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After using Onshape for a few months...
øyvind_kaurstad
Member Posts: 234 ✭✭✭
... my feelings are mixed. Here's my take, as a pure hobbyist with no previous MCAD experience (but with quite a bit of Sketchup experience under my belt). After purchasing a 3D-printer, I quickly realized that Sketchup wasn't even close to cutting it for me, so I started looking for other solutions in the free to low price range. I installed FreeCAD, but I didn't spend much time on it, and the time I spent wasn't very fruitful. Not sure why, but I just didn't find myself at home with the GUI. Then I discovered Onshape, and I decided to go all in and try to learn that instead.
There are many things I love about Onshape, and there are a few things I hate, and then of course some minor niggles. I won't go into detail about (all of) the niggles, but unfortunately there are also some major issues the way I see it. I've recently finished my largest design yet, which is a document that has a few part studios and no assemblies. I have one base part with 53 features, which is then derived and built upon in a different part studio, with a count of 99 features. Then this part is derived again to a new part studio, where all the rest of the model is added to this part. The feature count in this part studio is 346.
Working on this model has been both rewarding and painful. Rewarding beause I'm quite happy with the final design, painful because I have spent a LOT of time waiting for Onshape to catch up. Sometimes it just sits there with no indication what's happening (not even the spinner), but I have learnt to be patient, and usually it will come back even if it appears to be hanging. During these episodes, I have full graphical capabilites, and can rotate and view the model as I please, and I have also monitored my connection (using Ctrl-D), which shows that I have consistent pings to the server at around 50-70 ms). Now, you could argue that as a free user I can't complain, but that's besides the point, really. Had I been a paying customer I'd be furious about having my productivity hampered by things like this.
And that brings me to my next point: I actually would like to be a paying customer, but Onshape doesn't want me to, unless I go for the one single option of $100/month. To be honest, for me as a hobbyist that's never going to happen, but with the performance issues I've been having, I don't find that price justified anyway. However, I would most definitely want to pay some moderate amount to have a bit more space and number of private documents. While this model I've been working on is just 9 MB without history, I can't work for long until it has outgrown the free account limits, and I have to do the cumbersome copy/delete dance to get rid of the history. I have done that countless times on this document, and I've grown a bit tired of it (with a large(ish) document this operation is also really slow). Even free users want to keep some things private, but Onshape really forces free users to go public, and ultimately I think that will drive some users away. This might be my biggest hate about Onshape at the moment, and I strongly feel that they are missing out on some good money from hobbyists that are willing to pay for a little more than free, but can't justify going full monty.
Then there are of course a lot of good things to say about Onshape. Being cloud based, it is a relief to not have to save my work all the time, as it all happens automatically. I do like the GUI, but there are of course a lot of things that could be improved. For example, in a sketch with many constraints it can be next to impossible to find the constraint I want to delete, so I often end up deleting a lot more, and then re-adding those that should be there. When something goes wrong (code RED), the error message is very often completely unhelpful. Booleans is a prime example. When it goes wrong, it usually just says that it couldn't return a valid object, but there are absolutely NO indication whatsoever as to what (and where) the issue is.
Onshape support is great. I have reported quite a few of the problems I've had, and usually I get a prompt response. Not always what I want to hear, though. And that brings me to the last issue I'm going to mention here: Tesselation! My model rendered beautifully up until the latest update, and now it looks crappy, because apparently Onshape wiped their server cache, causing a rebuild of tesselation data. In my case that ruined the rendering of my model, and it is now quite painful to work on, with everything looking choppy. This is also not fixable, so either I might get lucky if they wipe the cache again, or if they improve their algorithms for calculating tesselation. It is incredibly frustrating to know that Onshape is fully capable of rendering my model beautifully (because it was), and then by some unlucky strike it now looks crap. I actually find this unacceptable.
