Mind you, a token is $3/piece. You can only buy them in packs of 500 and higher, and they expire in a year’s time. Something that I’ve noticed is that you used to be able to buy 100 tokens, but they removed that option some time ago, too.
There's a lot of options in this space. Ansys, Dassault SOLIDWORKS (though they're trying to push the cloud model, lmao), Siemens. Smaller devs like zw3d which plug into dedicated sim packages (it's not like f360's is that comprehensive).
Why don't people move? It's not like a super free market, but there's a bunch of options in the space.
Because you could get Fusion360 for $500 per year but the equivalent in Solidworks cost $5K base+$5k for CAM+$5K for modeling+$5K for ...
Solidworks is the monopoly and it was only the insertion of Fusion360 that broke it. Solidworks is so entrenched that they still haven't reduced their prices even though Fusion360 is absolutely killing them at the low end.
> Why don't people move? It's not like a super free market, but there's a bunch of options in the space.
I'd love to hear about them and throw some money at them. Before Fusion360, I knew of basically nothing at the low end.
Solidworks isn’t that widely used outside of academia and small businesses though, Catia is Dassault’s pro product and Siemens has NX and another tool whose name escapes me.
It’s worth noting that Siemens licenses the CGM kernel from Dassault for some of their products too though. At least they used to when I worked there…
I think they don’t need to market them - but that’s because they’re aimed at a different market segment. The licensing costs for these tools individually are very high, but big companies buy them as a package along with things like TeamCenter. Inertia is very strong so if a company uses a tool, they’re unlikely to migrate unless they’re forced to for some reason.
Because learning new software and workflow is extremely expensive for an architect. As software engineers who learn for a living we sometimes take our learning muscle for granted.
Autodesk is simply trying to find what that “cost” is for their user and keep the total price slightly below that.
The cost to learn a new software is trivial. The cost to redesign all library components in the new software is huge.
It is very analogous to programming if you consider it like rewriting a program designed in Java into C++. Depending on the complexity of the program, you will become proficient in C++ long before you finish the code transition.
I use Siemens NX to design. It would take thousands of hours to recreate all the partfiles we use into a different CAD software. Some of the big guys write programs to make a transition easier (from Ideas to NX), but they are not perfect. They may work for some simple parts, but for more complex things... forget about it.
Do those other commercial options offer free usage at the hobbyist level of usage? That's my main reason for picking Fusion 360 over anything else at this point. There are FOSS alternatives, but they're harder to use.
And now that I've learned it, I'm more likely to pick it over other things in the future. If I got a job with any of this stuff, I'd be leaning towards it as the tool for that, too.
Both Siemens Solid Edge and Dassault Solidworks are available in "community editions", which are fully-featured and may be used for non-commercial purposes.
Ansys (which includes Spaceclaim) does, completely free for student and hobbyist use. Even offers a class with Cornell on edx on how to use the simulation software.
Siemens are also trying to push the cloud model, StarCCM already supports it, and I’m sure it won’t be long until other products in their suite do too.
