[Ian Mackenzie]

SolidWorks by a good margin, as far as I'm concerned. For my CAD course this term, I tried Inventor, SolidWorks, and Pro/ENGINEER (well, I already knew Pro/E). I really liked the Inventor interface - looks good, nice keyboard shortcuts, iProperties, etc., but to me it just didn't seem to have as much 'meat' as SolidWorks. At least on my laptop, Inventor's rendering is all messed up (and I know of at least one other person for whom this is true), and it just doesn't seem as stable as SolidWorks.

For instance, in Inventor I tried to create a shaft in the context of an assembly by extruding from the back face of one ball bearing to the back face of another ball bearing. When I changed the distance between the ball bearings, no matter what I tried, the length of the shaft wasn't updated, which pretty much scared me off Inventor completely (anything less than full parametric modelling, as far as I'm concerned, is unacceptable). SolidWorks has no problem with this sort of modelling (although it won't do it dynamically; if I remember correctly, you do have to rebuild).

That being said, I'm no expert in Inventor, and if anyone can tell me how I SHOULD have made that shaft so that it was parametric, I'll edit this post.

EDIT: As mentioned below, it would probably be possible to create the shaft separately, and then set it up as an adaptive part. But that seems like a lot of unnecessary work compared to just designing in context, and the simple fact that Inventor allows you to easily create non-parametric geometry is, I think, a major point against it; it seems that it would be easy for me, for instance, to make a gearbox side plate that would end up being non-parametric. If I then increased the centre distance between two gears by 0.002" (i.e. to avoid binding), I wouldn't notice that the plate holes were now in the wrong place, but the drawing dimensions would all be off.

By the way, I disagree with the statement that SolidWorks and (especially) Inventor are the most powerful packages out there - for instance, Unigraphics and CATIA are both far more powerful (in terms of stuff like surfacing, manufacturing integration, etc.)