I still think Onshape is promising (and I do think they'll be able to fix the issues), but I will admit that I am contemplating to try the competitor Fusion 360. They have actually chosen to not limit hobbyist users, which I find compelling. However, I don't really want to learn another GUI at this time, so I'm not sure what to do.
Keep up the good work, Onshape. I am still in your corner, but I am disappointed that you will not consider taking my money. :-)
There are many things I love about Onshape, and there are a few things I hate, and then of course some minor niggles. I won't go into detail about (all of) the niggles, but unfortunately there are also some major issues the way I see it. I've recently finished my largest design yet, which is a document that has a few part studios and no assemblies. I have one base part with 53 features, which is then derived and built upon in a different part studio, with a count of 99 features. Then this part is derived again to a new part studio, where all the rest of the model is added to this part. The feature count in this part studio is 346.
Working on this model has been both rewarding and painful. Rewarding beause I'm quite happy with the final design, painful because I have spent a LOT of time waiting for Onshape to catch up. Sometimes it just sits there with no indication what's happening (not even the spinner), but I have learnt to be patient, and usually it will come back even if it appears to be hanging. During these episodes, I have full graphical capabilites, and can rotate and view the model as I please, and I have also monitored my connection (using Ctrl-D), which shows that I have consistent pings to the server at around 50-70 ms). Now, you could argue that as a free user I can't complain, but that's besides the point, really. Had I been a paying customer I'd be furious about having my productivity hampered by things like this.
And that brings me to my next point: I actually would like to be a paying customer, but Onshape doesn't want me to, unless I go for the one single option of $100/month. To be honest, for me as a hobbyist that's never going to happen, but with the performance issues I've been having, I don't find that price justified anyway. However, I would most definitely want to pay some moderate amount to have a bit more space and number of private documents. While this model I've been working on is just 9 MB without history, I can't work for long until it has outgrown the free account limits, and I have to do the cumbersome copy/delete dance to get rid of the history. I have done that countless times on this document, and I've grown a bit tired of it (with a large(ish) document this operation is also really slow). Even free users want to keep some things private, but Onshape really forces free users to go public, and ultimately I think that will drive some users away. This might be my biggest hate about Onshape at the moment, and I strongly feel that they are missing out on some good money from hobbyists that are willing to pay for a little more than free, but can't justify going full monty.
Then there are of course a lot of good things to say about Onshape. Being cloud based, it is a relief to not have to save my work all the time, as it all happens automatically. I do like the GUI, but there are of course a lot of things that could be improved. For example, in a sketch with many constraints it can be next to impossible to find the constraint I want to delete, so I often end up deleting a lot more, and then re-adding those that should be there. When something goes wrong (code RED), the error message is very often completely unhelpful. Booleans is a prime example. When it goes wrong, it usually just says that it couldn't return a valid object, but there are absolutely NO indication whatsoever as to what (and where) the issue is.
Onshape support is great. I have reported quite a few of the problems I've had, and usually I get a prompt response. Not always what I want to hear, though. And that brings me to the last issue I'm going to mention here: Tesselation! My model rendered beautifully up until the latest update, and now it looks crappy, because apparently Onshape wiped their server cache, causing a rebuild of tesselation data. In my case that ruined the rendering of my model, and it is now quite painful to work on, with everything looking choppy. This is also not fixable, so either I might get lucky if they wipe the cache again, or if they improve their algorithms for calculating tesselation. It is incredibly frustrating to know that Onshape is fully capable of rendering my model beautifully (because it was), and then by some unlucky strike it now looks crap. I actually find this unacceptable.
I still think Onshape is promising (and I do think they'll be able to fix the issues), but I will admit that I am contemplating to try the competitor Fusion 360. They have actually chosen to not limit hobbyist users, which I find compelling. However, I don't really want to learn another GUI at this time, so I'm not sure what to do.
Keep up the good work, Onshape. I am still in your corner, but I am disappointed that you will not consider taking my money. :-)
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