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It’s time to present the results of the CNCCookbook 2021 CAD Survey!
I will present the results in two installments. The first is this article, and the second will be in the form of a further update to this article. If you’re part of our email newsletter (signup is below this blog post), you won’t miss one as I will announce each update in the email newsletter.
Without further ado, here is the first installment!
There were not quite 500 responses to our question about production CAD packages–up from about 300 last year. Thank you all very much for participating!
We have CAD Survey data for 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and now 2020, so we’ll be able to see a little market trending here too. BTW, I am calling it the “2021” survey because that’s when it was taken. But it is early 2021 and so I refer to the data in the charts as 2020.
Overall: Market Share of Packages Used in Production
In all, 46 packages were represented as being used in production by our respondents, up from 39 last year. Here’s what the overall share looks like without any attempt at segmentation. Let’s start with the Top packages, which comprise 91% of the market (up from 90% last year and 82% in 2018):
Last year, F360 was down on share a bit and this year it has bounced way up. Here at CNCCookbook, one effect of the Pandemic has been a lot more hobbyists joining that Professionals during this time. I suspect a lot of shops were either furloughed or keeping a lid on new purchases.
Solidworks lost a tiny bit as did many others. The two big losers were Rhino3D and BobCAD which had been #3 and #4 and fell to #5 and #6 respectively. Autodesk continues to consolidate its leadership position.
Vectric was a write-in this year like prior years, but it’s share is way up. Again, I suspect this is due to a lot of hobbyist activity, and we will see some more data to support that shortly.
Most of the big heavy pro packages like SolidEdge, Pro/E, NX, and the like have slipped.
Alibre is a nice package that saw a modest gain in share. Onshape continues to shrink even after their acquisition.
Overall: Mind Share of Packages Tried
If Market Share represents packages in production, packages tried is closer to being “Mind Share.” If you’ve tried a package, you’re aware of it so it has some mind share. We can also learn from the ratio of production market share to “tried it” market share. A package that has been tried by many and adopted by few is obviously different than a package where the majority who try it adopt it.
The average respondent tries about 3 or 4 packages before settling on one. If you’re trying to decide on a package, be sure to try several.
The most commonly trialed CAD packages account for 94% of the trials, up from 82%. That surely reflects consolidation and loss of mindshare for smaller players:
F360 is down a fraction of a percent versus last year. Solidworks is down 1.7%. And AutoCAD actually gained nearly a percent.
SketchUp is up, Inventor is also slightly up, and FreeCAD wasn’t even on the chart last year.
What about that adoption ratio? How many who tried wound up buying?
Here are the adoption results for the Top Production Market Share CAD Packages:
This is an interesting category because it shows how many who tried decided to buy. Therefore, these numbers are indicative of satisfaction achieved during a trial when evaluating the software. If the vendor is successfully getting their word out, then all other things being considered, the Adoption Rate should tell us who will grow by next year’s survey. Let’s see how that goes.
Solidworks had slightly edged out Fusion 360 last year but now it is the reverse. I’m not sure the numbers can be read that closely though–both have nice momentum on the journey from trial to purchase. I would say any of the players that converts more than 25% must have a pretty good “cockpit” experience for their trial users.
Adoption rates look good for all the top contenders on market share (and the list is sorted with higher market share at bottom of the graph). You can see that’s one reason they have such high market share–people try them and wind up buying.
Are You Evaluating New CAD At This Time?
Only a little over 11% of respondents are interesting in changing their CAD packages. It takes quite a while to learn one, and once you have mastered a package, it’s really tough to switch. This all provides friction that slows down market share changes. The number looking to change is a little higher than last year, but not enough to suggest major market shifts.
Hobby vs Pro Users
CNCCookbook serves a mixed audience of Professional and Hobby CNC’ers. Last year this survey had 64% of the participants were Professionals. This year that’s fallen back to 55% Pro. As mentioned above, I’ve seen evidence all year that the Hobbyists were active as ever while the Pros seemed to slow down during the Pandemic.
Analysis: Free vs Paid
Much like our CAM Survey, we can see that Fusion 360 is here to stay, but the major players aren’t going anywhere either. Like last year, a question was asked to determine the relative Free (plus educational and pirated) share vs paid share of the packages.
Here are the overall figures:
- Use a free, educational, or pirated version: 25%
- Paid full price: 75%
Despite Autodesk putting a lot of limits on free F360, free is up quite a bit from last years 21%. Times were definitely tough with the Pandemic.
It’s worth keeping some perspective. In 2018, the free category was at 29% of respondents.
