SOLIDWORKS proudly supports FIRST Robotics teams as a Crown Supplier. We offer SOLIDWORKS Desktop CAD for Windows users and browser-based SOLIDWORKS Cloud CAD Apps for teams working on Chromebooks, Macs, tablets, and mobile devices.
You’ve seen SOLIDWORKS models featured in the FIRST Game Manuals—now your team can access this same professional-grade software for free through our sponsorship program!
Our school network is slow enough that download the game manual takes a minute or two (3Mbps per device + regulatory restriction). All our students bring their own laptop anyway. So we only use the full desktop version.
There’s something magical about having software that works with slow internet, I agree. I’ve been using Solidworks since before any cloud options other than PDM were out, and am afflicted with slow internet as well
All CAD softwares comes with downsides, and onshape is far from free to them. While yes we’d all like Solidworks to fix their clunky software that’s had the same issues for decades, every other cad software also has major issues of some flavor for some users. Requiring constant internet connection, poor handling of redundant relationships that are automatically added, a severe lack of features, not being the software taught at some teams school, mentor familiarity, extremely long part regeneration times for advanced features, reduced workflow speed when working with other simulation softwares, and many others are all reasons to use Solidworks over Onshape for some teams.
Mindlessly saying “go use X other software lol” on a post that is offering free software is highly unprofessional and not beneficial for anybody, when there are very real reasons for using Solidworks, even if they are only relevant to some teams.