndrome may be more accurate. It shaped how I think, it aggravates me as only a long-time companion could, but overall I'm fond of it.
It gives me hope that others have made the switch. I've wanted to love FreeCAD for a long time, too.
I recently gave CadQuery (a Python wrapper around OpenCASCADE) and its Jupyter and VSCode integrations another try. Two years ago installation was a mess across conda, Docker, and pyenv, and the API itself felt like a dense, bespoke DSL you had to fight.
This time everything just installed, and Claude Code turned out to be pretty good. Designing with code is sometimes more work upfront, but iteration is so much better. You get proper abstractions: functions, encapsulation, loops. You can drop in a SAT solver to optimize part placement or grab data from an excel sheet. No more clicking through a GUI that crashes and loses your session. I've spent time with Fusion, SolidWorks, NX, OnShape, FreeCAD, and Rhino, and each has its merits, but none of them can benefit from the LLM revolution the way a code-first tool can.
I asked Claude Code to generate a set of Lego bricks in various sizes, apply a nice color palette, and pack them optimally into a grid. It needed some steering, but all in all I was impressed
I believe there's a cadquery workbench for freecad, I messed around with it about a year ago but ran into similar struggles as you describe. I'll have to give it another try.
not really. cadquery started as a freecad workbench, but moved out a long while ago. So current cadquery isn't usable inside freecad (which is a shame).
also worth a look: build123d
Yeah, I found it much more interesting when it was in FreeCAD --- wish there was some nice, graphical alternative (something like Grasshopper).
I just learned about build123d from another comment here, very excited to try it out!
I wish they would just copy the gui format of Solidworks, Creo, NX, etc. Every time I open it to try and learn it, it frustrates the crap out of me and I close it until it's been long enough that I'm willing to try again.
MangoJelly makes great video tutorials for FreeCAD: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUWhaOxsRk_5oPPq00_Y7Dw "MangoJelly Solutions for FreeCAD"
I only used it for some hobby modeling, but I have to say it's fantastic and very impressive.
It seems like it's fully community-maintained, there is no big company or foundation behind it. Honestly it's hard to believe!
There was just one major problem, the infamous "topological naming problem" which caused issues downstream is you edited a non-leaf node. That was pretty frustrating to deal with, but in later releases they fixed it I think. (Have not tried it since because I didn't have anything to model)
The solution for Topological Naming Problem (TNP) was merged just before the 1.0 release. A lot of other significant changes were also merged in at the same time. Some people have reported that the UX has improved a lot since then.
I don't know much about the internal architecture of FreeCAD. As far as I know, FreeCAD does a lot of heavy lifting including managing TNP. It's supposed to be handled by the CAD kernel - OpenCASCADE in this case. I suspect that the reason why open source CAD lags behind their proprietary counterparts is really the CAD kernel. Many proprietary CAD software share the same kernel, in fact. For example, SolidWorks, Solid Edge and OnShape use Parasolid. It tells you how critical the kernel is.
Perhaps we should be focusing more on a more capable open source CAD kernel. There are a few projects around that are trying this. But they either have very limited scopes, or don't have enough support and momentum.
Not a solution, but could be one of the problems we should tell the "LLMs will replace software engineers" crowd to implement.
Maybe then they'll notice that without Open Source training data it won't be able to solve the problem.
It's possible that the training data (and research data) is already out there, just not (yet) combined into a single open source CAD kernel.
Then again, the success of such a project might depend on other factors. Given the complexity of the task, I can imagine that just "lucking into" the right design decisions early on could have a major impact.
I feel CAD is one area where open source does not shine. The problem space is too complex, and the UIs demand continuous, thoughtful development driven from customer demands rather than developers scratching their own itches.
Not least there are free (as in beer) solutions available, like fusion 360, that are enormously capable.
Theres certainly a place for open source, and openscad would be a great tool to reach for for procedurally generated models. But in all honesty, Freecad doesn't compare well to the professional tools in this space - not in the way that say, gimp does to its commercial competitors.
