Anyone have a recommendation for 2D drafting software? I’ve used LibreCAD a little bit and it’s fine. Any other options I should be aware of?
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KiCAD for circuits obviously. Other than then you’re kinda out of luck. AutoCAD is one of those things that never really got a good FOSS alternative since Autodesk is crazy aggressive in the market.
The big thing is that they get governments and big companies to adopt it so you need to use their format to interact with those (which you usually do when drafting).
My company kicked it and switched from Civil to ArcGIS, but that one is also licensed and not really a great pure drafting software (we to utility design, so it’s a bit more suited to our specific style of drafting at least). ArcGIS also has a decent alternative in QGIS that we can switch to, but again it’s not as user friendly as the commercial stuff (which is kinda important when you’re creating workflows for 50+ people).
I have used Blender and FreeCAD as an alternative, but they don’t really come close to the polish that you’d expect from AutoCAD, which has like 50 years of being the industry standard behind it.
FreeCAD and OpenSCAD are the two that I see mentioned with any frequency. I only have experience with 3D CAD, so I can’t give a ton of advice on how 2D CAD works in any software.
If you’re doing simple stuff, FreeCAD’s sketcher is pretty useful. It’s just not the best when you need to do a bunch of prints and large scale plan layouts. Autolisp is also a really slick system (with a ton of faults and disgusting quirks).
Anyone who’s used AutoCAD for a while gets used to Autolisp since literally every command is just a function call in the REPL, and you can write out procedures by just typing a short lisp routine out (or copy, pasting it from a text file like I’ve seen many drafters do).
If you’re doing simple stuff, FreeCAD’s sketcher is pretty useful.
FreeCAD has a lot of separate workbenches for different stuff, so I don’t know what OP’s “2D CAD” actually relates to, could be drawing a house or sheet metal. However, it does have a generic “drafting” workbench (that I have never used) that seems more 2D CAD oriented.
I’ve used it, and I wouldn’t really call it a replacement for AutoCAD. It can handle basic drafting, but the whole reason people want AutoCAD is because of the REPL. Drafting in AutoCAD kinda feels like drafting in Emacs.
From my experience, it feels like the intended workflow for the Draft workbench is for producing prints for 3D objects created earlier in either the Part, PartDesign, or Architecture workbenches. A similar workflow to Creo Parametric / ProE. FreeCAD’s Sketcher workbench is excellent for creating well-constrained 2D geometry (better than Creo IMO), but lacks GD&T or other annotation features. It may be possible to design in Sketcher and go straight to Draft without going through Part / PartDesign, but I have never tried this workflow.
FreeCAD can also be scripted (in Python, rather than a LISP dialect), but I have never seen this used in the wild. While a lot of work in AutoCAD might be done via one-liners, Python scripting in FreeCAD is a lot less common, used mostly for plugin development rather than day-to-day modeling.
RE: your other comment, CAD software tends to depend highly on industry. I work in a contract manufacturing shop and we need to work with a number of CAD systems. Some of our customers use SolidWorks, some of our customers use Creo, we generally work with whatever system they provide their models in (though this does break down into personal / department preference as the original model is transformed into individual machining operations to produce operation sketches and do CAM work in ESPRIT, MasterCAM, or various 3D printer slicers to produce contoured CMM fixtures). The firms which do the original engineering / design work basically get to make the choice. I suppose AutoCAD is really popular in some industries, but not in mine. That said, DXF is still treated almost like a lingua franc format - sort of like a 2D STEP file.
IMO, AutoCAD is way overrated, and this isn’t just my FOSS zealotry speaking :) The actual truth is that ALL CAD software is garbage.
A rational firm (read: very few of them) would respect the engineer’s judgement and license whatever software they insist on using - assuming they could briefly describe what a CAD kernel or a geometric solver is as part of the hiring process.
All professional software sucks tbh. I only have to interact with AutoCAD every once and a while since we mostly use ArcGIS now (all 2D FTTH network design/permitting). It’s decent for that, and the LISP scripting is nice, but it also constantly crashes and they will fuck with you on licensing constantly.
ArcGIS Isn’t much better though. Only benefit is that the data can be pretty easily moved around between formats, but the layout engine is proprietary. They also have a scripting library written in Python (arcpy), but it literal trash. I’ve written like 20k lines of code just to make it moderately usable.
(Yes, there is regex indexing of lists in there, ESRI thought it would be cool to allow you to have many things with the same name and hide the real name in some underlying CIM data that will crash the process if you touch it because their backend C code is bugged)
If we are including OpenSCAD, I would also suggest cadquery and build123d, where you have the capabilities of the entire Python interpreter. I’ve been also interested in a couple of CAD kernel projects written in Rust: Fornjot (it looks like this was archived recently) / Truck
FreeCAD’s recent updates seemed to have fixed a lot of issues I have had with it. When I have free time, I have been practicing FreeCAD so I can start creating a part to 3D print for my desktop so I can fit all of the high capacity hard drives and maybe add supports to some areas.
I saw a video a while back about FreeCAD that made me think it’s finally good enough for me to switch from Fusion360.
Of course every time I need to make a model I feel like I don’t have the time to relearn everything and just use fusion360.
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