As a side thing I decided to learn Onshape, but I’ve realized that our team will probably be using Inventor, so I was just wondering what the differences were between the two, or other CAD programs (just out of curiosity).
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The main differences between Onshape and Inventor are(listing what onshape has that inventor doesn’t): featurescripts(can and already is multiple threads) which are essentially custom features you can add into Onshape for use in part studios, ability to do multiple parts in a single part studio rather than have a single part per file in Inventor, mates being set up differently in that Onshape does mates in a way that it infers how the parts are oriented from a single connection rather than with multiple constraints like in Inventor(usually 1 fastened mate = 3-4 constrain mates(rough estimate but thats what I feel like the difference is). Inventor, like Onshape, has cloud I believe but am not too sure in how that structured. Thats all I can think of at the moment between the two softwares you mentioned.
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Fundamentally, all CAD software packages enable you to 3D model your mechanical designs. They have different features here or there, but none of that will really affect your ability to model your robots.
The biggest difference between Inventor and Onshape is that Onshape is not only CAD software but also a PDM (product data management) software. It does all your file management for you automatically behind-the-scenes. Everyone always has the latest model and the model can never be lost. With Inventor, every student using it will have to upload their changes and download other’s changes manually on a regular basis. There are certainly good tools to do this, such as GrabCAD, but there is nothing better than not having to think about it at all.
Other big differences,
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Nothing to download since it runs in the browser. You get free software updates roughly every 3 weeks and you don’t have to install them.
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Built in real-time collaboration
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Public FRC part library (MKCad)
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I maintain that that’s a bad thing. Onshape gives you no way to download your files. PTC discontinues onshape? Server goes down? No internet connection? Tough luck.
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I may be misinterpreting what you said, but Onshape allows you to export your files in a variety of formats so I don’t really get what your point is.
My team uses google drive, github, and slack too. We’ll be the first to go down in post-internet era.
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You can download various parasolids to protect against catastrophic failures… But yes, both server and client side need to be up for you to work.
For the entirety of the 2019 season 973 had no lost time due to Onshape outages though.
We found the upsides well worth the risk.
You could probably find an answer by browsing threads such as these. I think we should close this thread.
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not only are both of these factually incorrect, but I’d like to point out that onshape provides even better version control and file management than any other CAD software I’ve used either in an internship or personally (this includes Fusion 360, Inventor, Solidworks, onshape, and autoCAD). The fact that Onshape has Git-style version control of your projects as well as the ability to have paradoxical “take this part from one version of this file while taking the other part from this other version and mate them together” without breaking down is just extremely good engineering.
I don’t usually get this wound up on CD, but I think it’s extremely unfair for you to assume that engineers that helped develop programs like Solidworks wouldn’t think to add a download button to their online CAD package.
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No.
254 used SolidWorks with GrabCAD.
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tsk tsk tsk…
For me (and maybe I’m doing something wrong) Onshape is significantly slower than Solidworks (and inventor, although I rarely use inventor). The amount of time I spent sitting waiting for Onshape to do tasks or open files was infuriating. If you have any internet / network issues in your shop it’s probably a deal breaker for Onshape (67 had really spotty and slow internet in their shop)
As others have mentioned, file management is different between the two, and the ability for multiple people to work in Onshape at once is nice. GrabCAD works just fine, but requires a little more coordination.
The only feature I found missing from Onshape that I wanted was path length dimensions, specifically for getting belt center to center dimensions correct. How do you Onshape folks do this with tensioners / more complicated belt paths?
Solidworks does some really annoying version control where you can’t open files from a newer version of Solidworks so everyone needs to have the same year of SW installed. Inventor is much more flexible.
Creating your own parts library in Solidworks or inventor is a lot of work and kind of a pain.
I haven’t tried CAM in Onshape, not sure if it exists, but I really like that HSMWorks integrates with Solidworks and keeps your CAM parametric with the model. Fusion 360 can do this too.
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OnShape is to Google Docs as Inventor / Solidworks is to Microsoft Word. (Pretend for a second Google Docs doesn’t have an offline mode)
For most people, Google Docs does everything they would want Word to do, and it shares files and manages them for you. Word has more features, and can definitely do some things faster and some things with more user control / power, but many FRC teams do not need these features. Both can be functionally used to make great documents. Word isn’t exactly irrelevant, not at all, but Docs has some compelling use cases.
Anyhow if you don’t know any CAD at all, use OnShape. If anyone on your team is an expert in a CAD program you can get for free, use that CAD program.