The reason being that Open Source is a bunch of people who approach EVERYTHING as a programming problem, and they are chronically allergic to graphics, graphical UIs, and any kind of sense of what user interactions are a good experience.
They don't start with "how do users want this to operate?" They start with a weekend of coding, applying their preconceived notions, a library of fancy algorithms that are not directly motivated by an actual feature, and they go from there. This does not lead to a good product, as in something that could earn you money on an open market. It only prevails, in spite of nobody wanting to pay for it, because they give it away for free, and they sink their own "disposable time" (and maybe even income) into the project.
The real problem is that BREP CAD kernels are hard. A few of proprietary kernels dominate the scene: Parasolid powers NX, SolidWorks, Fusion, and Onshape, while ACIS (owned by Dassault) is used by Inventor and BricsCAD. Catia uses Dassault's own CGM kernel. The open-source world relies mostly on OpenCASCADE, which is unfortunately a lot less capable than any of these.
Fillets and chamfers are a good example. They seem simple but are geometrically non-trivial, and OCC will fail on cases that Parasolid handles without complaint. You can push either kernel to its limits if you try hard enough, but OCC hits that ceiling much sooner. So any CAD tool built on top of it inherits that ceiling too.
> Fillets and chamfers are a good example. They seem simple but are geometrically non-trivial, and OCC will fail on cases that Parasolid handles without complaint.
A long time ago I interviewed at one of the large CAD companies. I remember getting an office tour and the person showing me around pointed into a corner with six desks and said "that is the team that does fillets".
Open source tools can handle some cases, but to handle the full complexity of real world problems is a huge extra step that I doubt they will manage any time soon.
Do you think this is why CAD software UI/UX is often so clunky? The kernels are complicated and error-prone given the incalculable number of edge-cases, which puts error reporting at a disadvantage, leads to counter-intuitive feature wizards with some having way too many parameters and others being very single-purpose?
That's one of the real problems. The other real problem is an active resistance to UI improvement simply because another CAD package did something similar.
> the UIs demand continuous, thoughtful development
The current AutoCAD GUI is essentially unchanged from the 80s, so this shouldn't really be much of an issue. They added a ribbon probably 15 years ago at this point, but I can't think of any other major/recent changes. (But maybe there are some changes that I'm not familiar with, since I don't use AutoCAD very often and only started using it relatively recently)
People aren't talking about AutoCAD, but things such as Autodesk Inventor, AD Fusion 360, ...
> I feel CAD is one area where open source does not shine.
Many such cases, not only in CAD area. Good non-dev FOSS software is exception, not a rule, and these exceptions pretty often have some corporate backing and are not purely community-driven. And even for dev tools there are proprietary offerings that are light-years ahead of anything FOSS, though people here are never going to admit it, as TTY clone running vi clone is supposedly all you need.
I don't state this with satisfaction, quite the opposite, but it is long since I became disillusioned.
fusion 360 is exactly "free" for that reason, to make people reason like you do. They do not want a blender moment.
Note as a Linux user, the only version of Fusion you can really use is the (bad) browser one, which requires a $900/year subscription. I like Fusion, but this is a powerful motivator to make due with FreeCAD or Dune3D.
Fusion 360 and my golf sim software are the only two reasons I have windows dual boot.
I'm use Vectorworks professionally, but that's because it's become the de-facto program for drawing in the entertainment / production space, and uses Parasolid. I'd love to have any, ANY alternative to VW and Nemetschek's awful pricing / subscription scheme, but I don't see FreeCAD being a competitor in this space for many, many years. Maybe for hobbyists, but I agree that the problem space is oversized for a community project like FreeCAD.
Another advantage of OpenSCAD (if you can call it that) is that LLMs seem to be able to work with it pretty well. A few days ago I asked chatgpt to make me a box for storing batteries, and it came out perfect on first try without any modification. It also made an okay-ish looking 3D pelican after some back-and-forth.
