I thought I’d share my recent experience using OnShape to design boxes for laser cutting. I’ll write up the project once it’s done, but a couple folks have asked about the software I was using, so I wanted to share a few resources that will hopefully help others. I’m a novice both at CAD and laser cutting, so probably I’m doing a lot of things wrong and YMMV 
I chose to use OnShape because I saw it had really good plugins. The biggest caveat is that the free version doesn’t allow any private files. https://www.hackschool.org/post/onshape-cad-and-laser-cut-tabbed-boxes was the main guide I used, though the plugins weren’t that intuitive to find the first time. https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/15701/laser-joint-tool has links to the 3 actual plugins. The first guide uses “allowance” for kerf, but the author in the comments suggests using a third plugin for kerf instead and leaving allowance at 0.
A few things I noticed:
- The drawings don’t always auto update. There’s a button to do that, and sometimes it doesn’t enable correctly
- It doesn’t seem possible to update a variable and then create a second version of the drawing (like for testing kerf)
- I tried things like labeling and BOMs and such, but nothing really worked very well. Drawings are probably the weakest part of the process, but it works well enough
- The rollback tool is really good/necessary to be able to modify things before the auto layout (and/or tabbing)
- You can go to documents and click “Public” and search through other people’s drawings which could be handy
All in all I was pretty impressed with how easy it made things. The box I made was completely functional on the first try, which I didn’t expect at all.