SolidCraft vs Fusion 360: Which Parametric CAD Fits Your Work

The short version: SolidCraft CAD is a modeller you own, and Fusion 360 is a product development suite you rent. SolidCraft covers sketches, constraints, a parametric feature timeline, assemblies and a wide export list, and a solidcraft vs fusion 360 comparison on price alone understates how much that covers. Fusion 360 covers the same modelling ground and then continues into CAM, simulation, drawing creation, cloud versioning and review, which is where most of its value sits for a company.

The price difference between SolidCraft and Fusion 360 is the headline, and it is real. SolidCraft is MIT or Apache-2.0, so it costs nothing for any use, including commercial work, and there is no seat to renew. Fusion 360 has a free personal-use licence with limits and a paid subscription for commercial work, which makes it a fusion 360 alternative only in the sense that SolidCraft replaces the modelling part of the subscription. For a student or a hobbyist the practical difference is small; for a workshop with three seats it is the whole decision.

The control difference matters as much as the price. A SolidCraft design is a file on your disk, and the SolidCraft app works offline. A Fusion 360 design lives in Autodesk’s cloud, with a local cache, and collaboration happens through that account. Neither model is wrong, and they suit different jobs. Pick the one whose failure mode you can live with, and read the SolidCraft guide before you install either.

SolidCraft’s licence is MIT or Apache-2.0 at your option, with the clean-room contribution rules documented in the repository. That means you can use SolidCraft commercially, modify it, and ship a product built on it, as long as you keep the notices. For anyone comparing a free fusion 360 alternative, this is the part that is genuinely free rather than free-with-a-catch. There is no account, no seat count and no expiry. Sponsorship is optional.

Fusion 360 is licensed as a subscription for commercial use. Autodesk also offers a free personal-use tier with limits on what it permits and how many designs stay editable, and the exact terms change, so read the current plan page before you assume a free seat covers business work. The paid tier is what unlocks the commercial terms and the collaboration features a team needs, and it is also what a fusion 360 vs solidcraft comparison has to weigh against the free licence.

This is where a SolidCraft vs Fusion 360 comparison usually stops, and it should not. A free licence that cannot produce a drawing is not cheaper for a company that needs drawings; it is a second tool to buy. The honest calculation adds up the tools you still need after the modeller, not just the modeller’s price.

The SolidCraft CAD modelling set is deeper than its age suggests. Sketches sit on origin planes, offset planes or planar faces, with construction geometry, projection, trimming, fillets, chamfers and a full constraint solver written by the project. Features include extrude, revolve, sweep, loft, fillet and chamfer, shell, draft, holes, threads, patterns, mirrored copies, split and combine, all on an incremental timeline with parameters and configurations.

Fusion 360 covers the same ground and adds surface modelling, sheet metal, generative design extensions, mesh conversion and a much larger ecosystem of add-ins. Its timeline and parameter system are mature, and its direct-modelling tools handle imported geometry that a parametric tree cannot fix. For production parts with sheet-metal rules or complex surfaces, Fusion 360 is the broader tool.

The practical test for SolidCraft vs Fusion 360 is the part you actually need to build. A bracket, an enclosure, a jig or a replacement knob is comfortable in SolidCraft, and the SolidCraft feature list covers the tools behind that. A sheet-metal chassis with a flat pattern, or a surface-heavy consumer product, is not. SolidCraft’s own reference part — a Raspberry Pi 4 case with fillets, shell, patterned standoffs, cut-outs and engraved text — is a fair picture of its comfort zone.

SolidCraft saves a local design file, with SolidCraft 0.15.0 moving to file format 26 while designs from every earlier version still open. Export covers STEP AP242 with body names, colours and components as assemblies, IGES 5.3, 3MF, binary and ASCII STL, OBJ, glTF, current-view DXF and URDF for assemblies with joints. Import covers STEP AP203, AP214 and AP242, IGES and mesh formats.

Fusion 360 keeps designs as cloud documents with a local cache, and exports STEP, IGES, STL, OBJ, 3MF and DXF depending on the workspace. The STEP output is production-grade, which is why the format is the bridge between the two tools. A SolidCraft part can go to Fusion 360 as STEP, and a Fusion 360 part can come back the same way, which is the cheapest SolidCraft vs Fusion 360 interoperability story available.