The problem with openSCAD is that you cannot modify it easily. I had made a complex geometry several years ago in openSCAD and I have been waiting for a model that can actually convert it into a python script that generates freecad parametric sketches that recreate it in an editable way. All frontier models fail at this, some more spectacularly than others (gemini never spent 40 minutes / $4 trying and failing, but opus 4.6 did).
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4335532
OpenSCAD is ideal for making models that can be modified! You have to program your models with the mindset of parametric CAD though, if I was making a battery case I would start by defining variables for battery length, diameter and count and work from there.
Your ball looks well parametrized to me, what kind of editing are you missing from it? Unless you want to change the shape of the locking mechanism altogether, which I think would be a chore in any format.
Yeah the lock is what needs iterating. It was always marginal and took several rounds of prototyping to even get to a printable state. I'd like to experiment with something like a keyed screw.
The issue with this scad file is that I built the geometry up with no functions. I tried and failed to get them working so I just pushed through, so now it is mind melting to try to refactor it. I'm hoping to one day melt a mechanical mind to get it done. Until then, it's a fun challenge prompt for these models.
Openscad models are a bit like complex regexps, write only artifacts that do the job at the time but are regarded with trepidation afterwards.
I never understood this UI problem.
Because... You can copy the UI of the leader and problem solved.
There you have GIMP with an absolute nightmare UI to use, but people keep saying, just get used to it. On the other hand, a single developer, in javascript, made a copy of photoshop, and most people I know prefer to use that over GIMP...
Just copy the UI that works, if you can't research your own UI.
I use GIMP and FreeCAD quite often and find them very powerful programs, but maybe I'm some sort of genius? I think where these programs don't do well is among the crowd who expect to be able to just click around an advanced piece of software and somehow it just works to get things done! For basic apps this is a reasonable expectation, but CAD is not a simple process.
PS: I've still not managed to learn Blender, not put enough hours in, it is a hugely complex beast of a program that basically requires keyboard shortcut use imho. That interface (beautiful as it is) has so many options that even if I know what I'm looking for I can't find it!
Yeah, to use these UIs you gotta think like a programmer.
Part of what made Blender accessible around 2001-2002 when I was using it regularly was a really great paperback book[1] that served as a tutorial and reference. The UX was strange to be sure but after reading through the ~200 pages and getting acclimatized, it all began to feel sensible. If not for that book I would have bounced off Blender and never looked back.
[1] https://www.abebooks.com/Blender-Book-Carsten-Wartmann-Starc...
>Because... You can copy the UI of the leader and problem solved.
For whatever reason, the FreeCAD community is explicitly against taking note from competitors. Copying the UI of the leader is a thoughtcrime.
No it isn’t, stop being silly.
> There you have GIMP with an absolute nightmare UI to use, but people keep saying, just get used to it.
Which is something I find odd that so many people seem to assume GIMP as the de-facto open source photoshop alternative when Krita is more analogous and much easier to use.
Do you mean photopea?
Great alternative in-browser.
I do, it is indeed. I'm always surprised that a single developer in javascript managed to do it.
Why do you think GIMP is a nightmare? I don’t find it problematic at all. The only issue I’m hitting once in a while is that I click on a button on the toolbar, and I guess I hit its edge, as I doesn’t switch modes. Other than that, I don’t have any complaints at all. What are yours?
Adding a text that has a couple of pixel white borders is something possible in GIMP, yet a nightmare compared with photopea which just copy cs2 way of doing it.
And that is without having to edit the text in case you made a tipo.
Now, if we are talking about doing batch image editing in python. Gimp us the best tool I've found.
It's mostly a received holdover opinion from the days when Gimp still defaulted to being strongly multi-windowed. The people who keep repeating it probably haven't used Gimp for a while. The usability may still not match Photoshop, but at this point the Gimp UI is largely conventional for this genre of software.
Popular opinions take ages to shift sadly.
I don’t know, I tried FreeCAD a few months ago and it was buggy as hell. I did some really basic extrusions and distance constraints. But ended up with non-perpendicular entities despite not constructing it like this.
