Think You Know Which CAM Packages Are Most Popular? Time to Find Out!

Last modified: March 19, 2024

We are excited to announce the completion of our 4th CAM Software Market Share Survey with interesting findings. These CAM Software surveys have been conducted in 2010, 2012, 2014, and the latest in 2015. Considering the rapid changes in the market, we've decided to conduct the survey annually, instead of biennially.

We divide the market into 3 segments:

Let's take a look by category.

High-End CAM

The High End was the largest part of our survey and accounted for 47% of adoptions.

For our 2014 Survey, we remarked that the High-End CAM Software Market was crowded, fragmented, and somewhat confusing.  There had been predictions of consolidation, but consolidation was not apparent in the data.  That has changed for our 2015 survey.  There are still a great many players, but the Top 5 account for 5% of the market while in 2014 the Top 5 were 51%.  The market is indeed gradually consolidating.

Mastercam holds a 27% market share of high-end CNC software in 2015.

High-End CAM Market Share

Here are the highlights of 2015 relative to the 2014 results:

To understand the market share gains and losses better, you’ll want to drill down on some of the other survey analysis such as Share of Mind, Top Features, Top Frustrations, Conversions Rates and Product Strengths and Weaknesses.

Tier-Priced CAM

The Tier-Priced category consists of products that are sold in modular fashion so you can build a CAM package at virtually any price point depending on how much functionality you need.  As such they straddle multiple markets from low-end to high-end.

Tiered CAM software market share pie chart for CNCCookbook.com.

Tier-Price CAM Software Market Share

When we did our 2014 survey, the Tier-Priced category was the second most popular segment, after the High-End.  This year, its share places it in third place, and we think that is largely due to the incredible success of Fusion 360 at the Low End.  26% of our respondents were using Tier-Priced CAM packages.

There was quite a lot of upheaval in market shares among the Tier-Priced packages too:

In 2014 the Top 3 players in this segment had 78% of the segment.  For 2015, the Top 3 also have 78%.  The forces at work here are not consolidation but changing positions based on overall momentum.  Like the High-End, more insights are possible by looking at some of the other reports.

Low-Cost CAM

These are the packages that Hobbyists and “Prosumers” (low-end business + high-end hobbyist) thrive on because their price points are relatively low.  This was our second largest category having received 32% of the responses.

Low-end Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM) software market share pie chart, 2015.

Low-End CAM Market Share

This is the market where Autodesk’s Cloud Strategy and Fusion 360 product have really taken over.  The Top 3 players in 2014 had 61% market share while Fusion 360 is closing in on that all by itself.  Every single player we tracked in this market lost some share to Fusion 360, it was only a matter of how much.  CAMBAM stayed pretty flat while MeshCAM went from 23% to 15% share.  The rest all did much worse.

The combination of nice parametric CAD, the very nice HSMWorks CAM, and all at a very affordable price is tough to beat.  The low-end market is basically being offered a lot of the power that had been reserved for the High End and Tiered Segments at a very affordable price.

Customer Satisfaction

Customer Satisfaction can be elusive to track down, but we all want the product whose customers love it the most.  For this report, we measured Customer Satisfaction as a score in two ways.  First, we asked respondents to rank their packages on a 1 to 3 scale where 1 = Not very good, 2 = OK, 3 = It rocks!  Second, we asked whether the customer was actively searching for a new package to adopt.  A mathematical formula related the percentage of each kind of answer to a Customer Satisfaction Score.

High-End Top 5

  1. Alphacam
  2. Edgecam
  3. Gibbscam
  4. Featurecam
  5. Solidcam

Tiered Top 5

  1. Vectric
  2. Bob CAD/CAM
  3. Sprutcam
  4. VisualMill
  5. MADCam

Low-End Top 5

  1. DolphinCAM
  2. HSMWorks (Fusion 360)
  3. MeshCam
  4. CamBam
  5. Desk Proto

Want to Learn More About CAM?

This year we asked a lot more questions in the survey than simply, "Which CAM packages are you using?"  We added questions relating to Customer Satisfaction, Favorite Features, Biggest Frustrations, and more.  We learned a lot, but it's really too much for one article.

If you'd like to know more, no problem.  Just sign up for our weekly newsletter and we'll give you a link that allows you to download our beefy and free PDF report on the survey.  A little later, we'll publish more installments with even more information. Stay tuned for these follow-up articles, but for now, sign up for our weekly digest of new CNCCookbook blog articles and we'll give you the PDF report for free.

To sign up, scroll down and use the form below where it says, "Like what you read on CNCCookbook?"  Nothing to it!

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