Migrating to FreeCAD from SolidWorks

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    Overview

    The intention of this page is to serve as a guide for users that are accustomed to the SolidWorks CAD/CAM workflow and want to migrate to FreeCAD.

    History

    Understanding a little of the history of FreeCAD may help users comprehend it better:

    Tips

    The PartDesign Workbench has many functions that are equivalent to SolidWorks. The image below identifies equivalent functions and their names on each platform, as well as functions that are unique to each platform.

    Features and Part Design.png

    A comparison between FreeCAD and SolidWorks. Click the image for a higher resolution.

    Topological naming problem

    FreeCAD version 0.20 is still affected by the Topological naming problem, but there are plans to fix this in the next version.

    Tutorials

    List of helpful tutorials

    Joko Engineeringhelp

    There are many video tutorials online. Some of the more popular (at the time this was written) are by a Youtuber calling himself Joko Engineeringhelp.

    One of his tutorials is meant specifically for former SolidWorks users: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XXnulyKPNI

    Some of the other videos are comparisons of SolidWorks and FreeCAD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RX8-3rMCbRw

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