Affordable 3D CAD : Alibre VS BricsCAD

I have used both Alibre Design and Bricsad. I have a licensed copy of Alibre Design, the expert version. My copy is the 2017 edition. I first purchased this product in 2012 and paid the annual maintenance, not much, I may add. I purchased this do do a few small projects that were simple for me to do, on contract. Purchasing a Solid Works license was too expensive for the size of this work and the amount I could charge for this, so instead of making a comfortable return on my investment I would not have covered software purchase costs with Solid Works, which is what I was using in my main job at the time. This being provided by my employer, getting a return on his investment being his problem and not mine.

I had used Bricscad which had been been purchases by my employer as an alternative to AutoCad. This worked as well as the more expensive AutoCad in the mainly 2D work it was being used for.

Because of the nature of the projects offered to me, a range of industrial fans and dust filtration equipment, I was looking for an application that had all the main features of Solid Works, but not the price. Alibre Design has sheetmetal tools, multiple configurations, designs can be driven from equations and spreadsheets, perfect for quickly producing a range of centrifugal fans, for each size for each type, basically scaled versions of the same geometry. Due to my small outlay for a good and very usable product, I did quite well out of this part time work. I stopped keeping up to date with retirement, and now mainly use this product doing work free of charge for a local vintage tram museum.

Briscad is also a great value product, but is more suitable for the sort of work you would choose AutoCad for. Last time i had a look at it was a couple of years ago, it now has reasonable 3D capabilities including sheetmetal tools. It all comes down to the type of work you wish to use it for, in my case work, that was similar to the work that I was doing for my employer using Solid Works. I also have used Solid Edge in a similar environment.

Alibre Design though similar to Solid Works is not the same. I have come across many Solid Works fan boys who will run down all other software. I found Alibre to be easy to learn and after I while the few differences in the way you go about making models have become my preferred way of working. Being comfortable with many 3D Cad applications,and being able to quickly learn new ones and swtich between them is an asset that helps you to stay employable in an engineering career.

Download a demo from the Alibre Design website https://www.alibre.com/downloads/ and you can try it for a month. I downloaded a demo, installed it, and within an hour of trying it, I was buying it. I could not believe small cost of this product, not only does it come with a Keyshot license, you actually own what you buy and not just rent it, as with most other offerings.

Most of the models I have placed on my profile were produced with Alibre design, from 2012 version to the 2017 version along with a few old Solid Edge V12 models. If you download a demo you can download the Ad_pkg files for the Alibre models. These can be opened from Alibre with: File -> Package -> Restore
This contains the complete project, all parts, nothing missing, which is a great way to send off your work to another Alibre Design user

You can try DesignSpark too. Looks not to bad but need some time to get used to it. Very good documentation too.

https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/mechanical-software