What do you like best about the product?

It always work, on any platform, support J's outstanding and new features are added Ona monthly basis.

What do you dislike about the product?

Cost is a little steep for very small companies who need this kind of tool only a few days a year.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I create objects ranging from cabinets to wearable, but also construction project, share the models with suppliers and clients that can easily validate or built right from the 3d.

I was able to streamline my process and cut back on 90% of drafting.

What do you like best about the product?

Cloud based, real time collaboration, integrated release management, in context design, and a clean and fresh look make Onshape a pleasure to use.

What do you dislike about the product?

Changing CAD systems is always hard and migrating in legacy data structures correctly requires careful thought and attention. This isn't an Onshape specific flaw, but something encountered whenever switching CAD systems.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We switched to Onshape about a year before the Corona virus hit. Now that we are in the age of Covid-19 and working remotely, this was a very timely decision. We were able to continue working from home with zero disruption. Before, working remotely with Solidworks, PDM, and VPN's always caused us headaches. Solidworks/PDM was too slow over the VPN, and working "offline" has numerous drawbacks. None of which exist in Onshape.

The amount of design time is per project is less in Onshape than Solidworks. The concept of "in context" modeling actually works in Onshape and saves a significant amount of time. We've found that especially for early conceptual development tasks, Onshape significantly reduces the design time. If you are considering Onshape, take a good look at the "in context" abilities Onshape has to offer. In Solidworks, we generally avoided in context design because it would always fail somewhere, and we'd constantly be fighting broken mates. It flows much more smoothly in Onshape. For assemblies where parts are highly related to each other, the design gets done easily in half the time.

A similar time saver in Onshape is that you can work concurrently on the same part or assembly. I don't have to wait for my colleague to check back in the assembly so I can work on it, for example. We can both be working on the same thing at the same time and see each others progress in real time. It is not possible to overwrite each others work. This is a huge deal when under a time crunch - you can easily throw more resources at a particular design to get it done faster.

Release management in Onshape is actually baked into the product and not an afterthought like PDM. I felt like I was always fighting Solidworks PDM, never just using it. Making sure people check there stuff in, uploading files generated offline correctly, updating both the server and client software, etc. was just a hassle and waste of time. All of those issues are gone with Onshape.

Software management is essentially nonexistent in Onshape. No more service packs, upgrades, version conflicts etc. It all just works and is always current. I don't ever have to think about managing the CAD or PDM software anymore.

Lastly, Onshape support is excellent. Their responses are fast and they actually know what they are talking about. How many times in Solidworks have you contacted your reseller with an issue and they responded with something like, "yeah that's a known bug, we'll add you to the ticket and you'll be notified when it's fixed". And, did it ever get fixed? I can't think of any for me that were. Onshape on the other hand, pushes out new releases every few weeks (transparently). The few bugs I've come across were all fixed after I reported them, some as quickly as the same day. That level of support is really nice, especially if you've never experienced it before from a software company.

What do you like best about the product?

I love the stability with referencing and the control parts don't get repeated. The fact that it's constantly updating and getting better on a weekly or monthly basis is one of the absolute best things, especially that the updates are based on user feedback.

What do you dislike about the product?

The only downside I've found so far is that some important features are still missing, so there is still a little bit of limited functionality, however, with the updates, these limitations are removed frequently, and it's constantly getting better.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Onshape is helping us collaborate and share our engineering files better, and I'm finding that my projects are getting to prototype stage much faster. The fact that we don't have to manually reference files to eachother anymore is a big time saver.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Keep experimenting and learning more. Always reach out to the excellent team when you have a problem!

What do you like best about the product?

The best part about onshape is that it is browser based. Also the simplicity of the operations.

What do you dislike about the product?

Since Onshape is a young software there is not many surfacing tools or other advanced modeling tools that are built-in natively.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Organizing all of my CAD file for all the customers within the program. Simplifies file management and revisions

What do you like best about the product?

There are many features I like best about Onshape. One is it's modeling features that allow you to continually and smoothly roll forward with changes without ever needing to deal with the consequences and after math of going way back in your tree to modify an earlier sketch or feature.

