So if you ever thought FreeCAD is a poors man choice...

I was Autocad full steam till about 2008 when a friend of mine introduced me to Inventor, that wrecked my Autocad addiction and made me Inventor dependent, I did extrmelly complex projects in Inventor versions 2009 to 2012 and bumped in a lot of the Inventor limitations and bugs because of that.

Fusion 360 is a mini Inventor, bare bone, just like Revit is a mini Autocad, in my view.

I was aiming around the year 2014 to go Catia when somebody pointed me towards FreeCad, a free (like in freedom from oppresion, but also like in not for pay to use, however the accent is in free like in freedom) open source CAD parmetric modeler intended to do anything Catia would do.

I found it scarce and lagging years behind not only Catia but even Inventor wise, however it was usefull, so I started digging in. With time not only constant newer versions came up, but the community started creating plugins that brought it on par with Inventor 2009 version, including the bugs like Topological naming problem just to name the most obvious one (that happened around 2018 for me).

Now is 2024, FreeCad still has bugs, although they sorted out the Topological naming problem and are preparing themselves to release it in Beta testing in the next release, but heck man, it beats Inventor in some aspects, I mean the 2024 Inventor, you ca run it in Inventor like GUI, or in Solid (something) like GUI or in Catia GUI (FreeCAD has several different navigation modes available, that can be set in the preferences settings dialog or changed by right-clicking in the 3D view. For full details about the modes, see the Mouse navigation page), you have various analisys plug-ins, CFD, Stres, Weldings, you have pre made parts stocks when it comes to bearings, nuts, bolts, you have assembling plugins and much more.

Now FreeCad is on par with any paid big league CAD software at the pact you take the time to dig into it (most of you give up too early,waaaaay to early), you can work complex projects like boats, airplanes, blocks of flats, cars, I mean not just the outlines, but the whole assembly bolt by bolt, welding by welding, cable by cable, etc.

There are drawbacks too, it has some limitations that can be worked around with a bit of a headache, and obviously as you drag in more plugins and make it more powerfull, you need computing power, yes it drains a lot of math power, processor, memories, video board and tranfer BUS highway capacity, it is no longer a go cart, we now have a 400 meter long cruise boat that needs 200 people to steer it around and drinks fuel by the ton per minute.

And it grows up and many bugs are sorted, and new ones popup, is a never ending game.

So yes the learning curve is step and painfull unless you come from Inventor, Catia, Solid something world, than is a breeze, and yes, your super duper gaming laptop is by no menas good enoug to run it if you plan to design yoursefl a helicopter from tip to toe and spit out the BOM to start purchasing parts to asemble and fly it, it will actually crash your computer often, thermal runout form over stress, unless if it is water cooled, than it will freeze your screen for hours until it gets the computing done, sometimes I leave mine at night frozen, wake up in the morning still frozen, go to work, come back home, still frozen, and sometimes in the evening I have access again, the CFD is done, or the linear pattern of 400 columns and 300 rows, etc.

I need a better machine, the software needs more computing power, rendering and memory power than any machine under 3000 USD can provide.

So if you ever thought FreeCAD is a poors man choice for basic needs witout any real industrial capacities, well... think again, because you labeled FreeCAD so in your mind, but in reality is the paid counterparts like Fusion 360 or Revit that actually fall into that category not to mention the pleiade of Android and Iphone apps at hand; that are extremelly usefull but also extremelly simplistic and limitative (what? you expected to run a Catia like program on a phone? Get real will ya...)