My company is considering, for the first time, buyindg a FEA software package for structural analysis (both linear and nonlinear static/dyanmic analysis). We use AutoDesk Inventor to do the solid modeling and would like to use the Inventor model direclty in the FEA analysis. Rightnow, We are considering ANSYS structural and Algor InCAD Designer/FEM Pro. From the demos and based on how much I know about FEA, I really didn't see significant differences between ANSYS and ALGOR ( at least for our application). I, however, did not find a convincing reason in the price differences between these two software? Can anyone please help me to understand why ALGOR is cheaper than ANSIS? Are there any other FEA software package that have the direct integration from CAD and are equavalent to ANSYS (or ALFOR) in terms of pricing? Thank you in advance,
GP