Free 2D CAD options

[dave.laban]

With the demise of free Draftsight, what was the consensus on best free 2D CAD options for editing DXFs / DWGs?

[Tom G]

DS was an AutoCAD LT clone. Best (USE) option that I found was NanoCAD because it is also an AutoCAD LT clone. That is, the same text shortcut commands that you're used to work equally, as well as the prompt order within a command. However, I read End User License Agreements thoroughly because that's solely my responsibility here. NanoCAD has an exceptional EULA, iirc, where disputes are arbitrated by a Russian court because the software is written in Russia. I never expect to pursue such a dispute, but we rejected it entirely because we can work on sensitive projects. Read it for yourself and make your own judgements. In my opinion, it is ok for personal use at home but not for mil/gov work.

I did try several others, but none were a true clone, and had their own new learning curves. When I lost my DS, and it wasn't bought for me (grr!), I downloaded Siemens SolidEdge 2D to use as a reader, because its interface confused me a lot. I never bothered learning it through tutorials, because eventually I was provided DS.

[RichGergely]

I use NanoCAD and it is great, I suppose as Tom mentions if you were working on Military or classified sensitive government projects there could be some issues with using such a vendor. That would be no different to you using Kaspersky.

[AlexLachance]

I use NanoCAD and it is great, I suppose as Tom mentions if you were working on Military or classified sensitive government projects there could be some issues with using such a vendor. That would be no different to you using Kaspersky.

Yeah, uh, great is rather relative. I use NanoCAD also, it works 'okay', if I had to chose between previous Draftsight and NanoCAD I would go with Draftsight in a heartbeat.

It's an okay viewer, but I would never ever work with it. For instance, I'd rather launch VMWare, start a Windows XP and use AutoCAD 2000 rather then use NanoCAD.

[Tom G]

I use NanoCAD and it is great, I suppose as Tom mentions if you were working on Military or classified sensitive government projects there could be some issues with using such a vendor. That would be no different to you using Kaspersky.

Yep, exactly like that. Despite superior products and/or research from Kaspersky, we cannot use them either. I'm not the one to make those decisions based on FUD or directives which don't cover our organization. Nationalism is foolish sentiment in business applications. I wonder when France will offend the REDACTED in my country and then I'm not allowed to use Solidworks anymore.
I'd shrug, but this covers it.

[Edu User Anon]

There's also 'SOLID EDGE 2D DRAFTING' if you like things being parametric with constraints and such >> https://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/ ... ree-2d-cad
. . . although for a 2D CAD program it seems to take up a lot of hard drive space, over 4GB.

[zxys001]

There's also 'SOLID EDGE 2D DRAFTING' if you like things being parametric with constraints and such >> https://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/ ... ree-2d-cad
. . . although for a 2D CAD program it seems to take up a lot of hard drive space, over 4GB.

yeah.. it's huge, so there is a lot more they are including...(image) ,.. and, you can read 3D formats as well (image)

[RichGergely]

I use NanoCAD and it is great, I suppose as Tom mentions if you were working on Military or classified sensitive government projects there could be some issues with using such a vendor. That would be no different to you using Kaspersky.

Yeah, uh, great is rather relative. I use NanoCAD also, it works 'okay', if I had to chose between previous Draftsight and NanoCAD I would go with Draftsight in a heartbeat.

It's an okay viewer, but I would never ever work with it. For instance, I'd rather launch VMWare, start a Windows XP and use AutoCAD 2000 rather then use NanoCAD.

I have found it less hassle than Draftsight but I suppose it depends what you are doing. I'm just using NanoCAD rarely for modifying very old client drawings that aren't worth the time to model and generate new drawings in Solidworks - it's been fine for that.

I don't think anyone would argue no clone is a true substitute for true AutoCAD but the pricing is just silly now for what is basic 2D software. Lite at £422 a year!!!!!

It wouldn't surprise me if in a average year I do no more than 4 hours of 2D AutoCAD work now days.

[AlexLachance]

I use NanoCAD and it is great, I suppose as Tom mentions if you were working on Military or classified sensitive government projects there could be some issues with using such a vendor. That would be no different to you using Kaspersky.

Yeah, uh, great is rather relative. I use NanoCAD also, it works 'okay', if I had to chose between previous Draftsight and NanoCAD I would go with Draftsight in a heartbeat.

It's an okay viewer, but I would never ever work with it. For instance, I'd rather launch VMWare, start a Windows XP and use AutoCAD 2000 rather then use NanoCAD.

I have found it less hassle than Draftsight but I suppose it depends what you are doing. I'm just using NanoCAD rarely for modifying very old client drawings that aren't worth the time to model and generate new drawings in Solidworks - it's been fine for that.

I don't think anyone would argue no clone is a true substitute for true AutoCAD but the pricing is just silly now for what is basic 2D software. Lite at £422 a year!!!!!

It wouldn't surprise me if in a average year I do no more than 4 hours of 2D AutoCAD work now days.

The company I work for prefered investing money in getting VMWare and XP licenses in order to run AutoCAD 2K rathern then pay for AutoCAD or pay for Draftsight.

We felt screwed when Draftsight became Pay for, so the boss prefered forking money over to any other program then Draftsight. We had the old ACad licenses sitting, so we put them to use.

[jcapriotti]

The company I work for prefered investing money in getting VMWare and XP licenses in order to run AutoCAD 2K rathern then pay for AutoCAD or pay for Draftsight.

We felt screwed when Draftsight became Pay for, so the boss prefered forking money over to any other program then Draftsight.

