FreeCAD Reviews

Good

Thank you very much for the program! Thank you for distributing it under a free open source license!

Excellent program for the design of buildings and structures. Thanks to the author of the project!

People who continue to download and rate FreeCAD here: please look below in the project summary, FREECAD MOVED FROM SOURCEFORGE MORE THAN 2 YEARS AGO!!!!! FreeCAD v0.17 was released in April 2018 and v0.18 is in active development. Please go to the official FreeCAD website which has an up-to-date download link: freecadweb dot org To those who complain about the unstable nature of FreeCAD: this is not the experience of most FreeCAD users. Did you actually download the latest version? To those who complain about the FreeCAD interface: granted it has a lot of room for improvements, and devs work on it. But they are all *volunteers* who contribute *in their own free time*, please remember that. Plus, anyone who's used parametric CAD software will tell you that without a minimum of training you won't be able to do much of anything. Stop wasting your time here, go to freecadweb.org where all is happening, and register to the FreeCAD forum where people will be happy to help you.

I love FreeCad!!! The plugin selection is huge, sketch, draft, part .... There is a learning curve, but after you've built a few models it feel natural. This is a project I check twice weekly for updates. If you have a 3D printer I recommend building the parts in FreeCAD.

Install OFFLINE on BeeFree OS using wizard. Excellent

This is nice and helpful software. Please, search the Title in You tube - (how to make facebinder in FreeCA

FreeCAD has great promise, but it's young and very much a work in progress as yet. I like its user interface and much about the capabilities so far - though it has a few odities and bugs still. However!!! As at August 2015 it allows you to design a single homogeneous part (e.g. a moulding) as a unit. But most real things require an Assembly of parts (e.g. mouldingS + screws + bearings, etc..) - and that's not there yet - which rather scuppers any serious use yet. You can of course design many parts and even place many components on the same drawing. But that's not the same as being able to assemble individual parts into a component/product/composite-part. I know there are some good intentions and good features in the pipeline, like the Assembly module and true Parametric driven* design capability. Providing these are well thought out and well implemented, they'll make it a great product with much potential. [ * FreeCAD at present allows specification of the values of attributes (eg. length, width, height etc.). These can be changed (edited) and redrawing happens. However, to me true parametric driven CAD is being able to use formulae and variables in the attribute definitions, so that changing a value ripples the effect through the whole model, not just one item. ]

Very good program! Thank you guys!

It's an excellent software. It still lacks: - assembly management - FEM support for Code ASTER (open source certified engineering sofrware). There's just Calculix support :-( - structured mesh support (it's needed for FEM model patch test) - spline in sketch

If the version number of FreeCAD were an integer, my rating of it would be much lower. Since the version that I am using is .15, though, I think that it's a very impressive piece of software. The people involved with the creation of this program are doing a great job. I use Autodesk Inventor in my day job and have previously used Pro/E/Creo. The user interface and sketcher in FreeCAD are bother frustrating to use compared to those. Some of that, of course, can be attributed to being more accustomed to my regular software. Some appear to be bugs - it appears that certain operations are unsuccessful - but this may also be my learning curve with the interface. I added the Assembly2 workbench and like it so far. From what I've read, adding real assembly capability to the software is a major undertaking, but assembly is crucial to making this software more usable. If my programming skills were above mediocre, I would find a way to help with this project. I still might at some point but want to learn the software better first to find out what works, what doesn't work, and what things I might like to see changed.

It is a complex interface and using rules (example a form must be attach to the prévious form. what ever which parent you chose to create the new form. It is not a problem when you know, thanks to the communoty because it writen nowhere. Until now I do not succeed to make drawing for the work shop with cotation. Rockn says about FreeCàD "Mais vous savez que le futur c'est maintenant" I hope not, the 2D CAD where a lot more intuitive.

It's decent in some areas, but full of bugs and with a horrendous interface design and lack of options. It really needs a lot of improvement to avoid being the frustrating piece of software it is. Update: I decided to stop using it after giving it a lot of time. I just can't stand it. It's worse than an inkjet printer in the 90s. I can't remember so much frustration with any piece of software, and most of it coming from bad design decisions (i.e. seems to store external references as indexes to the element in the array of the sketch elements, so when one element in the sketch is deleted, everything done after goes crazy) and bad software development (lots of crashes and segmentation faults -especially when using its Python scripting). I think it will take a lot of work to make FreeCAD really functional, but right now it's not usable for any practical purposes (unless the design you're working on is quite simple). I won't recommend to use it unless you are playing or helping to develop it. And good luck with the latter.

