Spoiler Alert: Yeah, I think it is.

I’ve been forcing myself to solely use Autodesk’s Fusion 360 for my personal projects for almost 2 years now and I’m starting to kinda fall in love with it. I say ‘force’ because it is so easy to give up on a new tool and go back to what you are comfortable with. When it comes to CAD, for me, that is Solidworks. It’s used everywhere, is great for high part count assemblies, and has amazing add-ons. It is the default. But for a number of reasons, not the least of which is cost, I decided to give Fusion 360 a shot and see if it could become my go-to CAD software for my personal projects. I figured, I would take it as far as I could and if it left me needing more, I would abandon it and go back to my trusty Solidworks (courtesy of an employer-provided license).

Over a year and change later, I have yet to be roadblocked by my decision to use Fusion 360. In fact, I have been pleasantly surprised at the pace of development by the Autodesk team. Fusion 360 updates roll-out regularly and the patch notes are transparent and useful. Somewhat recent additions, like merging in Eagle functionality, are huge undertakings that really improve the workflow of an Engineer like myself. I’ve been a longtime user of Eagle (way before Autodesk acquired them), and have been impressed with where that project was heading, but to then have that functionality pulled into Fusion 360 as well is incredible and really increases the value proposition of a Fusion 360 license.

To really get a feel for Fusion 360, I had to do as many apples-to-apples comparisons with SolidWorks as I could. I knew the workflow was different, so I didn’t let that tarnish my experience as much as I could avoid it. It’s true, you have to shift a little bit, but I actually found it far easier of a transition than some online commenters made it seem. I took a couple assemblies I had created in SW and re-created them from scratch in F360. One of them was a model of my favorite pen, the Zebra F301. And although, I still had a lot to learn about Fusion 360, I was able to get to a reasonable level of detail in my model in a fairly short amount of time.

• 

• 

I set myself a few other tasks to do some more forced learning of the various tools available in F360 and watched a decent number of the free tutorials on Autodesk’s website. Soon, I was feeling pretty confident and was able to tackle some actual design projects. So, I started working on an idea I’d had for my son’s crib. I wanted to make a baby mobile that used a camera and a neural net to determine when my son’s eye’s were open and activate it’s own motion. So, basically, eyes open, mobile spins. Eyes close, mobile slows to a stop. I’ll create a more detailed post on this project later, but suffice to say, Fusion 360 was up to the task. Is my baby mobile beautiful and perfect? No, but I was able to create what I had sketched, 3D print, assemble, and functionally test the project in a very short timespan thanks to Fusion 360.

In the year or so since, I have designed around 50 projects of wildly varying complexity in Fusion 360 and have been incredibly happy with my experience. I even undertook a One-A-Day challenge (separate post to follow) and the ease of the Fusion 360 workflow really helped me churn out new designs each day even when they were terribly uninspired. When I was looking for an excuse to not create something, Fusion 360 gave me no friction and I found once I sat down and started sketching something, F360 just got out of my way.

So, would I never look back? Am I forever done with SolidWorks? Naw. If I’m given a license or easy access to a workstation, I would still be happy to use SolidWorks. I still love it (not the cost or Windows-only). Buuuut, I gotta admit, Fusion 360 is my new favorite. It is easy to be productive in it, the integration with Eagle is great, the cadence of updates is awesome, CAM tools are wonderful, cost is attractive, and cross-platform availability is a huge win. If you are a Mechanical Engineer, an EE who want’s to make your own enclosures, a maker, or a student, I highly recommend giving Fusion 360 a shot. I think you might start falling for it as well.