[Greg Needel]

well i haven't seen anybody say "I use all three on a regular basis" so i figure i would post some good input here.

Pro-e: I use it for work, all of our parts, drawings, and full assemblies are in pro

Inventor: I use it for quick designs for personal things, and small assemblies

Solid works: all of my classes in school use solid works as the backbone software. ie. draw it in sold works and port it to our FEA or cam software.


Each piece of software has their advantages, disadvantages and differences, here are the ones i think that are most relevant.

pro-e forces you to be solid in your designs, as every sketch or feature must be fully constrained or it doesn't like it, while this is a good thing for manufacturing design using pro for quick prototyping tend to take extra time because you have to think everything through. Basically it won't allow quick and dirty parts. Pro's interface is not very intuitive, I often find myself spending loads of time looking for options in the menus, and i have been using it constantly since January.


Inventor lets you get the job done very fast. If you are just looking to get something that will work in an assembly or fast turn around of parts where you just need a drawing, or just want to try something. That being said it also lets you use parts that aren't completely constrained, this leads to the next problem. Inventor hates large Assemblies 400+ parts, for robotics this is fine but if you are doing any major design...good luck.


Solid works for me is in the same boat as inventor, good for the quick and dirty. SW defiantly is better for requiring fully constrained parts but nowhere close to pro. Some features that are nice is the the integrated FEA is much better then the one in inventor, and i really like the 3D sketch interface with SW, but other then interface and a few small features SW and inventor are even and just come down to user preference.

Back to your question: I think that any of the 3 pieces of software are good to learn, as the basics of CAD (dimensioning, building geometry, etc) are the same. In the long run, your students are going to adapt to whatever software their employer is using, and knowing the basics of using CAD is more important then the specifics of which software. Since you already know inventor I would probably stick with that. The learning curve for pro-e from inventor or SW is very hard, without a full training class. Inventor to SW is not hard at all.

On a FIRST note, since the software doesn't matter so much and there is an award for inventor, it might help you to keep them in the inventor boat, just let them know that there is more software out there then just the one you teach.

Hope this helped,

Greg