AutoCAD vs FreeCAD

With the advancement of technology, different sectors are evolving to produce quality work, one such sector is the civil engineering sector which is the backbone of infrastructural development. Designing and constructing buildings, houses, railway platforms etc is not an easy task and requires a lot of resources and time, so to ease the designing and modelling work many companies released different software, two of the most used software in this field are AutoCAD and FreeCAD. They are used in modelling, designing, and drafting different civil infrastructures so we will see a detailed comparison between the two. 

AutoCAD is computer software which helps in drafting and designing different types of computer applications. CAD is an acronym for Computer-Aided Design. It was developed by Autodesk. It is compatible with different operating systems like Windows, MacOS, iOS etc. It was first released in 1982 and its stable version was released in 2021. It is available in many languages. It provides robust tools for easing the work of designing.

Advantages of AutoCAD

• It comes with advanced features which help in the accurate and precise designing of civil infrastructures.
• It allows importing files from other platforms to work on pre-built designs.
• It allows to easily share files without any data loss to multiple parties simultaneously. 
• Calculation of Area, Center of Gravity, Mass, Volume etc is very easy.
• It provides enhanced image tracing functionality which helps in converting handmade designs to digital designs.

Disadvantages of AutoCAD

• It is not suitable for Building Information Modelling (BIM).
• It supports limited file formats to import into this software. 
• It is heavy software which requires high memory and disk storage.

FreeCAD is computer software which is in parametric 3D designing, it is also used for BIM (building information modelling) projects. It is a multi-purpose tool which is used in modelling structures for real-world and for virtual worlds like gaming and other simulation environments etc. It is compatible with different operating systems like Windows, MacOS, Linux, Unix etc. Initially, it was released in 2002 and its latest version was launched in 2022.

Advantages of FreeCAD

• The main advantage of this software is that it is completely free for everyone.
• It supports most of the operating systems.
• It allows users to customize tools according to one’s needs.
• It supports files from other CAD software.

Disadvantages of FreeCAD

• It has a complex interface which makes it difficult for beginners.
• It has a problem of freezing when importing large files.
• Performance is low as compared to AutoCAD and CATIA.

Following is a table of differences between AutoCAD and FreeCAD:

	AutoCAD	FreeCAD
1.	It can be understood as computer-aided design software which is used in construction, designing, and drafting 3d models.	It can be understood as a CAD and BIM modeller which is used to build parametric models and 3d designs.
2.	It was developed by Autodesk.	It was built by Jurgen Riegel, Werner Mayer and Yorik van Havre.
3.	It is not open-source software.	It is open-source software.
4.	It is built using Python scripts.	It is built using C++ and Python.
5.	Team members cannot work simultaneously on a single project.	It allows people to work in a collaborative manner.
6.	It supports mobile platforms along with web platforms.	It only supports desktop platforms.
7.	It has large Autodesk community support.	Community support is not as good as AutoCAD.
8.	It is available in a large number of languages.	It is available in fewer languages.