Yeah, back when it was free, I figured the day would come when it would turn to a pay model. It's not free for SolidWorks to provide, its just a rebranded Ares Commander product and someone has to get paid.

DraftSight is fairly inexpensive as far as CAD systems go. Seems like the cost of VMWare, servers,, support, etc would outweigh the license cost wouldn't it?

[AlexLachance]

The company I work for prefered investing money in getting VMWare and XP licenses in order to run AutoCAD 2K rathern then pay for AutoCAD or pay for Draftsight.

We felt screwed when Draftsight became Pay for, so the boss prefered forking money over to any other program then Draftsight.

Yeah, back when it was free, I figured the day would come when it would turn to a pay model. It's not free for SolidWorks to provide, its just a rebranded Ares Commander product and someone has to get paid.

DraftSight is fairly inexpensive as far as CAD systems go. Seems like the cost of VMWare, servers,, support, etc would outweigh the license cost wouldn't it?

It certainly did at first, but I'm pretty sure we would have forked more money on Draftsight in the long-run, whereas the option we went with was a one time thing.

The other thing that was kept in mind was that users were familiar with it, and that there were macros developed for it, whereas with Draftsight our macros did not work. For example, we can still push right now from ACAD 2K to our ERP, but we couldn't with DraftSight.

We had a pretty friggin' sweet setup on AutoCAD. Whoever took care of implementing it was a Solid CAD Admin, and no it wasn't me!

[jcapriotti]

@AlexLachance We definitely do the same here with some older programs. Eventually the support becomes too great and expensive. Also there is the chance something stops working and you are in disaster recovery mode. That's essential how we got management to approve the purchase of PDM after asking for years. The old in house, unsupported drawing viewer running on a 25 year Linux box ran out of resources and couldn't be repaired easily. Two weeks with our factory not having access to drawings was enough shock to get it thru.

[AlexLachance]

@AlexLachance We definitely do the same here with some older programs. Eventually the support becomes too great and expensive. Also there is the chance something stops working and you are in disaster recovery mode. That's essential how we got management to approve the purchase of PDM after asking for years. The old in house, unsupported drawing viewer running on a 25 year Linux box ran out of resources and couldn't be repaired easily. Two weeks with our factory not having access to drawings was enough shock to get it thru.

Yeah there is definetly these risks but we've kind of covered those by transitionning to 3D. Everything is pretty much converted now, the only things not converted are trailers that were made before we transitionned to 3D, and that's not gonna happen, so that's where VMWare comes in most of the time.

That, and our electric/hydraulic/pneumatic schemes are still in transition to the 3D version we developped on SolidWorks, but most of them are done, there's just the less frequent ones that haven't been converted yet.

Edit: Added screenshot of a 3D scheme because people often ask what it looks like. This is electric/pneumatic.

[Ry-guy]

There's also 'SOLID EDGE 2D DRAFTING' if you like things being parametric with constraints and such >> https://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/ ... ree-2d-cad
. . . although for a 2D CAD program it seems to take up a lot of hard drive space, over 4GB.

Yeah, it's big. It's the full 3D install. The only difference between the 2D install and traditional 3D install is a licence file. That's it. The whole point of that offering is to get hooked on the 2D and sketching capabilities and all you need to do to move to 3D is swap a license. Bammm done.

[wangpiao]

I would advise Fusion 360, FreeCAD, Onshape, OpenSCAD, BlocksCAD, TinkerCAD, QCAD, and LibreCAD. Depends on what kind of things you want to design. Different industries use different software.
here's a detailed article about this: https://www.xp-pen.com/forum-6119.html

[doobes]

I've tried a bunch.

NanoCAD was prolly the best. But....... It's Russian software and I'm not super comfortable having it installed on my computer. It actively calls home.

I had played with QCADD, and it seemed okay, so I sprung for the paid edition which can read and write dwg files.

Well, QCAD is your quintessential open sourced software, in that the dev's were smarter than anyone else and created an interface that they thought was the best. It look's somewhat like a ACAD clone, but it isn't. Many things have odd names (Round = fillet....), making them a challenge to find. I got a stern lecture about their superior intellect when I asked if I could do an alias file with the commands I've been typing into ACAD for something like 30 years.

So, I'm still looking. I don't have a lot of use for it, so will probably just use QCAD for now.

If only our "friends" at Dassault would have warned us about the new subscription plan and allowed casual users to buy a seat (it was something like $100 IIRC) they would have made a lot of friends. Scum bags....

[GeoffB]

That's useful. Thanks. I'm using CAD software somewhat less now that I've retired and was looking for a free 2D package. I didn't know about NanoCAD's origins, and so will probably try QCAD despite the fact that I've felt for a long time that ACAD is getting really dated!

[m2shell]

I recently cancelled my subscription to AutoCAD, and have also been looking for a replacement.

I haven't tried nanocad yet but I'm currently trying out CMS Intellicad. Note that it is NOT free but the price point is definitely quite reasonable for a product that (so far) seems to have similar functionality to Autocad, including the ability to create new command aliases which is a big one for me.

[doobes]

I've just downloaded Double XT CAD https://www.turbocad.com/content/doublecad-xt-v5

It's fairly old, but it works for me.

I've used (and discarded) NanoCAD for the sole reason that I'm not really comfortable having it installed on my computer(s).

I bought a copy of QCAD, and while it works well, it's fairly different from what I'm used to, and I'm not really interested in learning another CAD tool at this juncture.

[m2shell]

CMS Intellicad crashes repeatedly. Alas.

[mp3-250]

Another CAD to add to the list

https://github.com/zamtmn/zcad

it includes source files so you could also double check if putin is going to take over your pc or not.