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Advice on a CAD solution
(sopuli.xyz)
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this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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I currently switch a lot between FreeCAD and Sims. When I brainstorm with my girlfriend we either use a simple drawing programm or Sims. Then, once we aligned on an idea, I use FreeCAD to bring in accuracy. Quite often then the original ideas don't work out because of wall thickness, window placement etc.
What are you running FreeCAD on? I have tried it on 4-5 different systems and it has ran like shit on all of them. Like I don't expect it to be perfect but it took 30-90 seconds to even respond when I try to do something. That's completely unusable. I finished an entire (fairly simple) design I was working on in Fusion360 before I could even get 2 rectangles sketched out in FreeCad. I'd love to get it working because it's one of my bigger hangups getting rid of windows.
I never had these kind of performance issues at all. I use it on three different ThinkPads, all not too bad but also no crazy hardware. The cheapest should be an E14 with a AMD 5500U and 16 GB of RAM that was around 500€ 4 years ago.
Isn't Fusion360 cloud-based? If so, it doesn't make too much sense to compare the performance on a certain hardware.
My understanding is fusion360 only does some things in the cloud. It still runs locally. Otherwise they could have a web app I could use on my Linux desktop and not worry about it. I was using them side by side on two separate workstations (the one with FreeCAD actually has higher specs) and I wasn't really trying to compare performance but when it's that glaring of a difference it can't just come down to hardware and like I said it wasn't just "slower" it was completely unusuable. I tried FreeCAD on the system I use Fusion360 on as well with similar results to everything else I've tried it on.
Okay, that's strange. When you say workstations, I assume that you had pretty decent hardware and probably more powerful than my consumer notebook. I usually don't notice lags or load times > 1 second. If I do a complex operation like mass-cloning an object via a polar pattern, I have to wait for 2 or 3 seconds but really nothing that bothered me in the workflow. Definitely never anything close to a minute as you described.
If you want to give FreeCAD another chance one day and still experience the same issues, maybe bring it up in the official forums. The experts there might have an idea what could be wrong.