I’m using Solidworks 2014. We’ve just bought a spanking new Minitech CNC Minimill and I need some software to go between the two.
HSMWorks has been recommended by Minitech, but my Solidworks reseller sells Solidcam, so recommends that.

Anyone got any experience of the two of them?

The guys at work use HSMWorks.

In honesty though at £10K plus £3K for solidworks isn’t that more than the cost of the little cnc machine and a bit ‘mad’?

Look for HSMexpress which is free if you don’t need to do 3D work, then you are only buying SW.

Another place to look is at autodesks new fusion product – its cloud based and very cheap indeed and uses all the same guff as HSMWorks but at a fraction of the cost.

We use CAMWorks for Solidworks and the CNC’s

Is for work? I’ve used autodesk fusion 360 to machine something. Managed to get a education licence but i think there are free licences for up starts.
Its a bit simple (usally use powermill) but works fine.

Find out who gives the best post processor support for your machine. I can tell you from bitter experience that a bad post makes the best CAM package next to useless.

Is this an illegal download from some dodgy chinese website or a legitimate purchase for work?

I used to do some work for the Solid gang and didn’t agree with sales practices

Their salesmen in their little office 2 miles from where we are will tell you what you want to hear and give you the impression they are huge , its one guy who does the tech support and he’s very busy…all the time

We looked at HSMworks (and loved it ,even the free one it was cutting parts in 30 minutes) then they pulled out of the UK, then they got bought by autodesk, then we looked at buying it and the sales guy at man and machine said yeah we sell it but I have not used it yet but we can give you training it costs X on top of the 10K so as for support erm yes we do support you ??

If it were me I would go with the one which you can get some decent support off the internet either legally or illegally as the sales guys don’t really know or care what they do as long as they meet the monthly quota

They do 2.5 axis free versions HSMworks Solidcam and Delcam but again with free products they are trying to hook you in, again go to the delcam forum and ask for help and basically its like a ghost town when you mention the freebie software the HSM one is quite helpful though

Mastercrap fits this very well ,its got a very large legally installed user base in the USA (also a very large illegally installed user base) and you will often find even if you need to call support in the UK and log a call Someone over in the states will have had the problem and you will be able to fix it long before support gets back to you ,find posts that work etc etc

We have a 5axis machine coming in april both of them will now be getting used conversationally

We bought a seat of Camworks to back up our Powermill capabilities but post support is pants so it doesn’t get used. Shame as its a nice bit of software

I use to use edgecam to take 3D models from solidworks and make g code for our work cnc. Worked pretty well but was a bit of a faff and no options for fettling mid cut. 99% of jobs we would export 2D dxfs from solidworks and run those directly from the cnc. It was a lot quicker and easier.

At home I use cambam and mach3. Much cheaper and do the job.

I have been using Alphacam for years and like it a lot. We tried Mastercam and it was awful. But that might because I’m used to Alphacam.