What does not survive the SolidCraft vs Fusion 360 round trip is history. A STEP file carries geometry, names and colours, not the feature tree, so the receiving app gets a solid body rather than an editable timeline. Both tools can work with that, and neither can rebuild the other’s parameters. If a design has to move back and forth often, keep the native file as the source of truth and treat STEP as the handoff.

This is the section where SolidCraft has nothing to compare, and the SolidCraft documentation does not pretend otherwise. Fusion 360 includes CAM with toolpath strategies, simulation studies for stress and thermal questions, and a drawing workspace that produces dimensioned sheets. Those are separate products in most CAD stacks, and having them in one subscription is the reason workshops pay for it.

The SolidCraft answer is deliberate: export the SolidCraft model and use another tool. A SolidCraft STEP AP242 export goes to a CAM package, a simulation solver or a drawing tool, and SolidCraft DXF covers the current view when you need a 2D handoff. That is a normal workflow in open-source engineering, and it means the free licence is the beginning of a toolchain rather than the whole of one.

For a hobbyist printing parts at home, SolidCraft vs Fusion 360 is not a close question: the slicer takes an STL or 3MF and the job is done. For anyone selling machined parts, the missing CAM is the line item that decides the comparison, and no amount of free licensing changes it.

Fusion 360 is built around a shared cloud workspace, while SolidCraft is built around a file you own: version history, comments, review links and a team that can open the same document without a file server. Autodesk also sells support and training, and there is a hiring pool that already knows the tool. That is the part a free app cannot copy quickly.

SolidCraft CAD collaborates through GitHub and Discord: issues, pull requests, a roadmap and a release every few days. That works well for a solo designer or a small team that already lives in Git, and it is thin for a company that needs a support contract. The MCP server is a different kind of collaboration — an agent can model inside the same session — and it is genuinely new.

The table under this heading marks the rows each project documents. Where Fusion 360 has a capability SolidCraft does not ship, the row is a miss rather than a promise. Where SolidCraft is different in kind — the licence, the local file, the agent interface — the row is a win. The scores are a map, not a verdict.

Moving a SolidCraft design into Fusion 360 starts with a STEP AP242 export from SolidCraft. In Fusion 360, insert the STEP as a new design or into an existing one, then decide whether you need to rebuild the feature tree or work with the imported body. For a bracket or an enclosure, direct editing on the solid is usually faster than rebuilding every sketch.

Moving the other way, fusion 360 vs solidcraft in the other direction, is the same operation in reverse: export STEP from Fusion 360 and open it in SolidCraft, which imports AP203, AP214 and AP242 solids with assemblies, units, names and colours. Mesh formats such as 3MF, STL, OBJ and glTF arrive as mesh bodies, which render and measure but do not become parametric features.

Plan the SolidCraft rebuild either way. A translated solid has no timeline, and a parametric model without its history is a sculpture. If the design will keep changing in the other tool, budget an hour to rebuild the features that matter and keep the STEP as a reference. That is the same advice any CAD migration gets, and it is the honest cost of switching.

Use SolidCraft if you are a student, a hobbyist, a workshop that owns its machines, or a developer who wants CAD inside a script. Use SolidCraft CAD if the alternative is not buying a subscription at all. Use it if your deliverable is a STEP file, a 3D print or a design you want in a git repository. Use it if the licence question matters — a startup that cannot add another subscription can model in SolidCraft and export to whoever machines the part.

Use Fusion 360 if your deliverable is a manufactured part with toolpaths, a drawing set that a shop reads, or a simulation result that a client signs off. Use it if your team shares models daily and needs comments, versions and permissions rather than a file server. The subscription buys the parts of the workflow that a modeller alone does not cover.

The common answer to SolidCraft vs Fusion 360 is both, with STEP as the bridge, and the CADCraft guide covers the 2D drafting tool for shops that still need drawings: model in SolidCraft, export, and keep Fusion 360 for the manufacturing and review steps. That is not a compromise, it is how mixed shops already work. What matters is knowing which tool owns the source of truth for each design, so a change never gets made twice in two places.