personally, i haven't used autocad for a long time. currently, my friend asked me to recommend one good autocad alternative to him. i think most of the alternative softwares are using the same kernel/technology (intellicad), but just their interfaces are a little bit different. Am i right? is CMS intellicad good to use? it seems to be the cheapest one, much cheaper than Progecad & Bricscad. if there is no big difference in technology, should i choose the cheapest one? please advisethanks in advance!
 
dickson sham

[QUOTE=dicksham]personally, i haven't used autocad for a long time. currently, my friend asked me to recommend one good autocad alternative to him. i think most of the alternative softwares are using the same kernel/technology (intellicad), but just their interfaces are a little bit different. Am i right? is CMS intellicad good to use? it seems to be the cheapest one, much cheaper than Progecad & Bricscad. if there is no big difference in technology, should i choose the cheapest one? please advisethanks in advance!
 
dickson sham[/QUOTE]For what he will use it.?

autocad alternative is just 1/10 cost of autocad, but with nearly 100% of the functions. 2nd, autocad dwg dominates in building service industry but the economy is not good today; companies need find ways to cut unnecessary costs.

Such AutoCAD "alternatives" (read "copies") exist for many years. Despite of this, they have never established well on the market. The main reasons are their unreliability and first of all incompatibility with DWG.
 
Yes, they do read/write files with the .DWG extension but they do not fully interpret all DWG objects and their forged DWG files cause lots of problems when processed in AutoCAD or other CAD applications.

thanks, vladimir,
 
thanks for your comment. but can you share any report to prove that these alternatives are actually not compatible.
 
i heard the comments from www.intellicad.net, which are opposite to yours.

Beside the frequent support requests from our customers struggling with "strange things" when working on such DWG files, there is the Budweiser DWG-compatibility benchmark on www.xanadu.cz/budweiser (not yet updated to the current DWG2010 format).
And the incompatibilities are logical - DWG is an Autodesk file format which is not publicly documented so any "compatible" application can use just a reverse-engineered approximation of this format.

I use Civil 3D Autodesk software and for the company I had tried out diffrent alternatives to Autodesk software and I have found Microstation to be very good and also works great importing dwg's it costs much less and is very similar to Autodesk and it will take some getting use to, but I have to say with everything out there and if my company was to move away from autodesk software this is what i would recommend.

in fact, price makes us move. The prices of these alternatives are a little bit higher than microsoft windows, but lower than microsoft office. How about Microstation?
 
We know Star5 hotels are always better than Star3. But if we just use the room at night and the bed is comfortable enough to make us sleep, why do we need to pay trible. Making money is not easy today, especially this year. If autocad price won't drop, bosses would cut the software costs but keep good employees working.
 
"Intellicad is autocad-compatible". Can some professionals/ expert users prove it is wrong? Why don't Autodesk do something to beat them?dicksham2009-03-29 05:32:46

I am using AutoCAD since 1992. Our company has tried IntelliCad twice - first in 2001, returned back to AutoCAD and then in last year. Now we are back again on AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT.IntelliCad is almost compatible and its environment is almost the same as in AutoCAD. The main problem was that it crashed quite often and that its DWG files were causing problems by our customers. They were complaining about printing problems, fatal errors, missing data. So our customers pushed us back to AutoCAD.