DraftSight

The company offers a version which offers you 2D functionality for free which is good. I have tried over ten CAD software in the last several weeks and this one is right up there in terms of ease of use. There have only been a few which I found to be intuitive the moment I logged into the software. SketchUp is the easiest to get going with in my opinion but DraftSight is very close. I am still uncertain as to the pricing of the professional version as I have just installed the trial. But the price point is very fair with their free plan compared to AutoCAD LT which is a $1000+ 2D drafting software. It works on both Windows and Mac. The user interface while utilizing a lot of icons saves space they remain quite intuitive to understand in terms of your best guess while learning as to the function. It matched up with my first thought for all of the tools I have tried so far. The symbolic icons used are actually very similar to every other CAD software I have tried which helps through a familiarity. There are a lot of helpful resources available as well as user guides. You can visit their user forum community to get additional help from regular users or experts too which is good to know. I have gotten warnings from most of the CAD software I have tried on my laptop as the video card isn't compatible with some newer 3D technology, but I did not get this warning while using this software at all though it has this same technology as AutoCAD, for example. It's also a very lightweight software compared to almost all of the others so far, I believe. It comes in under five hundred megabytes compared to some like AutoCAD at almost twenty gigabytes. One of the strongest features is the ability to use the .dwg file format which is the AutoCAD standard. Which means you can create with this tool and communicate to the large percentage of architects or engineers who use AutoCAD. So you can use vectors, blocks, layers and associate annotation and dimension the same way and know your design will be compatible down the road which is excellent.

The company charges on top of their professional upgrade for their support I believe which seems slightly unethical or perhaps it's just aggressive pricing yet I believe the least they could do is include it in the price even if it is the higher cost. Simply because the end user experience is going to go a long way either positively or negatively. And superior support helps build trust which gets communicated by reviewers which prospects most certainly affects our decision as to move forward with a company, or not. Though I have read this company listens to their customers so perhaps they will get wind of this across their user reviews and adapt accordingly. I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt.

DraftSight is a computer assisted design software which helps you build 3D and 2D models much more efficiently than traditional methods. I am determined to find the simplest and most professional way to learn a software in order to become proficient with it over time enough to create and communicate one design, my future custom home, to the professionals I will hire when it is time to build. And I believe this is the best option so far at least from the 2D side of things. You can't beat the price and the value in the offer is truly outstanding.