Free vs Paid Market Shares
Here is the breakdown on what percentage of the respondents are using Free/Educational/Pirated versions for each of the top packages:
There’s no denying that free is a powerful tool to drive adoption, so I find it all the more impressive when a tool that has very low percentages of free users does so well in the market share comparison.
In fact, if we take out the free users, the market share situation changes pretty radically:
When we talk about packages that were paid for, SolidWorks jumps back to #1, although it lost considerable share from 33% last year to 28% this year. For a market leader, that is an extremely large drop.
F360, meanwhile, gained a huge number of paying users. Last year I had this to say about Free:
The interesting thing about free, is just as nature abhors a vacuum, shareholders abhor a lack of profits. Sooner or later most free things tend to get a lot less free. Free is typically used as a tool to accelerate growth until market dominance can be achieved.
We saw that prediction come true this year as Autodesk slapped a bunch of limitations on the free version of F360. Things like no tool changes and no G00 rapids. Apparently it made a huge difference if the increase in paid market share is any indication.
That’s not the whole story though–see what happens when we slice the data to show Hobby vs Pro use:
Hobby vs Pro Market Share
Pros need different capabilities than Hobbyists, and they can afford to pay more for their tools. For example, Pros need to be able to exchange files in whatever format their customers operate, so it is much more important for them to use higher market share products. Pros also care how easy it is to hire folks who already have the skills to use whatever software they’ve chosen–also an argument to buy higher market share software.
Hobbyists, meanwhile, want simplicity and low cost first and foremost while raw power is number 2.
Here are the CAD Package Market Shares for Hobby Users:
Not surprisingly, F360 is by far the leader for the Hobby segment. After all, it offers Pro-level power at an amazingly cheap price. It’s so good, I’ve often wondered how the next tier down survives.
I admit I am surprised to find SolidWorks in the #2 position. Fabulous product, but WAY too much money for most hobbyists. Next up would be Vectric, Alibre, AutoCAD, and maybe BobCad.
Rhino3D seems to be falling off. It’s a pity, as I like the software, but my dealings with them suggest they can be difficult and a bit self-focused. I don’t know if that’s the reason for the fall-off, or whether the incredible price/performance of F360 is wearing them down.
Onshape continues to fall. No surprise. They pretty much snubbed the hobby world early on when they abruptly changed the nature of their free offering to make it almost unusable.
Here are the CAD Package Market Shares for Pro Users:
As I mentioned, Pro users have different needs from Hobbyists. They’re also a lot slower to change away from something that’s working and paid for.
Solidworks continues to enjoy commanding market share for Pro users, even though it has fallen off a bit since last year.
Despite the tendency for Pros to adopt slowly, F360 made subtantial gains, going from 16.1% to 23.7% of the Pro market. But, they clearly didn’t take all that share from SolidWorks. If we look for big declines, we see some from Rhino3D, BobCAD, Pro/E, and perhaps Vectric.
Customer Satisfaction Awards
I’ve saved the best for last.
Respondents were asked to rank satisfaction with their production package as:
- It Rocks!
- It’s Okay
- Not Very Satisfied
We awarded 2 points for It Rocks!, 1 point for It’s Okay, and -2 points for Not Very Satisfied and then combined it all to get our final Customer Satisfaction Scores. Based on those responses, we award a Gold and a Silver Customer Satisfaction Award to the first and second place packages.
Without further ado:
Gold Customer Satisfaction Award: Autodesk Inventor
Congratulations to the Autodesk Inventor team for taking the Gold Customer Satisfaction Award!
Silver Customer Satisfaction Award: Autodesk Fusion 360
Congratulations to the Fusion 360 team for taking the Silver Customer Satisfaction Award!
Custom Satisfaction Analysis
Here are the Customer Satisfaction detail scores for the last three years of our CAD Surveys:
The oldest scores are the yellow top bar while this year’s scores are the bottom blue bar. As such, you can see the overall trend for these products.
For most of the products the trend has been downward. The Pandemic did not put CAD users in a generous mood.
Solidworks and Rhino3D suffered solid drops. Onshape had an even worse drop.
In terms of upward trends, Alibre, BobCAD, SketchUp and AutoCAD went up on their scores.
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I’m astonished to see your comment about OnShape modifiying their free product to make it “almost unusable” I use it almost daily for design of parts to be 3d printed., It is fast for me, and where I need it, I like their assembly method.
