A naive review of FreeCAD

What are the best aspects of this product?

Free. I managed to complete my design without any prior knowledge within a couple of hours (I have very little CAD experience, but I do some 2D graphic design from time to time, and I'm a programmer). I often give a new tool a little time so that I can adapt to its unique workflow (I use GIMP, after all) and I will be using FreeCAD again very soon. FreeCAD didn't crash on me, and is fairly lightweight.

What aspects are problematic or could work better?

The tool isn't very well suited to performing actions on multiple objects at the same time (yet, or at least in my very limited experience). You can't interact with all screen elements, so in that respect it's a bit counter-intuitive, but there are alternative ways of, for instance, change camera angle or panning or zooming, with well-defined mouse/keyboard combinations

What features/services would you like to see in future versions of this product?

I'd like to be able to multi select some objects and apply changes to only some of its properties. It seems that when I change anything to several objects, then all of the objects copy each other's properties even if I didn't explicitly change tham. I'd also like a bill of materials to be generated from FreeCAD. It seems that there's a fairly active community that has various suggestions about generating BoM, but nothing that helped me quickly.

What specific problems in your company were solved by this product?

This was for personal use. I designed a new small cupboard for my study at home and I had to get the dimensions just right since it fits inside of another larger cupboard. I then used the dimensions of the FreeCAD objects to do the woodworking myself, and it turned out as I was hoping it would.

Are you a current user of this product?

Yes