You can easily pilot FreeCAD from scripts, build your own modules or even embed FreeCAD in your own application.

Most of FreeCAD's functionality is accessible to Python.

If you use commercial parametric modeling software at work, you will find similar tools in FreeCAD.

Our community will help you get the hang of it quickly! Got yourself a project you want to build, have built, or 3D printed? Model it in FreeCAD. FreeCAD is open source (LGPL license) and completely modular, allowing for very advanced extension and customization.įreeCAD reads and writes open file formats such as STEP, IGES, STL and others. It is really complex to use, very little user friendly and the documentation is most of the time not that helpful.Parametric modeling allows you to easily modify your design by going back into your model history and changing its parameters. The possibility of having a parametric CAD together with FEM analysis are great. PROSįreeCAD, as the name suggests, is free and considering alternatives on the market available for free right now, this is the only CAD with so many functionalities, which I consider another great advantage. However, depsite the difficulties in 3D modeling, the FEM part is more straightforward to use and allows to obtain interesting results. However, if some of the issues will not be solved and another more user friendly alternative will be present on the market, I feel like it will be abandoned quickly. Right now, I feel it is one of the most valid alternatives, especially after Fusion 360 introduced limitations on the numbe of components that can be worked with for free. The biggest pro of this software is the number of features implemented and totally free, which makes it the best unrestrained free option for who requires a CAD or a FEM software but cannot pay for it, but unlike another 3D software, Blender, that despite being open source got highly user friendly, FreeCAD feels still quite hard to use, due to a not so agile workflow and some bugs that are still to be fixed. I have used FreeCAD as an hobbyist who has no availability for payed cad softwares, to produce models that I later 3D print.

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