I assure you that my 3d prints look like what I designed them.
FreeCAD is the first program I ever used where I actually drafted hate mail to the devs (but the oss nature gave me restraint in actually pressing send)
I spent 2 days crash coursing freeCAD (this is with a general understanding of the theory of 3D design already) to try and make an adapter plate for my car. A plate with 6 holes in precise spots and tapped. It was absolutely brutal and after the first 3D print trial had the a couple holes misaligned, I trashed freecad got the free fusion360.
No shit, in 20 minutes I had made the exact part I needed. The program actually worked the way you would expect. I didn't even need a tutorial it was so intuitive. Even if I hadn't spent the previous 2 days getting bent by freecad, I'm pretty sure it would have taken me only an hour max with a blank slate mind in fusion.
Now I'm getting angry writing this. If the FreeCAD guys see this, thanks for the hard work, but understand your minds must work completely differently than even the average engineers.
I am not trained to be a mechanical engineer. I wanted to explore 3D printing. The usual suspects (FOSS missionaries with a deep-rooted hotly burning hate for capitalism) gave me OpenSCAD, which was okay to dick around with but QUICKLY showed its clunkiness ("compiling"... what a joke). So then I gave FreeCAD a look, because everyone said it's just like the commerical programs. It was not. Documentation and tutorials were a mess. The program itself was a mess. UX that makes you want to strangle someone.
So then I looked for free student versions of commercial software. They had a clear UI and UX, clear tutorials. It was a joy to model the parts I needed.
If I needed 3D modeling for engineering in the future, I would absolutely pay for a commercial program. FreeCAD was simply no competition. I don't know if it is now. Nor do I have any motivation whatsoever to even bother to give it another look.
If I need a license for hobbyist purposes, I'm sure some of the commercial offerings are happy to give me one for free because that would translate into commerce for them if I ever needed it professionally.
I learned CAD (formally, in a classroom) on Solidworks/AutoCAD, and once I understood the difference between part and part design, I didn't have major issues with FreeCAD-the concepts of good modeling are the same. I had some "okay, what does this software call this function" moments, but it wasn't nearly as bad as when I learned NX and couldn't find the constraints menu. I personally find the shortcomings in techdraw & assembly to be a much bigger problem than the UI-frankly, if I compare it to every engineering software I've used, it is solidly middle-of-the-pack in UI. The worst ones were commercial, expensive software. At least with FreeCAD if something is unbearably stupid I can go in and _fix_ it.
I will try the newer version again. Last I tried 2 years or so back, it was crashing for me.
Personal Context: I am a civil enginer, and our requirement from CAD softwares are a lot simpler than Mechanical Engineering. Here on HN, whenever I see people discussing CAD, its the mechanical version of parts and 3d printing.
Shameless Plug: I have decided to try building my own! Over a long enough timeline, it is doable, including the UI/UX part.
https://mv.ramshanker.in/
UI/UX is not the difficult part. The hard part is the geometric modeling kernel.
The history of FreeCAD proves that UI/UX is the hard part.
In practice everybody uses an off the shelf modeling kernel like Parasolid, ACIS, C3D, or OpenCascade.
Is there a reason you don't just use FreeCAD, SolveSpace, Dune3D etc instead of attempting to develop all of this from scratch given that all of this software is open source in any case?
As I said, all these are optimized for Mechanical engineering, to the best of my knowledge. In civil, there are lots of standardization in 3D part and a lot more focus on 2D side. Major part of building design is using standard steel section. Mechanical side, apart from nut bolts, everything seems to be custom. Software interfaces prioritize these use cases.
Think of I beams, all major countries have national standards of shapes and sizes. There are many "devil in detail" nuances.
So, giving it a go myself. If not for others, at least for my own itch. This is one aspect of open source.
Spent hours and hours learning how to use it to draw a part. Got it done, but then didn't use it for a long time. Next time, couldn't remember how.
Finding Cadquery less of a hurdle for casual use. Wish I could run it from Termux though.
