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Solid works vs. inventor

We are a company mainly operating in mechanical engineering in the Netherlands (Eindhoven). We design assembly machines, textile printing machines, production machines etc. in teams of 2 to 4 people.

In the past we only used autocad. Currently (the past 3 years) our 3D design tool is solid works (3 licences) The next step is to get rid off autocad and switch to a 3D design tool (ca.

12 licences) After some investigation there are 2 programmes left: Solid Works and inventor.

I have been using inventor 7 for 5 days as a test. Ofcourse I donnot like it very much because I've been using solid works for the last 2 years now (it's always hard to use a different tool).

Can you help me to take a good decision. Does anybody has some experience with both inventor and solid works? Which one do you like best and what are the advantages compared to eachother?

Thank you, Ronnie Eshuis mechanical engineer

Reply to
Ronnie
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Ronnie,

You have both at you finger tips. Most of us don't

Your in a much better position to answer your own question than we are.

What do you think ?????

Mark

Reply to
Mark Mossberg

is there an echo in here? is there an echo in here? is there an echo in here?

Reply to
Not Necessarily Me

Ask for a fully functional system for evaluation and use it to do a 'real' project, in our experienceSolidworks is not stable, in February/March we lost 15% of our time to fixing problems which were the result of Solidworks crashing. This is time we can't charge our clients for.

We're currently evaluating Inventor as we have clients who are considering using it, at present we haven't completed a project with Inventor that is a fair comparison with our Solidworks projects. In our experience Solidworks gets less reliable the more complex the project/assemblies/parts are. We've had an occasion recently where it took a whole day to sucessfully insert a single view of a complex machine (3000 parts) into a drawing.

You probably won't see such problems with small simple assembiles or while working through training or tutorials.

Basically Solidworks is excellent, I love using it - until it crashes.

Evaluate it properly, don't buy it based on a demonstration.

jaf

Reply to
MCADuk

What Versions of SW and IV were you using or evaluating when make the comparisons?

Has either improved since is the big question. Seems IV is 3-4 years behind given functionality in SW and I would hope things IV does better than SW, SW would incorporate in a near release (after all the bugs have been fixed). I believe having competitive mid-range modeling software is good for the end users. Cost should drop and performance goes up!

Keith

Reply to
Keith Streich

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