Solid Works vs. Inventor

[Elizabeth Waters]

Originally Posted by R.C.

A) Personally I like Solidworks interface, but both are equally nice depending on who are you. This should be decided by your team.

B) If one of your main machine shops already uses Solidworks, why shoot yourself in the foot like Cory stated earlier? We have a shop that does a lot of machining for us and its just nice being able to send them a Solidworks file.

C) If your mentors know Solidworks and are proficient at it, why are you bothering to switch?

In reality, we have only one mentor who helps us with CAD models for the robot, and he comes from the sponsor corporation (Oceaneering) that helps manufacture our parts; this year, they actually manufactured nothing for us as it was not needed. Yet, after the Inventor training that we attended last week, it does seem as if SolidWorks is an overall better platform (and as many have previously stated, more widely used in industry). At this point, the only issue that we're concerned with is award submission being exclusively Autodesk; thus, we'd like to be proficient in Inventor for that reason. Still, with the basics down in Inventor and knowledge of SolidWorks, shouldn't be too bad to "transfer" our final design into Inventor.

Thanks for all the input!