Which is better autocad inventor or solidworks

Solidworks Professional and Premium When it comes to 3D modelling, the systems are pretty similar and both should give you the output you require. You'll find some things nicer and better in one over the other or if you dig deeper, one system has a command that the other doesn't or is a bit more advanced in functionality. Here's where Autodesk Inventor Professional has additional functionality:.

Like anything, where there's a will there's a way Simulation This is an area where there are similarities and clear differences. Solidworks has symmetry check and a geometry analysis tool in Solidworks Professional and Premium that compares two models.

There is also plastic injection mold flow analysis in Inventor Professional which is a cut down version of Moldflow and Inventor Professional and Solidworks Premium both have a cut down version of a sustainable design package. If you require further analysis and more in-depth simulation studies both vendors offer Simulation software with more advanced solvers. Solidworks Standard has none. With both vendors, the data management systems are not ready to go, meaning, the PDM systems need to be setup and configured generally by your reseller or someone who has experience with setting up data management systems and SQL databases.

Solidworks PDM standard comes with version and revision control which is a great feature over Autodesk, where Autodesk Inventor Professional has Vault Basic which gives version control.

A Drive for data management Autodesk offer A Drive with your Inventor Professional subscription where you get a CAD friendly 'dropbox' type of storage where you can synchronise your files to the cloud. Out of the box, this can be used as a version control data management system, has searching capabilities, visibility over who and when someone has edited, viewed and accessed files, secure access controls.

Visualisation Having a 3D model means you can create visualisations of photo renderings and animations that can explain the design or market the product. While nothing beats seeing and touching the real thing, having a digital prototype has multiple advantages where you can illustrate alternatives and be able to see the inner workings of the design to showcase the advantages over other options. Solidworks Standard has an animator, while Autodesk Inventor, Solidworks Professional and Premium come with an animator and photo realistic rendering for still images.

Product Design Suite can write to MS Excel, so if you need Excel data modified or created based on say a design specification or design change or for pricing, quoting or linking labour costs it can.

Autodesk Inventor Professional can also write to Microsoft Word. Typically to create technical documents with specifications and you can even take a snapshot image automatically and have it in the same document. Both systems will allow you to export to a lightweight model and embed the 2D drawings and 3D model into an office document for viewing.

Autodesk offer a wider range of collaboration tools that are cloud based or server based and functions that are free for CAD and non-CAD users to use and communicate designs and track tasks and changes. Here's different ways of collaborating with Autodesk Inventor:. A Viewer - Live Review Solidworks use the eDrawings Viewer program in Solidworks Standard and eDrawings Professional in Solidworks Professional and Premium to share designs and the typical workflow is to create content or import content in your edition of Solidworks and export it to an eDrawings file.

The additional flexibility we enjoy today allows users to create a variety of geometries in fewer steps than in other systems. You can even use a single vertex to begin the extrusion.

Want to extrude up to a surface in one direction, and a blind distance in the other? No problem. We can also add draft inward or outward on both, either, or none of the operations as we go. This saves a huge amount of guesswork and trial and error when trying to offset a large selection of surfaces at once. For those who want the flexibility of online-based single-user licensing, that is available, as is on-premise network license sharing aka multi-user perpetual licensing.

If you are a professional machinist or product modeler, I urge you to compare Autodesk Inventor with Solidworks. AutoCAD was developed in for drafters back when 3D computer technology was still sucking on a bottle. It has been through many enjoyable and beneficial upgrades that made it into the refined drafting technology we have today.

Solidworks was first released in , eleven years later, and was developed for a different purpose. In the same way that AutoCAD has adapted to the needs of its users, we will continue to see Solidworks doing the same. The same is also true for Inventor. The more intuitive the software, the fewer the limits a person has on their creativity.

It reflects the innovation that we are heading toward when it comes to User Interfacing. Again, the same is true for Inventor. The other offerings are specialized for particular needs and industries. The industry might not need your expertise anymore when this happens. Most of the jobs posted for draftsmen are for 3D modeling. A lot of freelance stuff is up for grabs, so you need to consider what is in high demand.

Being able to use the software is only half of the work. You need to know what your clients need. For instance, if you draft irrigation designs, you need to know something about irrigation.

If you model parts for an engine, you need to see how those parts are made and how your 3D model helps the machinist or fabricator. You need to understand them. When it comes to being a draftsman, specialized skills earn you big bucks. That is why the highest-paid draftsmen are also those with an intuitive understanding of a particular field.

