What people seem to like about Fusion 360 these days is that it is a cool middle-ground between Sketchup and Solidworks. We will go over that in more detail later in the article. Although, there’s another aspect of Fusion 360 that heavily relies on the cloud. So maybe between 20, the “cloud-ness” of Fusion 360 became less critical. I read a few articles on how Fusion 360 was released as Autodesk’s answer to the demand for “ CAD in the cloud.” As I looked more into this claim, it seems that while it was an exciting thing back in 2012, Autodesk’s product pages don’t make much mention of how Fusion 360 is “a cloud-based solution.”Īs I’ve researched Solidworks and Inventor ( Our Review on these two), they both seem to have collaboration tools. It dominates the market, but not everyone needs all that power.

In contrast, Solidworks is more powerful, more feature-rich, more customizable, and more complex. The people in this niche market can “get by” with Fusion 360, and they are much happier with the price. There is a niche market for those who need some kind of basic CAD/CAM modeling program, but don’t need all the bells and whistles.

Still, Fusion 360 is entirely outshined by Solidworks when scrutinized one category at a time. It is a legitimate CAD/CAM 3D modeling application that can “hang in there” with Solidworks (or Inventor). Suddenly it all made sense! Fusion 360 is like “Diet Solidworks” (or Diet Inventor). While I was initially studying these to applications, I found myself scratching my head and confused as to why Autodesk offers Fusion 360 when it is so similar in function to Autodesk Inventor. AutoCAD Vs SolidWorks | The Ultimate Comparison (2021)ĪutoCAD Vs Fusion 360 | Head-to-Head Battle (2021)

Solidcam vs camworks