[Closed] Best Free CAD software?

What are you designing?

I like Fusion 360, for 3D modelling. Dunno if it’s any good if you’re designing house interiors.

Its just for doing drawings for my loft conversion. Only needs to be 2D really. I use AutoCAD daily at work, but just want to put something on my laptop ot use at home.

Fusion 360 is free for ‘hobbyists’

I'll check that out, cheers.

You can use Sketchup. Just stick to plan view.

Sketchup seconded.

SketchUp is horrid if you use AutoCAD on the reg.

Sure it is, but it's free 🤙

Solid Edge's 2d drafting environment is free:

https://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/plmapp/education/solid-edge/en_us/free-software/free-2d-cad

Book marked

We use Bentley MicroStation, I'm sure you can checkout a license to use at home.
Can you do similar in AutoCAD?

Looking into this recently, I also saw that Draftsight is no longer free.

While looking at various forums for suggestions, i saw LibreCAD mentioned a few times. I've not tried it, or even investigated if it is actually free, but might be worth a look.

If it's just your loft, do it on a month trial of any of them. I use Bricscad and it's a very similar environment to autocad, but with fewer irritations. Also you can get a perpetual license, unlike autocad so long term makes for a good .dwg cad platform if you buy it.

Can you do similar in AutoCAD?

You can checkout licences if you have multi user licences. If you have a single user licence you get to install on two computers as far as I remember in a "work from home" capacity. Can't be used simultaneously and the second can't be used in the office.

We've just had to do a massive Autodesk licence redistribution after some interesting audit results...

We’ve just had to do a massive Autodesk licence redistribution after some interesting audit results…

Sounds like you work for my company as we've just done the same.

I've just downloaded AutoCAD for the free 30 day trial. will do me for these drawings I need to do now, but will probably look at the others after that.

Pcon planner is fairly simple, especially for room planning.

Sounds like you work for my company as we’ve just done the same.

Ha. I imagine it's a fairly regular occurrence.

Off to play hunt the real life STWer...

Leeds Office?

LibreCAD is genuinely free. I think it is 2D only. If you want 3D you should look at FreeCAD. It’s been a four years since I had any reason to use it - but it was fairly impressive. I keep thinking about dusting it off again for a bit of a project I have planned.

I recently played with freecad to design an extension, it is pretty good for a piece of free software but still has some bugs and is nowhere near as intuitive as Solid Edge/ Solid Works etc.

I really struggled with the constraints system on FreeCAD, I eventually gave up with it.

I've used libre cad a fair bit. Seems quite intuitive to me once I learnt 4 or 5 drawing commands.

For 3d I have used freecad a few years ago but it was missing the assembly module still.

Simple repeatable shaped in 3d openscad is good BUT it is scripting only. Better with the python interface.

Solvespace is a better simple 3d cad than freecad imo. Maybe less feature rich but easier to get simple stuff done

DoubleCadXT

I occasionally use LibraCAD on Linux (also available for Win) it's a basic but usable, 2D, AutoCAD-alike bit of software and (IIRC) is happy enough with *.dxf and *.dwg files (probably just not the latest formats) so you can probably import useful things like blocks and geometry from AutoCAD.

Its what I'd use for drawing up plans at home.
Otherwise I'd use Fusion 360 for any actual modelling...

If it's just for a one-off project, you can get a free trial of AutoCAD.

Alternatively, it's free to teachers and students, if you know anyone in academia.

But I cannot stress this enough.

Don't open actual work drawings in a student version.

Someone at a place I worked did that. Watermark everywhere!