CADCraft: ArtCraft's Free AutoCAD Alternative, Online

CADCraft is a CAD and drafting application from the team behind ArtCraft, the group that released free, open-source counterparts to Photoshop, Word, Excel and other Adobe and Microsoft apps in October 2026. The GitHub description calls it a clean-room reimplementation of Autodesk AutoCAD, rebuilt in pure Rust. Clean-room means it was built from public specifications and observed behaviour, not from Autodesk code, and the README says CADCraft is not affiliated with or endorsed by Autodesk.

The pitch is the AutoCAD workflow itself. The README’s example is the classic one: type L, click two points, type @5<45, press Enter — the command line, alias input and ortho/polar behaviour behave the way a CAD user expects. It is pure Rust and egui with no Electron and no web view, one binary on the desktop and a WebAssembly build for the browser.

It is also built for agents: every menu item, tool and prompt is a command, so scripts and AI agents can drive drawings the same way a person types at the command line. Our test of the web build opened straight into a dark drafting workspace with tool sets, layers and a working command line.

CADCraft vs AutoCAD is a question of production safety. The drafting workflow and the DXF format are genuinely solid; the gap list marks DWG round-trip fidelity, dynamic-block authoring and xref in-place editing as the alpha blockers that keep CADCraft out of production pipelines today.

The table below turns the CADCraft README and its gap list into simple marks. AutoCAD keeps a yes on the rows a production office depends on; CADCraft wins the last row outright — and at $0 against a subscription, the price row matters for students and hobbyists.

Drafting fundamentals are in place: lines, polylines with arc mode, circles, arcs, ellipses, splines, hatches, blocks with attributes, dimensions and leaders, plus the modify commands you expect — trim, extend, offset, fillet, stretch, rotate, array. Command aliases and prompt options follow AutoCAD conventions, including typing coordinates as @distance<angle.

File support is the standout, and it is a rare claim for an alternative to AutoCAD: DXF is read and written natively in ASCII and binary from R12 through 2018, and DWG opens and saves. Xrefs attach, bind, unload and reload through the External References palette; dynamic blocks from other files are read and their references can be edited. Paper-space layouts with viewports and plot-scale output are present.

If you are mapping the suite to Adobe and Microsoft, CADCraft is the AutoCAD sibling; our DesignCraft guide covers the InDesign-shaped page layout app, and the Adobe clone story explains how the family fits together.

The quickest way is our hosted copy of the official web build — a free AutoCAD alternative online with no account. Click the button at the top of this page or open CADCraft online. The first visit downloads about 8 MB, then the drafting workspace opens in a new tab. CADCraft online works best in desktop Chrome or Edge.

Step 1: type L and press Enter, then click two points to draw a line — the command line shows every option, just like AutoCAD. Step 2: press Enter to repeat the command, and type @5<45 relative coordinates for the second point. Step 3: type C to close a polyline back to its start.

Step 4: to open an existing drawing, use File, then Open, and pick a .dxf or .dwg from your computer. There is no autosave in the web build, so save early and often — Save downloads a copy, because the browser cannot write over your original.

Get every CADCraft download from the CADCraft releases on GitHub or the CADCraft page on getartcraft.com. CADCraft v0.6.2 was published on Oct 12, 2026, five days after the repository appeared — CAD users noticed fast, so check the tag before you bookmark an installer.

On Windows there are MSI installers and portable zips for x64, ARM64 and 32-bit x86. On macOS there is one universal DMG, plus a separate command-line tool. Linux users get AppImage, Flatpak, deb, rpm and tar.gz builds for x86_64 and ARM64, plus a RISC-V tarball, and FreeBSD has its own build.

The web build is a static site zip; that is the file PSDraw hosts, unchanged and checksum-verified. Every release includes SHA256SUMS.txt, so compare the checksum before you install. Our ArtCraft download guide walks through the checksum step for every ArtCraft app.

The CADCraft GitHub repository is github.com/storytold/cadcraft, under the same storytold account as PhotoCraft and the other Crafting Apps. It was created on Oct 7, 2026 and passed 4,300 stars within a week — CAD users noticed fast, because a free AutoCAD alternative with real DWG/DXF support is rare.

The code is offered under your choice of MIT or Apache-2.0, with no account and no subscription. The ArtCraft name and logo are trademarks outside that license, and our ArtCraft open source guide explains the fork rules. The gap list is public and blunt about what production users must wait for.

CADCraft is also scriptable: every menu item, tool and prompt is a command, available to the CLI, a JSON control channel and an MCP server. The same commands also power remote mode, so an agent can attach to a drawing you have open on screen. Our ArtCraft MCP guide shows how to point Claude, Codex or Cursor at it.

The gap list marks three alpha blockers. First, saving a DWG drops entities and objects CADCraft does not model — opening a colleague’s drawing and saving it can delete content. Second, all file tests are synthetic; nobody has verified a CADCraft DWG/DXF opens cleanly in AutoCAD. Third, there is no dynamic-block authoring and xrefs cannot be edited in place or clipped.

Geometry and platform edges matter for precision work: ellipse and spline intersections, offsets and closest-points are tessellated rather than exact, and polyline offsets ignore bulges. The web build has no autosave, and there is no CI gate running the test suite on every pull request yet. None of these are hidden: the gap list names each one, which is the right way for an early project to behave.

Two limits are specific to CADCraft online. Save downloads a copy instead of writing over your original. And CADCraft is built for desktop: on a phone it may be slow or not open at all.

CADCraft online runs in any modern desktop browser on WebAssembly. The project’s hosting notes say the build needs no cross-origin isolation headers, so plain static hosting is enough — that is how we serve it. The browser build loads the same WebAssembly binary family as the desktop installers, so the feature set is the project’s stated design rather than luck.

Desktop Chrome and Edge are what we verified on Oct 14, 2026. Firefox and Safari can run WebAssembly builds of this kind, but the project does not claim they are tested; if the workspace does not start, try Chrome or Edge first. Precision work also rewards a hardware mouse with a wheel and a keyboard with a full number pad, exactly as in desktop CAD.

Phones and tablets are not the target: precision CAD needs a mouse and a wide viewport. The launch block on this page warns mobile visitors for that reason.