Traditional CAD software feels vaguely like programming -- it took a _lot_ of work to understand the fundamentals.
But once I did (on commercial software), switching to Freecad really wasn't that bad.
I used it once or twice to open an existing .step file just to know if I was exporting it correctly from KiCad.
Speaking of KiCad, I am convincing lots of people to move from EAGLE to it now that EAGLE is about to be killed by AutoDesk, and everyone seem to be having a good time.
I am hoping FreeCAD can become good to the point I can convince people to move to it too.
Autodesk should have started their own ECAD from scratch. They have mountains of CAD know-how in house. Their acquisition of EAGLE did nobody any favors.
I am not sad to see it go. The only ones I know of who used to use EAGLE were those who got hooked on it when it was either free or the cheapest option for hobbyists and small businesses. It didn't win any UI/UX competitions, certainly not against the joy that is modern programs for solid CAD.
KiCad is frustrating because it’s actually good enough to make a lot of models but it’s just unfriendly enough to make it take way too long to do… but it’s also still way easier than learning how to do it in a full-featured cad program.
I would kill for something like KiCad with more refined controls.
I wish KiCad had a constraint solver built-in for defining footprints and placing some key parts of a PCB. A better library management system would also be nice. That aside, I think their interactive router is pretty great, and a huge improvement over older versions. I first tried KiCad in 2016 or 2017 and routing traces was pretty dire, especially if you had to redo them for whatever reason.
Got any specific pain points for KiCad?
There's HorizonEDA. Just be prepared to spend a ridiculous amount of time setting parts up.
I can second Horizon EDA. It's not perfect, but it has the good KiCAD kernel without the abysmal UX.
FreeCAD may also be good - it's the only other one I haven't tried.
On the other hand if you're convincing EAGLE users to move they'll probably be happy with KiCAD because they're already used to an even worse UX, as if such a thing were possible.
Cadquery looks interesting. In particular STEP support compared to OpenSCAD. Thanks for mentioning.
Try Build123d! It is just a joy to work with.
PythonSCAD recently gained STEP export:
https://pythonscad.org/
I'm pretty happy with build123d these days https://github.com/gumyr/build123d
Yep. I am doing all my CAD work with build123d. I think it is much more capable than OpenSCAD due to BREP and Python. A shame that it is still relatively unknown.
Wow this looks awesome! Thanks for the link.
FreeCAD is not great, it's painful to use but it's free and it works. I'm thankful for it.
I’ve really enjoyed Shapr3D (built on Parasolid). Nothing particularly better than the usual competitors but the interface is really intuitive and you can realistically develop on an iPad. Curious if anyone else has had experiences with it.
I like it to. I am just not happy with how they handle model history. And it is missing many of the tooling I like from things like Fusion. A thread tool would go a long way for hobbyists.
It’s my default. It is hands down the easiest to use modern CAD software today, and I’ve tried most of them. I too use it on the iPad and Mac, wish I could get it to install under WINE.
A very powerful feature of FreeCAD is its Python console. It is very useful when debugging software that uses/produces 3D solids. With it I was able to:
- colorise solid faces with random colors
- colorise faces by type (cylinder, plane, etc.)
- add 3D labels in the scene
I like freecad. I'm just not very good at using it. I rarely do sketches and part design. I end up doing stuff the kiddie way with just joining and cutting out basic shapes from the parts bench.
In a space that's being taken over by cloud shit where you have no privacy, FreeCAD is one of the last good CAD engineering tools left, let alone being FOSS.
I've crashed and burned in FreeCAD each time I've tried it (to be fair, that's happened in every other traditional 3D CAD program I've tried except Dune 3D) --- hoping that someone will update:
https://magazine.raspberrypi.com/books/freecad
for the new UI --- any word on that? (Just an annotated copy would be great)
Apparently, one of the devs from Ondsel has done a soft-fork and is stumping for funding:
https://www.astocad.com/
(but he wasn't interested in the feature I want, see below)
That said, I managed to make it through the tutorial for Dune 3D twice now (after a fashion), and I think that the tutorial needs to do a better job of explaining concepts from first principles: https://github.com/dune3d/dune3d/discussions/118 and https://github.com/dune3d/dune3d/discussions/252 c.f., my own attempt to explain the commercial CAD/CAM software which a company I work for sells/supports: https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/2d-drawing --- is there a really good book which explains fundamental 3D CAD concepts and terminology?
