Mechanical Engineering

Civil engineering is an area where mechanical engineers work. I do not know the CAD software leaders in that area. In general mechanical engineering Solid Works, ProE, and Unigraphics seem to be the leaders. Solid Works of the three use to be the cheapest. But their is a yearly fee to keep the software up to date. See if you can get a student license to learn it and us it for yourself.

I am retired and have chosen FreeCAD because it is the only open source totally free and with not limitations other then that from the software. It is on revision 18. The benches provided cover a very wide range from ship building , architecture, FEA, etc. The capacity of them very significantly and some are way below commercial programs. It is totally free software and I can not find any other software that has less strings. And i have spent over a decade looking.

OnShape.com is a good solution. It's completely cloud based so you don't have to install anything on your computer and it's awesome for collaborative work.

It was founded by the creators of Solidworks after they sold it to Dassault and found it had no interest in exploring a cloud based licensing service, so it's very similar to it.

It's commercial so you do have to pay a subscription but you can use it for free if you don't mind having your files made public (you can have up to 10 private files with your free plan).

If you signup they'll give you a two week trial period so you can mess around and see if it's worth your money.

I could keep babling about it but I suggest you actually checkout the website and give it a try.

After COMPAS-3D - SolidWorks.

>>>The free jobs overview shows, that mechanical engineering tasks are pretty rare, most of them in sphere of home and facility interior.

Yes, for mechanical engineers it is better to relocate for better opportunities.

of the software platforms I have used, inventor and solidworks have been my favorites. They are both fairly universally applicable. I have been looking into onshape, as mentioned previously it's entirely online and based on solidworks but they will configure the controls to resemble whatever software platform you are used to.

SolidWorks is very popular in our training Institute. Privately, i also work with FreeCad and OpenScad (OpenSource projects).

I'm using Fusion 360. It has very flexible licencing. Available for everyone from enthusiast to professionals :)

I'm using it for some quite time and I'm loving it :)

I've used most of the major systems on the market over the last 25 years. From my perspective, Dassault SolidWorks is the most widely used followed by Autodesk Inventor. I think (not sure) that Inventor is cheaper, but I have a personal preference for SolidWorks. Most of the colleagues I've worked with also agreed that SolidWorks is better.

Now if you want to use free software, that is a very different story. Very few companies that I know of use free software as it is too limited and not very popular and compatible with the standard market leading systems (SolidWorks, Inventor, Pro/Engineer, CATIA, Fusion 360, etc.).

Nevertheless, there are some free CAD software out there. The ones I've tried are FreeCAD, OpenSCAD, LibreCAD and probably a few others. I have to say that I was not impressed by any of them and have uninstalled all of them. They are no where near the "real" commercial software!

However, I very recently found DesignSpark Mechanical. It is still not up to par with commercial solutions, but it is getting much closer. I've not used it that much yet, but I think it is well worth a try. You can find this one here: https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/home