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1188 switched from Inventor to OnShape this year and will never go back. The primary reason has far more to do with the specifics of FRC teams than OnShape being a better program, it’s not. Inventor, Solidworks, PTC, NX are all more powerful CAD packages. As others have mentioned it’s all about the file management and ease of deployment.
So why is it better for FRC? Two main reasons. First, assuming you don’t have bad internet you can have OnShape up and running on an reasonable PC or laptop in minutes. You can’t do that with any of the other solutions. Inventor alone can take several hours to install and needs a reasonably powerful PC/laptop to run. Solidworks seems a bit better.
Second, as others have mentioned it’s all about the file management. GrabCAD is good but it’s far from perfect. We were using a combination of GrabCAD+Inventor and it quickly becomes unmanageable as your user base scales. 2 people, no problem. 5 people, totally unworkable.
Both of these issues are solved within professional environments where large amounts of time and money can be invested to address the challenge. For 99% of FRC teams the investment in installation and configuration is far to big a time sink compared to having a more powerful package.
Currently there are some negatives to OnShape that might vary based on your teams needs. As mentioned it needs a good internet connection. Even with a good connection we still found it getting slow as the models got more complex. The other item that really hurt us was the lack of integrated CAM. I’m curious what other teams did to get around this. For us, moving one hole meant repeating a whole workflow of exports, imports, and setup.
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I was pretty solidly 
in the SolidWorks camp until C19.
This week, we are teaching ~20 ‘NEWtrinos’ CAD in our now-online CAD Camp and OnShape is literally saving our bacon. And the kids are taking to it like ducks to water. We haven’t built up to anything of complete robot complexity yet, so waiting on tasks has been a very minimal issue so far. If it continues to perform acceptably, I’m pretty sure I’m going to be a convert.
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In 2019, we exploited to ability for many people to work on the same project at the same time when I was training some of the students. We all opened the same project and the students could see what I was doing as I was doing it. Each of us was in our homes and we spoke to each other via a Microsoft Teams group chat session. I recall letting the students take turns taking control to try doing what I had just shown them.
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The three features you brought up are all in Inventor.
You can write your won tools in visual basic. I haven’t done it myself but a coworker wrote a ton of useful tools specific to the types of projects we were working on.
You can create multiple parts in a single part file by creating a ‘multi body’ part. Its just a different way to do an extrusion, revolve, sweep, etc.
The way onshape constrains parts sounds like the ‘joint’ tool in inventor. I haven’t really played around with it in a whole but the description sounds similar.
Inventor has a lot of tools that are not obvious to new or basic level users. I used it professionally for a couple years and for FRC even longer and I’m constantly learning something new.
The biggest difference between the two that I see is the file management and version control. By its nature its native to onshape but programs like solidworks and inventor usually rely on other programs to handle it. We tried grabcad 4 or 5 years ago and didn’t like it but in 2017 we made the switch to Autodesk Vault (Autodesk’s PDM software) and have loved it. Not only do we use it for version control on our cad projects but we use it for team word docs, excel docs, and PDFs too.
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Based on posts in the forums, this is a feature that is currently being worked on. There are various workarounds to this which usually use featurescripts.
My personal workaround is simply doing the math for the path length within the onshape dimensions. They have a bunch of built-in functions you can use in the definition of the dimensions (things like pi, trig functions, sqrt(), etc) which is what I usually use. It gets a bit more complicated when the arc angle is not something simple, but it’s doable.
One of the really nice things about Onshape, is how direct the communication is from customers to the engineers and programmers working on the software. Anyone can post a request and Onshape decides how many resources they want to dedicate to that feature based on demand from the community. Onshape releases updates to the software roughly every three weeks with various small updates and large additions in most.
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This is something that does take more time and energy than working in SW or F360. Each new version of a part needs the CAM re-associated which is certainly tedious. I have poked around a bit with some of the free CAM options in Onshape and they are quite light on features but could likely work for a large portion of the relatively simple parts that are made within the FRC realm.
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Can confirm. Also Fusion (which I absolutely HATED using because the use of joints was mandatory at the time, and it wasn’t obvious to someone jumping in how to use the darn things). I learned how to use joints properly in Inventor from Onshape tutorials… but I have a tendency to mix joints and constraints (I’ll use a joint, then I’ll apply a constraint or two instead of using limits).
To me, 75% of the difference between CAD programs is how much they cost/how easy it is to set up an account. 12.5% is aesthetics/where stuff is. The rest is the actual difference, including things like what the software is optimized for (some works better with surfaces, for example).
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I’ve been using CAD for a long time. My current favorite is Onshape; it’s the most modern.