CNCCookbook 2024 CAM Software Survey [Which is Best?]

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 over 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, 2023, and now 2024 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 is the overall market leader, but it is down in share.
• Mastercam share is UP, and fairly significantly.  It may be that some users tried F360 for a time and have switched back to Mastercam.  That's purely conjecture, but I struggle to find another source of so much market share gain.  NX is also up a fair bit.
• Vectric/Aspire is down a fair bit on market share as is Camworks.
• Most of the other packages are pretty flat on share.

So, the market has paused on consolidation and remains 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 Top Solid:

Congratulations to the Top Solid team!

The Silver Customer Satisfaction Award Winner this year is Carbide Create:

Congratulations to the CarbideCreate team!

It should be noted that they won the Gold Award last year, so they are really on a roll!

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:

TopSolid 2024
CarbideCreate 2024
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:

Rising Stars in terms of customer satisfaction include:

• HSMWorks (the Non-Fusion 360 version)
• Mastercam
• Vectric
• Fusion 360
• Camworks
• BobCAD
• FeatureCam

Those that lost share were:

• Carbide Create
• SolidCam
• Mecsoft (VisualCAM, AlibreCAM, and RhinoCAM)
• SprutCam
• Gibbscam

Conclusion

We have much more to come, this analysis is still underway.  I will update in a week or two with a detailed drill down on the strengths and weaknesses overall, and of the various packages.