Hello! I've been on this forum for a while, and I've noticed how important tutorials are for you. Maybe I'll take the opportunity to introduce you to the software of the company I work in. ZW3D is really little known and it deserves to be highlighted a little more because it is interesting, it is a hybrid surface and volume parametric software replacing SolidWorks. It is much cheaper and there is no rental system.
I'll let you discover the software for yourself. Your feedback is interesting for me because I am in charge of training on this software. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQWtKMaH7WI&list=PLK4GTPfcVTZJOI_v2I5LhvoEPY_jPlW2I So here is a series of tutorials, there are 12 videos so far
From my point of view, evaluating CAD software is a very difficult thing.
Because there were very good products, which did not prevent Creo from emerging before it merged into PTC.
I abandoned Inventor because it handled the constraints very badly, as soon as we did basic kinematics, everything went in all directions.
It took me a while to master Solidworks (especially since for three weeks I was not very efficient because of the learning curve, customers were not happy with the extension of the deadline) while these software were relatively close.
In addition, I had to convert all my files that were still active, which is a lot of work.
From my point of view, changing software just for a difference in maintenance cost is not relevant. Because the time you will spend training, transforming the existing files, it will cost you at least two years of maintenance (SW maintenance price).
After the uncertainty that you can't do with the new software, what you were doing before (if you do things a little Sioux) is also a certain risk.
The cost of maintenance is to be reduced to the monthly cost (base 90 € per hour for a BE or more depending on the size of the BE) so if you reduce the cost of monthly maintenance to the hourly cost, look at what it does.
That is what I can tell you personally.
Your request will always give you a bit of publicity, isn't it :-)
I completely understand these arguments: when you have started working with a tool for years, it is difficult to change it, especially because of the proprietary formats.
For the financial argument, the "institutional" publishers have integrated that the cost is included in the service. That's why we end up with costs of €90 per hour: with expensive tools, it raises the bill:D
It is important to understand that ZW3D, newly arrived in France in this form, is not intended for design offices equipped for 5 years with 10 SolidWorks, Inventor, or PTC workstations. ZW3D is aimed at new structures that don't want to spend a fortune either on purchase costs or maintenance (0 €), do surface as well as solid, and that read SW, Inventor, CATIA, NX files... without changing their working habits. 80% of our customers are in this case.
Today, an SME that does not yet have a CAD and that makes a Benchmark between Topsolid, Inventor, SolidWorks and ZW3D, chooses our product in the vast majority of cases. The only constraint is the fact that you can't import the construction tree of other software when there are exchanges. The 2nd point concerns the lack of awareness. In France we love to buy the well-known brand of our neighbor;)
