CAD Forum

Any users here?

Stopped using it as soon as it became P2P

AlexLachance wrote: ↑Thu Nov 21, 2024 11:52 am Stopped using it as soon as it became P2P

Yeah...well it was either subscribe to AutoCAD LT ($500/year) or DraftSight ($400/year). DraftSight you can still get a network license so we can share the 20 licenses we have amongst 100 users. SolidWorks is our primary CAD system so it's only used a small percentage of the time.

jcapriotti wrote: ↑Thu Nov 21, 2024 1:36 pm Yeah...well it was either subscribe to AutoCAD LT ($500/year) or DraftSight ($400/year). DraftSight you can still get a network license so we can share the 20 licenses we have amongst 100 users. SolidWorks is our primary CAD system so it's only used a small percentage of the time.

Yeah, Draftsight was free and used across the company here. When they made it P2P, the decision was that we weren't investing in licences for "viewers", which means everyone outside of the technical department. The price was way too steep for us to even concider it. At that price, we were better off investing in more floating SolidWorks licences and have them available to all at any time, as long as the number of licences isn't exceeded.

We still have AutoCAD 2000 on our computers to access old files and two of my collegues have an active licence of AutoCAD for specific purposes.

My company couldn't upgrade to the current version of AutoCAD and we just started using SolidWorks. This was probably back in 2006. We still needed an alternative to AutoCAD for piping schematics and electrical drawings. DraftSight was free at the time. I was able to customize the interface so it was almost identical to the way I had AutoCAD 2002 (yeah I know) set up. I thought it was a great cost effective solution at the time.

I use it periodically. We use it mainly as a replacement for AutoCAD for plant layouts.

AlexLachance wrote: ↑Thu Nov 21, 2024 2:03 pm Yeah, Draftsight was free and used across the company here. When they made it P2P, the decision was that we weren't investing in licences for "viewers", which means everyone outside of the technical department. The price was way too steep for us to even concider it. At that price, we were better off investing in more floating SolidWorks licences and have them available to all at any time, as long as the number of licences isn't exceeded.

There are free viewers if that's all that is needed. We have a few cases of electrical drawings in DWG format, also some older drawings that we may not want to spend time modeling. And sometimes deal with architectural layouts from outside that are in DWG format.

Even at $400 per floating DraftSight license, that's far less than another SolidWorks floating license. Guess it depends on your company size though.