I also have this question. What is so different about the workflow between FreeCAD and other 3D CAD software? If you can do one, you can do the others.

I would love for you to explain how the workflow is any different than in something like SolidWorks? I use SolidWorks in my day job and I use FreeCAD exclusively for my personal projects. It was a pretty seamless transition for me. Sketch->Feature, repeat, paying attention to order of operations in your model tree. What’s so different?

Is FreeCAD’s UI a little rough in places? Perhaps, but a lot of the things that people complain about in FreeCAD are present in commercial software. If there’s one thing that SolidWorks might do better is allowing you to get away with things like over-defining geometry accidentally. It’s more forgiving of lazy modeling.

FreeCAD has improved significantly in just the last few years. There is a good community around it. We need more people using it and learning how to model.

Like others have said, Autodesk is a piece of shit company that continues to be customer hostile. They pulled the rug out from underneath users years ago with F360.

FreeCAD is a good alternative. A lot of people complain about the UI polish, and complain that models break. I’ll admit that the UI isn’t as polished as commercial software like F360 or SolidWorks. However, it’s just as easy to break models in SolidWorks as it is in FreeCAD. I’ve been using 3D CAD for over 20 years, and it’s always been a problem. Even with all of my experience, I still have to fix references that get broken as I make design changes. The more you use 3D CAD, the less you run into situations like this because you’re able to think ahead and avoid them. Talk to any experienced CAD user and they’ll tell you the same thing.

The workflows of FreeCAD are just like commercial software for most functions. There are definitely features that commercial software has that FreeCAD doesn’t, but that’s where you have to make the judgement about whether it’s worth it to pay for it.

For me, I’ll continue to use FreeCAD for my personal projects. I use SolidWorks at work, but we have different demands there, and it’s worth the company paying the maintenance for it.