Welcome to the Onshape forum! Ask questions and join in the discussions about everything Onshape.
First time visiting? Here are some places to start:- Looking for a certain topic? Check out the categories filter or use Search (upper right).
- Need support? Ask a question to our Community Support category.
- Please submit support tickets for bugs but you can request improvements in the Product Feedback category.
- Be respectful, on topic and if you see a problem, Flag it.
If you would like to contact our Community Manager personally, feel free to send a private message or an email.
Best Of
Custom feature: Unfold frame
Simple feature to unfold multiple mitered frames into a single tube for laser cutting and bending https://cad.onshape.com/documents/281caa879a59839b46c8418f/v/2cab0cc3f90d9a73056ec9f1/e/457a4892c80dc36602c9e2c0
Re: How is Surfacing in Onshape vs. SolidWorks in 2026?
Personally, I much prefer Onshape to Solidworks these days. There's a bit more control of most things, although a true 3D sketcher is missing. You can do just about everything you'd need with the other curve tools (routing curve, bridging curve, edit curve, etc), but there's no 3D solver. The 3D solver in Solidworks was always pretty brittle/buggy and stuff would blow up in weird ways.
Surface quality is as good or better. The surface analysis tools are more capable. Both are Parasolid based, as you probably know. In theory anything that can be represented in NX, Solidworks, Shaper3D, Plasticity, etc can be modeled in Onshape since it's all the same kernel.
There are a lot of a little quality of life things that could be improved here and there, but overall I'd rather work in Onshape.
The CAD for these below was all done in Onshape:
S1mon
🚨 Custom Feature Alert 🚨 Query Pattern
Query Pattern performs a feature pattern, but swaps out the input query every time it loops, allowing you to perform the same operations on very different faces, edges, bodies, etc. Here's how it works!
Free Form Deform Sandbox
Lazy post this time because this is not really a feature. More like the concept of a feature. The people yearn for generalized object deformation in Onshape and I recently vibe coded up some core utilities that can offer a solution in that space but it's real rough stuff at the moment and y'all are gonna be waiting some while before I can chisel this script into something polished that does this job cleaner. Until then I'll publish what I've got and let the other featurescript gurus take a look inside if they're interested and work on improvements to this one-afternoon rough build of an FFD utility.
Relevant conversation in this thread over here and some demo gifs of my messing around, but I figure a dedicated post in the featurescript directory might be more of a suitable place to collect discussions on this script specifically and be a better place for me to infodump my findings.
Will edit with more detail over time but until then enjoy the wiggly gifs.
Here are some of the examples of prior work that I liberally borrowed from and the core concept paper from 1986.
Re: Is there the capability to display dual units in part studios (and assemblies for that matter)?
Max_MG
Re: Sheet metal export
Re: Improvements to Onshape - January 9th, 2026
I'll call attention to one more item from the changelog for heavy FeatureScript authors. The performance panel now tells you how many modules you're importing in a Part Studio or a Feature Studio. People writing massive FS libraries have run into performance issues with too many modules being imported (typically via many different versions of std being referenced) so now you can at least see how much you're bringing in and how imports affect the module count.
