Hi friends,
I honestly believe Fusion 360 may eventually be an excellent product at a very competitive price, and it has served me well for three years now as a CAD tool. However, since I've begun machining my own products, the general instability, feature upheaval, and power ceiling has become a lot more apparent. I'm looking for other options and would sincerely appreciate others' thoughts.
Here's what's important to me:
Integrated CAD and CAM. Either a totally integrated solution (like Fusion 360, NX, etc.) or a plug-in with good integration with SOLIDWORKS (hyperMILL, SolidCAM, etc.) would be fine here. I design, program, and machine all my parts and want to be able to have changes in the original part file reflected automatically in CAM with minimal effort.
Stability. I don't mind (and even enjoy) frequent updates. I'm very much not the kind of person who wants or needs software to work exactly the same now as it did years ago. However, I'm extremely tired of the app crashes and general feature instability that comes with nearly every monthly update to Fusion 360.
Modern tooling and toolpathing. I'm running a Brother Speedio and make heavy use of HSM and 3D surfacing to make the best use of my machine. I'd additionally like to be able to use modern tooling like circle segment/barrel cutters in a 3-axis context. (I expect to make a jump to 5-axis some time next year as well, and want whatever software I select to have excellent support for that too.)
Price. This one's a little more complicated. Due to cash flow constraints, I'd rather pay $7k now for a year's license than $20k for a perpetual license. The seemingly-new-this-year NX subscription model is particularly attractive for this reason. I'm curious if other packages have adopted a similar model but not advertised it well.
NX seems the most promising and I'm having a trial license set up for the month of September both as a test of the software and of the VAR. What other packages would you recommend I look into and why? Ballpark pricing for 3-Axis work would be greatly appreciated as well.
Thanks.
I honestly believe Fusion 360 may eventually be an excellent product at a very competitive price, and it has served me well for three years now as a CAD tool. However, since I've begun machining my own products, the general instability, feature upheaval, and power ceiling has become a lot more apparent. I'm looking for other options and would sincerely appreciate others' thoughts.
Here's what's important to me:
Integrated CAD and CAM. Either a totally integrated solution (like Fusion 360, NX, etc.) or a plug-in with good integration with SOLIDWORKS (hyperMILL, SolidCAM, etc.) would be fine here. I design, program, and machine all my parts and want to be able to have changes in the original part file reflected automatically in CAM with minimal effort.
Stability. I don't mind (and even enjoy) frequent updates. I'm very much not the kind of person who wants or needs software to work exactly the same now as it did years ago. However, I'm extremely tired of the app crashes and general feature instability that comes with nearly every monthly update to Fusion 360.
Modern tooling and toolpathing. I'm running a Brother Speedio and make heavy use of HSM and 3D surfacing to make the best use of my machine. I'd additionally like to be able to use modern tooling like circle segment/barrel cutters in a 3-axis context. (I expect to make a jump to 5-axis some time next year as well, and want whatever software I select to have excellent support for that too.)
Price. This one's a little more complicated. Due to cash flow constraints, I'd rather pay $7k now for a year's license than $20k for a perpetual license. The seemingly-new-this-year NX subscription model is particularly attractive for this reason. I'm curious if other packages have adopted a similar model but not advertised it well.
NX seems the most promising and I'm having a trial license set up for the month of September both as a test of the software and of the VAR. What other packages would you recommend I look into and why? Ballpark pricing for 3-Axis work would be greatly appreciated as well.
Thanks.