I once interviewed for a position drafting irrigation designs. AutoCAD and Solidworks are not parallel software for a good apples-to-apples comparison. The real comparison should be between Solidworks and Autodesk Inventor. Solidworks is the clear winner for developing sophisticated machinery or other 3D objects. Consider your needs and long-term goals. He has extensive knowledge of almost all the top CAD software available on the market these days.

From simple tasks to developing a professional CAD drawing, he can do everything. He also has a Bachelor of Architecture B. I also see that you are a certified SW professional, what training or certification have you received in Inventor?

Even from your post you can see that users that spend more time in one software or the other can sometimes not know the best way to do it in the other software, even some of the basic taskes can be different, doesn't make one better than the other in that regard. As a side note, if you really want to compare SolidWorks to Inventor you DO need to look at the what you are getting with each.

I have a previous post that no-one seemed to want to refute because its true or they just don't know enough about the other products to compare them. Sorry, you are correct about the thin feature. As I mentioned before, SW has a lot of features I'm curious, how do you handle interconnectivity of parts and assemblies with design tables and how do you get all the parts to update when you change parameters from one sheet?

I agree with you. I personally think that Inventor is a "best bang for your buck" type of software. Baseline, it doesn't have nearly as many features as SW, but I use both on a daily basis and really have no problem using either. I'm partial to both in different regards. Inventor's baseline cost makes it appealing, which is why it's a best-seller.

You get more with SW, but it's more expensive. At that point, I had about 1 year experience with each. In the end, the only really determining factor was that Inventor had native support for the creation of gears and gear systems - something which I had an immediate need for.

Solidworks had nothing similar to offer except in a 3rd party add-on which I tried it and found to be clunky at best. But, in the nearly 4 years I've been using Inventor, I've never found something that I needed to do that I couldn't accomplish with Inventor.

I remember the SW guys showing me a tool called TolAnalyst that would be nice to have automatically ran parts through their tolerance limits and checked for interference in the assembly , but all in all I'm happy with my choice.

Really comes down to your individual needs but I think both software packages are very good and very competitive. Far superior in Inv. The solidworks dialog box is way worse. At least I can move the dialog box out of the way. In Swx you have to move the model away from under the tree that just landed on top of it. The mini tool bar is not for me but it doesnt get in the way, but the right click marking menu is far superior to the SWx S key short cut.

Then there is the context senitive short cuts that inv has that Swx doesnt. Click a plane in Swx nothing happens, but click a plane, face, edge etc in Inv and a context sensive toolbar displays at the mouse pointer, no right click or s key required. Yes there are some things that Swx does better, but menus and tool bars arent one of them.

I think in regard to controlling assembies, functionally, Inventor and SW accomplish the same things, but in different manners. Inventor has iLogic, which I like, and in SW you control suppression states of features and components from the design tables in Excel. I simply don't use parameters without using Excel in SW or Inventor.

I do like SW mouse gestures better than the Alias style hotbox, though, because it's quicker and I don't have to look at what I'm doing. It's involuntary. Something I wish would be changed in Inventor is filtering of parts in drawings via assembly view representation. This is backwards. This should be done by LOD. If I want a part constrained so that it's not affected by changes in an assembly, I don't constrain it to something I know is going to change often.

I more than likely constrain it the origin in the assembly. The same logic is applied to the parts list filtering. I change the visibility of parts often while working in assemblies and I don't want my parts list based on a tool I use during a design process.

In regard to surfacing, baseline SW is terrific for surfacing. I use surfaces a lot for mold design and I choose to use SW for this because it has more features that accommodate me.

For industrial design of consumer products it's awesome. The ability to freeform drag surfaces, edges, vertices, etc. I often design certain types of products in Inventor with Alias and design the tooling in SW. I, however, have my own custom application that I use for mold design in SW, so no comment on mold tools in Inventor vs.

Bottom line? I don't think it's possible to say which software is better. I like each one for different reasons. It would be nice to have everything under one roof, but I don't think I'll ever be satisfied with any software in its entirety until I finally take the plunge and develop my own.

There came a day when a decision had to be made as to which one they'd keep moving forward. They had a 3rd party come in and do some benchmark testing based on what and how we worked on a daily basis. Most parts in house were being held to 3 or 4 decimal places. The testing company took 10 random neutral part files and imported them into each software The files imported into Inventor were accurate out to the 9th decimal 10 out of 10 parts, the SolidWorks imports So you can guess which way they went.

It all comes down to your needs. Each program has its own way of doing things, you just need to learn them and proceed. For years, I had one engineer at the above company who was a bed wetting SW guy, twice a day he'd make an effort to come over and claim "SW does this, Inventor can't!