Just got mine!
Free SolidWorks licences for Makers
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How do you find it? more or less painful than fusion 360?
I’m not Andrea, but I’ve used Solidworks, Inventor, Catia and Fusion 360 a fair amount from a hobbyist perspective.
Fusion 360 has a hell of a learning curve and the benefit of cloud saving (& PC/Mac cross-compatibility) and is great for the most part - but Solidworks is a better package overall. I find Solidworks a lot better for mechanically minded projects, but that’s almost certainly due to how I learned CAD in the first place - creating a bunch of different components, then putting them all together in an assembly with mates.
Fusion 360 works differently from a fundamental standpoint - you can create components and joints in a single document and cross-reference all of the parts within the document, how they’re supposed to interact with eachother etc. It’s fantastic if you’re making some small, intricate part that needs to interact with other small, intricate parts - but for anything on a slightly larger scale, you’re better off with Solidworks. Additionally, if you need to do any sort of analysis of a part, Solidworks wins out pretty much every time.
Side note: my hardest learning curve with Fusion 360 was how to make it act like Inventor/Solidworks. I’m still learning Fusion!
well, depends who you are 
Well true
But I have too many external hard drives (I am literally using 11 of them at the moment) so cloud saving is such a relief.
I have to admit, this feature of f360 is one of the bits that annoys me the most.
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Having to login piss me off but have you tried firing it up without internet? Yup gotta set it to offline mode before hand or you can’t get in to use it at all. So dumb.
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Thanks for the rundown! I’ve poured quite a few hours into Fusion 360’s learning curve. The result being that I can usually do what I need to, it but it still takes me ages with extensive youtube research!
I might try Solidworks (seeing as Andrea’s provided the free link) and see how I get on
It’s good fun! Anything you run into on Fusion, feel free to give me a shout and I can try to help!
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This sounds like brilliant news – with the caveat that they could reverse this at any time: but so could Autodesk with Fusion360
@Jonathan might also have experience with both programs, and has a good oversight of what Fusion 360 is strong at
One thing to also note: Autodesk will occasionally grant a education license of Inventor (5 years of updates, indefinite use I believe) to people with “cool” projects and the ability to write about them in a somewhat soul-sucking way - just email their PR team and say “here’s a cool thing I’m doing! Would I be able to write about it for your blog” or something similar, and they’ll normally want to partner up in return for some good PR.
Source: this is how I got my Inventor license.
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hi would you guys know if this would install on a window 7 pc?
Lol code no longer works
I should have tried sooner
They’ll need to be consistent with the free licences if they want to build a community, along the lines of Fusion 360 – I’d have thought
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Yeah I think you nailed it.