I'm seeing a lot of votes for Fusion 360. Oh, is that cloud-based too?
It's hard, if not impossible, to find a good free one that's not cloud based. Fusion360 is great, I use onshape because it has few more features that I'm used to and has identical philosophy as SolidWorks I use for private stuff; Onshape is also, at least for me, noticably faster then Fusion360 (but that can always change overnight). Now I read onshape has no more "private" projects for new users .. too bad they turned that off (I still have that feature, not that I use it) but the major reason for me to use onshape is colaboration and sharing so I could not care less about "private projects" in cloud
I assume everything in cloud is far from private anyhow. Also if you have serious need to have "private designs" you are doing it for $$$ and you don't mind paying for the tools so you can then go with professional tools like SolidWorks, ProEngineer, Catia ..
If you are looking for desktop versions here are some "old" ones I used/considered purchasing ..
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Creo is great (used to be CoCreate - PTC.COM), they had a free version that lacked some professional tools (very usable for 3d printing), not sure where are they now I haven't follow up. The main thing Creo/CoCreate was lacking were parametric design but was incredibly powerful and fast.
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Alibre - V11 was free (and super great), V12 Express was free .. it was super fast, parametric .. no clue where they are now wrt usability/price/free version but the software was very very very good and a lot of ppl from reprap community used it, even large number of reorap users purchased a full version (they always had some discounts for reprap users)... might be worth a look .. it is now I think "Geomagic" and is owned by 3d systems
(
https://www.alibre.com/ ) .. they purchased so many companies around 3d printing
.. still if you want desktop app you want to check it out
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VariCad some time ago I tried number of "cheap" parametric cad systems and this one was the cheapest "usable" 2d/3d cad software at the time. not sure what's the pricing attm, but what threw me off from purchasing it back in the day was fairly expensive upgrade policy... for e.g. (I don't remember real numbers) the sw was $500 with 1 year free upgrades and then you have to pay $200 for every year after if you want updates... The software really is pushing great updates non stop and was pretty nice for the price but the $200 / year was just too much for my use case so I gave up
If you are calm and you have patience you can try FreeCAD
in combo with openSCAD it can be very powerful ... I just lack the patience required using it..
Now if you have "enough money extra"
- SolidWorks
- Catia
- ProEngineer
These are all btw "technical" part creating suggestions! If you want "artistic" approach they are all total and utter %@#$$%&^ .. then you want to be looking at the two most used ones:
- blender (free, open source)
- ZBrush (~ $800)
many other for organic/artistic modeling but it's not what I use so .. there are also good tools for 3d artistic modeling that come with their own software or plugins for some sw only ... for e.g. the popular is (again 3ds)
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https://www.3dsystems.com/haptics-devic ... om-premium
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https://www.3dsystems.com/haptics-devic ... ic-touch-x
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https://www.3dsystems.com/haptics-devic ... agic-touch