CNCCookbook 2023 CAM Software Survey [ What’s the best CAM? ]

Every year, CNCCookbook surveys readers on their CAM Software. The results provide an invaluable guide to CAM for the CNC World.  This year we received nearly 300 responses.

Product Managers at a variety of CADCAM companies, large and small, tell me they find the results very valuable in their own planning. There’s no other source of information quite like these surveys, so I wanted to get these initial results out as soon as I could.

We’ve done these CAM surveys in 2010, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2021, and now 2023, so there is historical data to compare against when looking for trends. 

Let’s start by taking a look by category at market share.

Overall CAM Software Market Share

Here is the overall CAM Market Share

The trends are interesting:

• Fusion 360 continues to gain share and is the overall market leader.
• Vectric/Aspire, Camworks, and Solidcam are also continuing to gain share.
• Mastercam, BobCAD, and HSMWorks are all down on share.

So, the market continues to consolidate, but at this point, is still pretty highly fragmented.

Customer Satisfaction Awards

Which packages did customers love the most?  There’s a lot more detail in the eBook (see below), but here are the winners.

First place goes to Carbide Create:

Congratulations to the Carbide Create team!  Carbide Create is an excellent solution for beginners.  It’s a title little integrated CAD/CAM package that is quite powerful.  My friend Jaime (CNC With Jaime) does all of her sign carving with it.

The Silver Customer Satisfaction Award Winner this year is OneCNC:

Congratulations to the OneCNC team!

Customer Satisfaction Award Winners over the Years

We think the customer satisfaction awards are a big deal as they represent actual user’s evaluation of the software.  After all, who would know more than actual users who live with a package day after day and use it to do their work?

Here is the roster of Customer Satisfaction Award winners over the years:

CarbideCreate 2023
OneCNC 2023
PowerMill 2021 & 2016
SprutCAM 2020 & 2016
SolidCAM 2018 & 2017
HyperMill 2021
Mastercam 2021
Siemens NX 2020
Gibbscam 2018
CamBam 2018
Surfcam 2017

If you’d like to learn more about the Customer Satisfaction Awards, for example, the scores of all the top packages, refer to our eBook (see below).

Here’s the big chart of all customer satisfaction scores.  Note that we only include packages below that had at least 5 responses:

CAM Software Complaints

What causes readers to knock down their Customer Satisfaction Score on these CAM Packages?

Here is a ranking of the most popular CAM Package Complaints:

This year, complaints were way up in most of these areas with the exception that Toolpaths are way down in terms of complaints, though they’re still very high on the list.

CAM Software Favorite Features

These are the areas that respondents noted in their Top 3 favorite features of their chosen CAM software.

CAM Software Pros and Cons

Let’s look at these on a package-by-package basis.  Note that in some cases, you will see the same dimension called out as both a Pro and a Con.  That’s simply telling you the user base is split on those areas.

CAM Demographics

These results are pretty similar to last year with Milling down slightly and Router and Turning work both up slightly.

Evaluating New CAM Software?

19.91% of respondents said they were evaluating new CAM Software compared to 20.67% last year.  

Conversational Programming

About 50% of you have used Conversational Programming to avoid having to CAM.  This is up from last years 45% number.

Conversational Programming is a time saving and simpler alternative to CADCAM for certain jobs.  I like to think of it as making it super easy to do all the sorts of things manual machinists do just by filling out a quick wizard.

         Conversational Programming can be delivered as a stand-alone software package like our G-Wizard Editor or it can be built right into your CNC Control.  It can make it a breeze to make simple parts or to add simple features to other parts.

Here’s G-Wizard Editor’s list of Conversational Turning Wizards to give an idea:

Do you modify your CAM-generated g-code by hand?

Results:

-Frequently:  16.3%, up from 12.2% last year

-Sometimes: 49.78%, down from 54.7% last year

-Never: 33.92% nearly unchanged from last year         

Being able to modify your CAM’s g-code can be a powerful tool. If your shop lacks this capability, you’re missing out on a lot of opportunities to improve automation and profitability. 

         To get an idea what’s possible, check out 37 things your CAM won’t do for you that g-code programming can.  It will show you what’s possible with a little g-code programming added to CAM.

Our respondents use this capability to do the following kinds of things:

Testing and Proofing CAM-Generated CNC Programs

How do you test or proof your CAM-generated programs?

         Proofing programs to avoid crashes and other errors is critical before you run them on a machine.  Here’s how the survey respondents go about testing their programs:

• 15.11% Cut “air” on the machine (down from 17.92% last year)
• 60.89%run the code through the CAM simulator (down from 62% last year)
• 9.78% use a stand alone simulator (same as last year)

The remainder use some combination of the three.

Note that trusting the CAM Simulator is down.  Most people do trust them.  What can be more sexy than watching that simulation?  It’s full 3D and you’d swear it has to be accurate.

       The issue is the way CAM program simulators work. If your CAM program includes a true CNC g-code simulator, then yes, it can be used to help test g-code programs.

       The thing is, most CAM programs don’t. They just plot the same geometry information that was used to create the g-code output by the postprocessor. This allows for subtle bugs to creep in that are not detectable in the CAM backplot. 

       For example, bugs in the post cannot be detected this way because the post is downstream of that geometry info.  In other words, you aren’t really performing an independent test on the g-code.  Relying on this type of simulator is fraught with peril.

       Because of that, a lot of experienced machinists insist on a separate simulated backplot as a sanity check for their g-code before they’ll run it. It doesn’t cost very much or take very long to have this peace of mind, so it’s something you should consider.

       Proving programs is just one of the reasons folks rely on our G-Wizard Editor software.  We wrote an article that details the sorts of problems a simulator like G-Wizard can eliminate from your programs:

5 Ways G-Code Simulators Crush CNC Errors

Conclusion

As always, we’ve learned a lot from our market survey.  If you liked it, be sure you’re subscribed to our blog newsletter so you don’t miss future installments.  There’s a signup form right below.