I'm way more successful w/ OpenSCAD (usually by way of BlockSCAD: https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/ or https://github.com/derkork/openscad-graph-editor) and the available printed books help a lot, though I've been using the new Python integrated version:
https://pythonscad.org/
https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview
The thing which would really help me in FreeCAD would be having a graphical programming workbench as a first-class citizen, something like Grasshopper for Rhino3D, or the node editor in Moment of Inspiration 3D, or Dynamo as used for AutoDesk software --- any word on that?
> for the new UI --- any word on that? (Just an annotated copy would be great)
I also am not a fan of the icon-only toolbars and so I always use this plugin: https://github.com/APEbbers/FreeCAD-Ribbon
IMO it's a big improvement (I have it configured to only show small sized icons with labels) but then again I know not everyone is a fan of this type of toolbar because of the amount of screen space it takes up.
FreeCad - the Dark Souls of cad software.
Nice too see this here. I've been using FreeCAD a lot recently for various personal 3d projects.
I can't compare to any of the paid competitors as I've not used those, but in my opinion FreeCAD is slightly disappointing when it comes to UI, bugs and stability.
It's fine for simple stuff, but man, it can be frustrating to work with especially when working on something more complicated then running into random bugs or application crashes.
It's a great project though and very powerful.
Few points that I've not seen being factored in over the past decade-
* This needs a better renderer in today's day & age
* Need cross-device/web support
* Topology Optimization w/ pure physics code
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Hopefully LLMs can work on forking this or adding better features with AI-assists
The last thing FreeCAD needs is AI integration. LLM contributions to the project have been of poor quality so far (just like most LLM contributions to FOSS)
I really want to support open-source CAD, but it's so hard to take FreeCAD seriously. It reminds me of POV-Ray, which was (and still is) a parametric raytracer. An impressive feat of engineering completely derailed by the choice of a "UI" paradigm that made the simplest things unreasonably hard.
Designing 3D parts is hard enough, and while parametric modeling has uses... come on.
Parametric modelling is not the cause of the bad UI in FreeCAD, Fusion 360, Onshape, etc are also parametric. No, the main problems (last I tried it around 1.0) were that it had a clunky UI and that it was buggy. It would refuse to chamfer or bevel edges for no apparent reason that other CAD software wouldn't have issues with. There were occasionally crashes. Editing previous steps would destroy the later steps much more often than in other CAD software. Etc.
I would love to go back to FreeCAD, but for now I'm using Onshape (I run Linux, so Fusion isn't an option).
> It would refuse to chamfer or bevel edges for no apparent reason that other CAD software wouldn't have issues with.
I'm guessing you're trying to set a fillet which would completely consume one of the faces adjacent to the edge being filleted. In these cases I've found that a workaround is to make the fillet 0.001mm smaller than the size which would consume the entire face. You end up with a very very small amount of flat area but it's so small it doesn't show up during machining or 3d printing.
Usually the issue seemed to be with compound curves or where a filet tapers out as it meets up with a face going in another direction (such as a handle that sticks out).
FreeCAD relies on OpenCascade kernel to actually deal with the models, and yes, there's still room for improvement..
As I understand it, there are no other open source alternatives around. On the commercial side there are some, perhaps the foremost being the venerable Parasolid, which is used by Onshape, Solid Edge, Solid Works, Siemens NX, Shapr 3d and others.
Creating a solid 3d kernel is hard. Parasolid is from 1986.
> It would refuse to chamfer or bevel edges for no apparent reason that other CAD software wouldn't have issues with.
These are almost all caused because they use Open Cascade under the hood