Solidworks vs. Inventor

[alijahed]

Hi All,

I've put this thread in this forum and the Inventor one as well to get some feedback.

At the present, there is a good offer available for buying Inventor Pro for 8000 AUS$ and because of that I'm doing a survey about this software vs. Solidworks. So I need to have a chat with Professional guys like you to make the best decision. I'm trying to explain our situation and filed in the following, but if more details necessary I'm more than happy to provide.
Our company is a branch of another company and we're working in the Aluminum Joinery (Doors & Windows) industry.
we design Extrusions and Components for making Doors and Windows.
In the both offices the main CAD software is AutoCAD.
In the main office they have Solidworks for modeling.
In here we don't have anything like that at the moment but because we gradually going to be involved in designing and modeling we decided to buy a package like Inventor or Solidworks.That was a brief about our situation.
After the first meeting with managers these question just came through:
In compare to that available offer for Inventor (8000 AUS$) how much is the Solidworks?
Because in most cases we're using AutoCAD in both companies, which software is the best?
Is there any problem going to be happened in sharing files and projects, if we use Inventor and they use Solidworks?
As a professional, what do you recommend for us Solidworks/Inventor? And why?Thanks in advance

Ali

[aledtaylor]

I have recently investigated both Inventor and SolidWorks as upgrades to AutoCAD (learning to use some of the basic features of both products).

Although the basic price of Inventor was cheaper than SolidWorks, when the add-ons and training were considered the Inventor option was more expensive. (We're involved in mostly electrical work so this may be different for you). You need to consider not only the cost of the Software but also the annual subscriptions, initial training, future training (can you send one person on a course without having to pay for a minimum of 10), add-ons, and hardware (the Inventor option included a dedicated file server but the SolidWorks option did not).

Inventor and SolidWorks have very similar capabilities but SolidWorks seems to be slightly better than Inventor at everything (ease of use, speed of use, speed to learn, import/export, general capability etc)

In general feel, Inventor seems to be unrefined and cumbersome with many dialogue boxes. SolidWorks by comparison seems to be more user-orientated.

I hope this helps.