About FreeCAD



FreeCAD will be a general purpose 3D CAD modeler. The development is completely Open Source. FreeCAD is aimed directly at mechanical engineering, product design and related areas, but also fits in a wider range of uses around engineering, such as architecture or other engineering specialties.

FreeCAD features tools similar to Catia, SolidWorks or Solid Edge, and therefore also falls into the category of MCAD, PLM, CAx and CAE. It will be a feature based parametric modeler with a modular software architecture which makes it easy to provide additional functionality without modifying the core system.

As with many modern 3D CAD modelers it will have a 2D component in order to extract design detail from the 3D model to create 2D production drawings, but direct 2D drawing (e.g. AutoCAD LT) is not the focus, neither are animation or organic shapes (e.g. Maya, 3D StudioMAX or Cinema 4D), although, thanks to its extremely wide adaptability, FreeCAD might become useful in a much broader area than its current focus.

Got curious? Take a look at the Feature list or the Getting started articles.

A major concern of FreeCAD is to make heavy use of all the great open-source libraries that exist out there in the field of Scientific Computing. Among them are:


 * OpenCascade, a powerful CAD kernel
 * Coin3D, an incarnation of OpenInventor
 * Qt, the world-famous UI framework
 * Python, one of the best scripting languages available