This doesn’t sound like an issue for those who use Fusion frequently, however you may want to find ways to get local files, just to be safe.
If you’re a beginner: get used to a different software, because Autodesk is the king of enshittification. Your files will be hostage and then you’re going to pay the subscription to keep them alive. Don’t waste your precious time in mastering Autodesk applications, the more you wait the harder is the switch
It’s just so rough to switch away from the one major CAD suite that doesn’t tar and feather UX devs on sight. Seriously, I like solidworks and solidedge and etc etc, but holy cow those interfaces are just unpleasant to use if you haven’t been steeped in them for the last 30 years. Even Rhino is more intuitive.
Having tried Fusion 360… It’s interface and design paradigm is utter trash. NX, Creo, and Solidworks are all far ahead. Can’t speak for catia, I’ve never used it but the versions I saw looked worse than Fusion
We all have our preferences, although some people’s are clearly more insightful than others…
UX isn’t universal. What intuitively clicks for one person might be unusable for someone else. Good UX is adequate for as many people as possible, but it can’t be perfect for everyone at once when some people work best with large labelled buttons with big, clear icons that have to go into submenus to fit on the screen, and other people prefer lots of small buttons whose purpose and location they’ve memorised which all fit on screen at once to save them needing to click into submenus.
I found Onshape to be quite nice. It was relatively easy to translate skills from Fusion to it after a few YouTube videos.
It is but you can’t sell any models you design on the free version because “TeRmS oF sErViCe”.
That’s on the free license. Fusion360, to which this thread is offering an alternative, has the same limitation.
I did a quasi-deep dive into licensing terms of the various suites. OnShape’s free tier is particularly clumsy, and on a facial reading bars you from using your own designs commercially, but allows you (and literally every other user) free rein on other people’s designs. It’s quite odd and will probably need litigation to sort out. Then they have nothing between the free tier and the $1800/year tier.
Fusion gives you, IIRC, a grace zone of a thousand bucks of revenue a year before it counts as commercial and you have to get the $600/year paid plan, which seems suspiciously close to how much profit a no-overhead side hustle might pull from $1000 of sales. Solidworks hobbyist gives you $2k of profit grace per year, and when combined with a Titans of CNC discount, makes it a pretty good option for the “let me sell a couple of things on Etsy crowd,” but it’s a much bigger price jump than Fusion if you need to get a commercial license (basically about $2000 a year, I think… sensing a pattern here).
Solid Edge keeps it simple and just says that the free version is for non-commercial use only, though as a locally installed app I’m surprised it’s not more popular.
I was continuing to struggle with FreeCAD, though it’s getting better with every weekly release, and they have a little bit of outside money coming into the project now. Still, I “treated” myself to a $700 permanent Alibre license. I like the workflow and the focus on the workbenches I actually use, and after ten payments I’ll be able to use this particular version however I like for as long as it runs. Not perfect, being closed source and Windows, but they’re a responsive small company in a crowded space, so I don’t think they’re going to fuck over the paying customers too badly.
Thanks for the detailed report! 💪
Damn them too? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised they’re both in the enshittification olympics. I moved away from F360 in favor on Onshape a while ago but started muddling my way through FreeCAD when I heard about Onshape.
Yeah I’ve been meaning to try FreeCAD in anger but every time I try it out I find it clumsy, awkward and limited. I’m hoping the new organisation will allow them to get more funding, I’d really love an actually good open source CAD.
How is this better?
This and the online-only are the reasons I no longer use onshape. While I don’t mind for a majority of my stuff to be public it just doesn’t make sense for everything and then you can’t even use it e.g on longer train rides without internet.
Solidworks has the most intuitive interface I’ve seen so far. I may be biased from using it for like 15 years at this point but I’ve also tried Fusion 360, SketchUp, Ondsel and FreeCAD with varying degrees of success in creating designs and assemblies more complicated than a nut and screw.
I may be biased from using it for like 15 years
Yes, yes you are extremely biased.
That was the point the commenter you replied too made.
give us good alternatives then. bonus for ones that run natively on linux. even bigger bonus if the workflow is actually intuitively usable.
FreeCAD, optionally with Ondsel.
You’re missing the “actually intuitively usable” part.
Well, it is a lot better than it used to be.
Yeah, got the same email. Fortunately I already exported everything to .step files and am using Ondsel ES full-time for my designs.
Hot take: that’s fair. They probably have thousands of users who made an account, drew a bunch of stuff and then abandoned it.
It’s not the best solution - that would be local offline storage - but it’s a fair change.
It’s fair if you ignore that it’s a problem of their own creation 😅
I do understand the point you’re making though
https://github.com/aconz2/Fusion360Exporter lets you bulk export all of your projects to local storage.
How do you open the files though?
It exports as F3D (probably readable by future versions of Fusion) and STEP (standard but with less fidelity) by default.
Is STEP a CAD format or 3d file format? I thought the latter. Like I don’t get constraints or sketches, only 3d models
STEP is at least marginally better than STL, because it can represent stuff like circles, instead of just a mesh.
Freecad is where it’s at.
How’s Freecad these days? I avoided awhile ago it because it looked difficult to use but I think this might push me over to it
It does take a little work to get started especially if you haven’t used any cad software before. But once you get the basics it’s easy to search for different techniques to address any problems you encounter.
This is my biggest gripe with Fusion 360 after the literal dozens of minutes using it. Why can’t I just save my projects locally?
I’ve personally switched over to FreeCAD, because of Autodesk signin policy (not this one, fusion kept signing me out forcing me to keep having to log back in). I am excitingly waiting for the next major FreeCAD release since the daily builds are looking extremely promising.
I tried freecad and my god I have never in my life used a less intuitive application. OpenSCAD is more intuitive and theres an entire scripting language you have to learn for it
I agree, though Daily appears to be much better. For the sable release I see it like GIMP to Photoshop
I’ll put giving it another try on to do list then. Having something that has features parity to fusion without all the bs would be awesome
Oh fuck this digital hellscape. I wouldn’t mind if a solar storm killed every fucking processor on this planet tomorrow.