this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026
358 points (99.7% liked)
Technology
80978 readers
4975 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
FreeCAD isn't terrible, especially since v1, it's rough round the edges at times, but definitely usable.
But compared to Fusion360, it’s archaic—borderline unusable imo.
What I really want to use is Shapr3D, but there’s no way I’m paying $40/m for the pleasure of making a model or two a month.
Plasticity looked promising, and I was willing to drop the parametric in a pinch, but I had trouble with getting the size right because it’s scale-agnostic.
What are you trying to model? It's far from unusable.
I tried using freecad a while back my previous experience being two years in blender and light designs in fusion360 that i picked up very quickly
designing a very simple shape that would've taken me a minute on blender or fusion, took me a good 20-30 minutes navigating errors and ui to find simple tools like extend, even after being found, making them work is an extra hassle
I would love to use freecad but its not worth the learning curve for me when i only design basic things to 3d print