With the build season coming up and new people getting trained in CAD, our team is thinking about switching to another CAD software such as Onshape for our workflow. We’ve used inventor for the lifespan of our team, but we’re thinking that now is the best time to switch considering we’re a relatively young team.
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Please refer to the many threads that have discussed this same topic extensively.
just two examples
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Inventor is better!
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I think this reply to a similar question nails it:
In what way?
We’re technical people. “It’s better” is the second most-useless reason to do something. (The first is “because I said so”, or so I hear.)
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Onshape doesnt have a price tag on it, for the most part. Paid versions exist, but it is free to use. It’s also cloud-based, which is nice too. I learned most of the CAD skills I currently have in Inventor. I like it, but it is kind of a pain sometimes. I’ve used Onshape and Inventor both, and I’m planning on figuring out Fusion 360, and I totally recommend Onshape for FRC.
You didn’t mention the best part imo. The live updates are what sold me. You can see other people’s edits in real time and it is extremely helpful for people to explain what they are trying to accomplish visually.
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It really depends on what your students’ classroom situation is. We have found that for students are already familiar with Inventor (or a similar CAD program), Onshape works very well. For those who have never used CAD before, Onshape isn’t very intuitive.
For FRC, I think Onshape is the superior system, but it has a steep learning curve.
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Our team went from Inventor in 2017/2018 to Solidworks in 2019, and to Onshape in 2020. I don’t see us leaving Onshape any time soon. We even helped convince our school to switch from Inventor to Onshape for our high school classes.
Here are the big reasons why we Onshape dramatically improved our CAD game:
- Every student was issued a chromebook. With Onshape, any of them can CAD at home with the technology provided by the school. They just need an internet connection. With our other platforms, we had 1 or 2 laptops that could be taken home and that really limited learning for large groups of students.
- During meetings our students have access to a computer lab managed by the school/school security. The screens are nice, but the computers aren’t great. Onshape means that really doesn’t matter. This means that I can have up to ~20 kids on CAD at once in this lab.
- Onshape makes file sharing/collaborative work easy. We have 7 kids on our CAD team this year. Before Onshape I had 1-2. Those 7 kids can all meaningfully contribute to the robot CAD at once. This dramatically speeds up drawing our robot and gets more students involved.
- Tools like MKCad, and Rev’s Onshape library make importing FRC COTS parts REALLY easy.
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Paging solidworks 
. In all seriousness, those threads linked above have great advice….but the world champs use solidworks 
-Ronnie
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For me personally I would say that Onshape is better for a few reasons. Firstly because there is the free version that allows you to use every feature that it offers. In addition as a current student I have found the education centre with the many tutorials very helpful in my development as a CAD user. Thirdly I find that designing in Onshape is simple and easier compared to Inventor. the other thing that I know Onshape has that is helpful for FRC is the COTS parts libraries already in the program which allows you to just drag and drop into your assembly. So I would suggest Onshape.
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My preferred CAD package has moved from Inventor (~2 years) to Solidworks (~10 years) to Onshape (~4 years). I still use other packages on occasion, but I’m always grumpy when I’m not using Onshape.
I’ve found that eliminating the Windows file management chapter from the learning experience is really helpful when teaching students that may not be familiar with Windows. The parts studio approach is so intuitive that I’m surprised it took so long to arrive.
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The best part of Onshape for FRC is that the barrier to entry is practically zero. No installing software, no buying a $1000+ computer with a GPU, just signup for an account (which everyone under 20 has done a million times). And there’s lessons built into the platform that you can set new students on.
The best CAD software is the one that your team will actually use. If your team knows how to use Inventor, and sees no specific deficiencies with it, I would not switch. OTOH, if there are few or no people who know how to use Inventor, Onshape is a great way to get more people involved.
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Personally, I’ve found students pick up Onshape far, far quicker, and have access to higher quality video tutorials, than when I was trying to teach Solidworks or Creo. Maybe inventor is just that much more intuitive than those two, but my brief experience was that Inventor was pretty similar.
As mentioned by others, I think a big part of what makes Onshape easier is that it removes a ton of the “dumb work” that other programs have to make you do to go along with CAD— the signup is super easy, there is no local file management, you don’t need a high powered machine, and parts libraries + custom features are easily shared among individuals and teams with almost no setup.
This makes it much easier for students to get to the business of actually designing robots, not warping their brain to accommodate a bunch of arbitrary technical hurdles.
And then once you get in, their integrated tutorials are freely available to education users, comprehensive for almost the entire system, well-presented, and accessible. It’s like a warm hug from the software. Other programs have integrated tutorials, but they often are clunky, out of date, or weird to access.
I will say that although I’ve almost always had good experiences with Onshape’s performance, I know there is a decent contingent who has significant issues for whatever reason, and I wouldn’t move a team over without checking how it did at the build space.
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oh yeah the cloud collaboration is super nice
“Because we have always done it that way” is probably #3
To give some thought to OP’s question:
You will find very successful examples of teams using both of these options. As people have said before you need to fine what works for you.
Both are free to use, at least for FIRST teams. We personally use Inventor, though we started with it before onshape was an option. With GrabCAD going away we are considering other options but it is tough to make a switch since we then need to retrain everyone on a new platform and it should be easier to learn a new file management system than it would be to learn a new CAD software package. I think my biggest concerns with onshape is the need to have an internet connection to work (someone please correct me if I am wrong if there is an offline mode). And the second concern is if there is any performance sacrifices made given that it is browser based. I plan to follow this and other threads more to keep learning about Onshape.
I’d recommend Inventor or Fusion 360 over OnShape.
Fusion has the CAM part, and matches well with Inventor. I have found OnShape limiting, and in the end too many frustrating dead ends. Fusion 360 is a much more capable tool than OnShape, and Inventor even more capable than Fusion in many areas (assemblies, etc…)…
Fusion has projects and groups, and sharing files built in, is free to students (as is inventor).
I am curious as to what you find limiting with onShape. I’ve used all three (Fusion 360, Inventor and onShape). Our team uses onShape and the single best feature is it easily runs on Chromebooks which our students are provided. We cad our entire robot in OnShape and export to Fusion for CAM operations (hoping that OnShape’s recent acquisition will allow better CAM in OnShape). While there are some different techniques I haven’t found any limitations compared to the other software mentioned.
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Onshape definitely has a step up over the other two being cloud and browser based
Why is it better?
Because I said so