Powerful and lightweight program. Easy to use.

FreeCAD is the CAD software of the future from mechanical to architecture work. But you know the future is now. FreeCAD est le logiciel de CAO du futur pour travailler depuis la mecanique jusqu'à l'architecture. Mais vous savez que le futur c'est maintenant.

FreeCAD is a powerful open source (LGPL license) parametric 3D CAD program. It is still under development, and version 0.14 was recently released. FreeCAD has an active web forum too. See the Users Showcase area to see some of what has been done with FreeCAD. There are also forum areas for those people who may have trouble installing FreeCAD, and another area for people who need help using FreeCAD. I have some YouTube video tutorials under the user name bejant000 that are intended to help new users learn FreeCAD to make 3D models. I've been using FreeCAD for just over a year (so yeah, I'm biased) and thought I'd post this info to help new FreeCAD users.

FreeCad is very good. There is another free CAD project: sourceforge.net/projects/cadplatform/

I've downloaded and installed FreeCad on a Windows 8 Platform but I am unable to open the program to start using it. Can you please help

Experiece from commercial CAD or not? It is just a matter about the way you are used to work. Once I got the hang on how to use FreeCAD it was really usefull to me. People praise Solidworks and Autodesk products simply because they are expected to be good, and people take the time and learn how to use them. CATIA would provide even more possibilities if you learn how to use it. At the end, the young and hungry generation might learn how to work in FreeCAD at start, then competing tools will not be as appealing at first glance. I really urge experienced CAD users to take the time to truly learn FreeCAD before giving up. Also for an opensource tool it must be easy to get started for a novice, because no one will pay for expensive education if you haven't spent a fortune on the software license. So I strongly agree with the concept of having an intuitive user interface, but I won't argue that FreeCAD can evolve even further, I really hope it does...

FreeCAD rocks!!!! The people complaining should realize that if they don't know what they are looking at they really shouldn't comment. I've yet to have it even work properly on my 64 bit windows system to get moving with it, a graphics issue, but I can see the API started, showing an entry point, Python being used, examples, and the transformation matrices are right there to be had!!! You might not understand what this is very important for, but I do!!! I'm going to give it a go. If I can help I will. I can't thank the people who have put this together enough. All those 'features' that people are asking for can be added by them for the most part. The important work is not only decent, but available where other CAD softwares will hide that functionality to control usage and sales. It's finally time to write some Python for me. I like the idea that I may be able to write something that works for someone else and then them not getting taken advantage of by the OS and CAD companies afterwards. I can't think clearly when I code if I can clearly see that what I develop will be used as a tool to take advantage of the people that I am trying to help in the first place. Kudo's to the crew regardless. You have done a great job already.

I've been using it for a few weeks now. It started out promising and I was able to make some good models for 3D printing. Then I hit a wall trying to do boolean operations. Apparently the OpenCasCade library that FreeCAD uses for booleans is not too robust. The end result is that I can't get the results I want which ultimately makes this a dead end for me. I'll keep using it for basic work, but I would never promote this to my peers/colleagues as a tool that gets real work done. I'll change my review when I can get consistent/quality results from boolean ops.

Cool app, works great!

600 5 star ratings <-- haven't used a professional parametric 3D cad program. 150 1 star ratings <-- have used a professional parametric 3D cad program. A shovel is a godsend if you were digging with your bare hands. It kind of sucks if you had an excavator. FreeCAD is nowhere near professional 3D cad software such as Solidworks or Autodesk Inventor, which cost thousands of dollars/euros. Features are sparse, ui is clumsy. But it's free. I tried to give this 2/5, but I honestly cannot. For I have used professional 3D cad software.

I discontinued Autocad and tried Freecad do continue drawing my house in 3D. I tried to move objects and extrude planes, and create walls... nothing was possible?? When I click a plane I can not extrude it.. the extrude button stays grayed out??? I have tried all kind of options for 20 minutes. Nothing works. Maybe this program actually is capable of doing anything, but the user interface makes it impossible to use. I am happy to teach the programmers how to make it user friendly. Terrible software. I can not use it.

Freecad is nice program and it is getting better with every new version. I use it with CalculiX (calculixforwin.com) for FEA analysis with commercial programs