Needed for the odd job at home. It has to be ACAD Lt as that’s what I’m used to.

£950 seems like a lot and the monthly subscriptions aren’t worth it with the (in)frequency of work I’ll be doing on it.

Is there a cheaper way of getting it without using torrent sites? I’m thinking buying unused older version or something similar?

Cheers

Have a look at Draftsight. The interface is very similar, including shortcuts, so it should be an easy switch. Price is much keener being free. Very good package.

A month ago I would have thought £950 was a lot, but after moaning to our IT bods that we never seem to have enough licences across our company, I found out that our firm is paying nearly £25,000 a year PER LICENCE just for the privelage of running Autocad 2015….

Not exactly money well spent IMO considering most people only use about 10% of its functionality…

2nd vote for Draftsight, almost identical to LT and free, whats not to like!

Looked at renewing LT in work (£1k++) and as mostly 3D now decided to just get Draftsight for all we do in 2D these days.

Think the Solidworks guys are pushing free Draftsight to kill AutoCAD.

+3 for Draftsight, I was amazed how close it is to Autocad Lt.

Great thanks, a quick look at draftsight and it seems to be just what I’m after.

Thanks

nickjb – Member

Have a look at Draftsight. The interface is very similar, including shortcuts, so it should be an easy switch. Price is much keener being free. Very good package.

Excellent! I am just searching for something like this … a question.

Can the Draftsight free version create 3D images?

😀

I can also recommend Draftsight. It’s not as polished as ACAD, but it is free. I often have problems if a drawing contains blocks from ACAD, but if you are doing everything from scratch then you will be fine.

Can the Draftsight free version create 3D images?

Yes, it has a small amount of modelling capacity. Been a few years since I needed to model in a 2D environment and back then you couldn’t edit a 3D entity, so it was delete and start again.

Look at FreeCad for free 3D.

Do you use it at work as need to check their license out as ours means that it can be installed and used on home PC as well as work ones.

Andy

draftsight good but better is sketchup pro with layout, about £350,

Also worth looking at ProgeCAD (Google it! and there was a free edition as well as a cheaper one approx £200) last time I used it (a while ago) very much like a copy of AutoCAD. If you are only looking at home stuff, maybe see if there is a student edition?

+1 for draftsight, and yeah the solid works guys are pushing it hard. I dropped my subs to acad full version here, lt is missing a few nice things like the express tools, a few other tiny things that are useful.

New desktop subs is £25 a month iirc, and I believe that is pretty flexible ie you can drop the subs when not using it. So do the bulk of your work in draftsight, if you are missing some feature you need then just pay for one month.

Yup. Draftsight here. It’s good.

Btw… New 3d package just launched called Onshape. Worth a look