cheaper alternative to Autodesk products?

May 06, 2004 5 Replies

I am a high school technology teacher, and my school is trying to fund our "Drafting and Computer Aided Design" courses, and it is hard to believe how expensive Autodesk's products are! $5000 Canadian per year for 25 licenses, that's $200 per year per machine!


1) Does anyone know of a cheaper alternative that we could use to teach the basics of AutoCAD to our students?


2) We wanted to use Autodesk's Inventor as well - know of cheaper alternatives for Inventor?



Howie


Don't know what you can do to replace Inventor but as for Autocad, give intellicad a try. Takes all Autocad commands and works so much like Autocad, the transition form one to the other is very easy. Go to :

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They used to offer the software free to schools. Don't know if they still do but worth asking. Don't expect to do much 3D with it though, that side of it is pretty buggy but for basic drafting, it works great.

Send your query to snipped-for-privacy@cadopia.com and they will get you the product at edu discounts.

Another Alternative is to download the free version 6.5 Cadvance.

If you want it to look like AutoCAD then this can be done (see my web site

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but you will need the later version with multi-toolbars to achieve it.

Send an email to Takashi Furukawa who may be able to help you with an educational discount. Check out their newsletter you will see the kind of things they have done for education and Charities.

A few years ago, Takashi visited the UK and presented the London Borough of Sutton with site licence for it's schools.

Regards

Alan (cadalot)

Howie, you may want to check out PowerCAD

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or speak to them directly about educational pricing (toll free 1-888-97-POWER). PowerCAD offers both full 2D and 3D drawing capability in about 300 AutoCAD compatible functions, AutoCAD command recognition, as well as an AutoCAD emulation desktop. I think you will find it to be the perfect fit...

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