I have a subscription to Creo with the manufactuing package. I’ve been using Pro/E since 1989. If I need to cut metal, I use Creo, if it’s going to be just 3Dprint, Almost always it’s OnShape. The free version’s only limitation which I can see for a single user is that my designs are publicly accessible. OnShape’s drawing setup is also very quick.
I don’t have the CAM add-on for OnShape.
Bob, FWIW, I’ve seen other negative reports about OnShape, such as the free version not having the full functionality, or the number of files being limited.
I’ve been using it regularly for 16 months and haven’t had those problems.
You know, the Onshape team is VERY talented. I love their first product, Solidworks, and I really tried to love Onshape. But even though a few people did find it usable as you have, I stand by what I said. Limiting it to so few private files was a total slap in the face for the free audience after they’d already had it available with much more capability.
And the thing is, not only did they not have to do that, but it didn’t help.
I had to write them off when one of the company executives told me they flat out had no interest in the CNC market. They said it was only about 20% of their total market and that Autodesk was making that segment too competitive so they just weren’t going to worry about it.
In the end, they had a great product, but made a number of strategy mistakes that wound up forcing them to sell the company.
Thank you for the great analysis!
HI CNCDIVI,
I’m using the free version of OnShape and so far have not run into a file number limitation. I have about 20 files (Documents) running at any one time. Number has gotten as high as 50. For me, it is quick, has some functions which are much quicker and easier to use than the equivalent in Creo. I delete documents I won’t need again.
I’m a hobbiest running Sherline 2000 CNC mill, Chinese 6040 CNC Router, MakerGear M2 3D printer, and (don’t laugh) TinyBoy 3D printer.
If I need to cut metal, I use Creo 7.0 with their Manufacturing add-on.
Subscription cost is over $3,500 annually, but for me it’s worth it.
I started with AutoCad in 1983 for architectural work, Pro/E in 1989 for product design, etc. etc.
Also use Eagle for PC board layout and cnc file generation for the router.
Sometimes use LibreCAD and FreeCad if I have to deal with an old DXF file.
Otherwise,I have no experience with the other CAD packages listed above.
I was cornered into learning OnShape when I was corralled into teaching solid modeling at local college and that was what they were using.
I tried it, liked it, and use it exclusively for 3D printing. I use simplyfy3d for slicing and SheetCAM for flatwork on the router. SheetCAM uses DXF file input.
There is a CNC package by a third party for OnShape. I talked to them. They offered a 30 day trial, but I demurred thinking that adding this to my list of other commitments would be unrealistic. If the combination had provided what I need Creo for I might have switched – cost would have been about same assuming I now had to pay pay for OnShape.
FWIW, Creo will load parts I did in Pro/E in 1992. OnShape will also load Creo or Pro/E parts made before Creo 7.0.0
Finally, I think what Bob has written above needs an explanation. I don’t think it is correct and is contrary to my experience. Maybe the CNC add-on isn’t so good. I don’t know. He should check his sources and enlighten us.
Over the years, I’ve found very few people who are really conversant with more than one CAD system. People are really quick at picking up the shortcomings of a new package compared to the one they know but not the things it does better.
There is also the problem of inertia where one keeps doing something the same way they have for 20 years and it works but in the meantime the software developer has devised a new improved method which is just astonishing and unknown to me.
As I recall, it isn’t a limit on number of files in Onshape, it is a limit on how many files you can keep private versus having be public.
I do agree that it is hard to be proficient in more than one CAD program. They are all very complex to learn. What I tell people is try at least 2 and preferably 3 or 4 before choosing, and give each one a minimum of 2 weeks before you make any conclusions. If you pick 3 or 4 standard parts and try modelling them in each package over the course of a couple weeks, you can productively begin to compare.
Usually, one of the packages will just seem a little more intuitive to you. That’s the one for you, and it is never the same one versus the one you buddy likes.
There are a lot of other considerations if you’re a professional who must deal with customers and sub-contractors as well, not to mention corporate standards, and on and on.
I didn’t know that OnShape ever offered free access and private-files. This has little to do with the usefulness of the program. On the projects which I do with OnShape which I would prefer not to be circulated, I name the documents with something unrecognizable.
Obviously a corporation wouldn’t wan their projects to be publically accessible, but then why would they be using the free version
Yes, they did offer free access and private files. And it has a lot to do with the usefulness of the program for many people. Even you are going to the trouble of using meaningless names to try to hide your files.
But, what is even more important is trust. When you offer all that and then wake up one day and change it, that erodes trust.
The numbers speak for themselves. They wound up having to sell their company and their market share has been eroding since.
Thoughts on Dolphin CAD/CAM?