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SolidWorks

Altium

Comsol

Proprietary yes, but I’ve used all three over the last few years and found them each to be very streamlined, productive, and elegant after a fashion.




IMHO SolidWorks is terrible. Single core performance limitation, huge disk IO, no out of box support for STEP GD&T export, ridiculous drawing-oriented BOM export UX, half-measure built-in RCS/VCS system, collision-prone namespace, etc.


Comsol is a truly inspirational bit of software. Remarkably easy to get started but with a huge breadth and depth of applicability. I wish there were a way it could be made free. Like, I think it might not be a waste of money for a country to buy a country-wide site license for their citizens.

A browse through their application gallery can be pretty interesting:

https://www.comsol.com/models

There's examples of studies into everything from cooking beef in a convection oven, to Bose-Einstein condensates, medical implants, geothermal storage, semiconductor manufacturing, etc, etc.


The modern Comsol GUI is truly phenomenal, especially considering where it was at with the 3.x versions. It's one of the rare cases, pretty much the only one I can think of in CAD/CAM, where the effort put into a radical GUI redesign really paid off significantly and immediately.




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