Another is that it saves every command you make in live time, eliminating any possibility to lose any data. It also allows you to go back and retrieve models at any point in time, along with seeing what changes were made and who made them.

What do you dislike about the product?

No complaints, would never go back. Their constant new releases solve problems I didn't know I had.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Collaboration is a big one. I think one of the absolute biggest benefits is the elimination of lost data, I never again have to worry about losing valuable work, and with that the ability to go back to any place in time and either retrieve a model or see where changes were made and who made them.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

I would make the leap. Big changes are never easy, but the benefits far outweigh the difficulties of making such a large transition. It's also so intuitive, you will be surprised how quickly you reach the point where you're moving things forward faster than you ever could before.

What do you like best about the product?

The assemblies and parts we make are much more robust, allowing us to change parameters on the fly in order to iterate multiple designs within hours instead of days. We can instantly share ideas throughout the office and between engineering teams allowing us to get rapid feedback. We often make design changes instantly during meetings.

Branching and Merging are powerful tools in Onshape that we have utilized to build up our machine configurations. We don't have to worry about duplicating part numbers or saving new copies of files when we want to try something new, we can branch into a new workspace and try out something new. If it works, we can instantly merge it back into our core design. If it doesn't, no harm, we can either delete that workspace, or just not use it anymore and mark it obsolete.

Being able to access our CAD and work from any machine really helped us out during this pandemic. Our team was split up, but we didn't have any sort of adjustment period to working from home, because it was the same experience as designing in the office. We could hop on a group call, gather in the same document, and follow along with each other while we talked about the goals of the day. We didn't have to worry about remote connections to PDM, or if we were all working on the most up to date versions. We would not have been able to adapt as quickly as we did if we were not using Onshape.

What do you dislike about the product?

There are compromises that we have had to make while using Onshape. They are minimal, and are vastly outweighed by the gains. While performance is amazing, it can dip from time to time. This mainly happens in drawings, but larger documents can slow down if they fill up. It has never significantly impacted our work.

There is a learning curve to using Onshape's Mate Connectors and Versioning. The workflow is different, and Onshape sort of bends you into a new way of thinking about your designs. The trade off here is it takes a little bit more time to learn the system, but you are rewarded with insanely stable and robust builds.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

The way we are able to automate repetitive tasks with Featurescript has saved us a lot of time. It has also helped with traceability and quality control. We can automate the creation of parts and tie them to our order numbers. They are instantly saved and searchable and we know that they arent going anywhere.

We have also made a few custom features to streamline the integration of some off the shelf hardware into our models. Mainly bearings, heat set inserts for our 3d printed parts, and DIN rails. These features were created over the course of a few afternoons, and we now use them constantly.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Try the professional trial and really give it a chance.

What do you like best about the product?

Ease of use, graphics, multi-user environment, auto-save, cloud-based, no saves, low bug/crashes, no data losses.

What do you dislike about the product?

No large assembly mode, no routing tools

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Much better data management than previous solution, easy to get back to previous states, easy to perform side studies without impact main model

Recommendations to others considering the product:

For the price tag, Onshape offers much more than the competition. Also, it is the only CAD platform that is filed based and this makes a huge difference in the data management and allows for real multi-user work.

What do you like best about the product?

There's no install or maintenance and it works everywhere.

I've been using it since it's beginning and think it's evolved into the best CAD solution available.

What do you dislike about the product?

Not enough people have switched from their old desktop systems. What's difficult is that people still want to share files with me and I'm still having to upload/download and then import files. I'm ready for this to go away.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Getting things done quickly. I speed all my time designing & creating and no time IT'ing.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Just do it!, it's the best design tool out there.

What do you like best about the product?

Part studio that allows cross referenced dimensions/geometries

What do you dislike about the product?

We sometime get random topology errors when importing step files from other cad system

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Collaborative environment

What do you like best about the product?

The ability to have different people work simultaneously on the same project at the same time and not worry about overwriting or destroying parts of the project

What do you dislike about the product?

Release management is still evolving, it has improved greatly, but is still a wee bit difficult

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Fast turnaround on projects, collaboration with customers

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Cost, efficiency,and security