FreeCAD

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.

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

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.

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.