SolveSpace is much better than FreeCAD. Honestly it's the only free CAD worth bothering with. The biggest limitation is no fillets or bevels, but it sounds like FreeCAD can't do that either.
But honestly if you're doing a decent amount of CAD as a hobbyist the only sensible option is to pirate Solidworks.
SolveSpace is interesting, and more "fun" than FreeCAD, and easier for beginners to get started in, but it is not better than FreeCAD. FreeCAD is a more powerful tool, and it is difficult to learn. I believe most (but not all) of the issues people have with FreeCAD come from their inexperience with FreeCAD, not from FreeCAD's actual limitations.
You are incorrect about FreeCAD being unable to do fillets and chamfers, FreeCAD has no problem doing fillets and chamfers.
I wrote a comparison[0] of FreeCAD and SolveSpace earlier this year, with the following conclusion:
> SolveSpace is fun to use in a hard-to-describe way that FreeCAD is not. It is also much more stable (i.e. it doesn't segfault). It is also much more immature than FreeCAD, and much less feature-complete. Overall I think FreeCAD is a more productive CAD program, mainly just because it can do fillets and chamfers, and you encounter open faces much less frequently, but also because of the "long tail" of little things that can be done in fewer clicks in FreeCAD.
We had an earlier comment outlining the problems with fillets, and the author of the article had problems as well. Do you think those are real, or could they be worked around with more experience in FreeCAD?
> The biggest limitation is no fillets or bevels, but it sounds like FreeCAD can't do that either.
which is simply untrue: FreeCAD can do fillets and chamfers. It has a built-in tool for them. It almost always works flawlessly.
You're right that FreeCAD will occasionally segfault on a complicated chamfer, but generally this is foreshadowed by a gut feeling that the geometry is so complicated that you yourself actually don't know what a correct chamfer would even look like.
But OK, FWIW, I just attempted the same Model Mania 2001 challenge in FreeCAD, and I got this: https://img.incoherency.co.uk/4072 - it took me about 20 minutes.
I didn't run into any issues or crashes with the fillets, the only thing that is arguably an issue is that FreeCAD makes the fillet that intersects with the front edge differently to how other tools do it. The one at the corner of the bottom of the large arc, where it touches the base plate. Arguably this is a FreeCAD bug, but it's hardly the end of the world. To say that FreeCAD "can't do" fillets is just wrong.
When it works, it's flawless. It's very easy to ask it to make a fillet that fails where you're guessing as to why. "Almost always" is far too generous.
In my experience, fillets in FreeCAD work okay, but are pretty much ground zero for the topological renumbering issues.
Put simply, FreeCAD needs a modern geometry kernel and there is no such thing in the open source world.
Given that OnShape (a bunch of ex-Solidworks honchos) went and licensed Parasolid for their new company, that tells you that developing the geometry kernel was something that they were willing to pay money to avoid.
> most (but not all) of the issues people have with FreeCAD come from their inexperience with FreeCAD, not from FreeCAD's actual limitations
I'm much more productive in Fusion than FreeCAD at a similar (low) level of experience. Sadly that means it wins for me, as much as I hate the licensing model.
True in many regards, e.g. the UI is way better and the constraint solver is more intuitive.
But very incorrect in others, specifically:
- SolveSpace has, IIRC, no fillets
- SolveSpace does not have a proper API to it's geometric engine (what the CAD industry, for some unknown reason, calls a "kernel")
To put it in perspective, MATLAB is a similar "if you have to ask" industrial piece of software and their hobby license is like £125 one-off. (Not including any toolkits but still.)
Most hobbyists are not going to blow £500/year on CAD software.
You don't have to pirate it anymore, they have a hobbiest version that is available for hobbiests that make less than $2k per year doing their "making".
But honestly if you're doing a decent amount of CAD as a hobbyist the only sensible option is to pirate Solidworks.