Best CAM software

[Cory]

Originally Posted by Jared

MasterCAM is expensive, but they may give a pretty good educational discount. It is significantly harder to use than HSMWorks. I don't think the learning curve for MasterCAM is worth it for just the tabs. You'll lose the nice integration between CAD and CAM and you'll have to redo all your CAM if you make a tiny change to your part most of the time.

It's $600 for a seat of MasterCAM or MasterCAM for Solidworks. If you use the latter you don't miss out on the associativity of HSMWorks. MasterCAM has a change recognition tool in the standalone version that will allow you to update geometry without redoing the entire CAM program, but it can be unwieldy at times.

I wanted to switch to HSMWorks but no tabs is a deal breaker. I'm not gonna waste the time to draw in tabs when I could have the part done already in MasterCAM.