What's the difference between SolidWorks, CATIA, and Inventor? Which one for me?

What’s the difference between Catia, SolidWorks and Inventor? Which one for me?

I am often asked what is the difference between the major 3d modelling software on the market, which is easier to use, and which can get me a better job. I’m writing this article to provide some information about these topics to new users of the software, or to people interested in learning one of the other products. I provide SolidWorks training, CATIA training, Inventor training, AutoCAD training and Visual Basic training via www.video-tutorials.net.

 Currently, 2D and 3D design software often has pompous names like 3D Product Lifecycle Management Suite.   There’s a few different stages a product goes through that have different acronyms you may have seen before:

CAx – computer-aided CONCEPTUALIZATION

CAD – computer-aided DESIGN

CAM – computer-aided MANUFACTURING

CAE – computer-aided ENGINEERING

 

The software packages available today fill some or all of these needs in the “lifecycle” of a product—conceptualization, design, manufacturing, engineering, testing, deployment, etc. For example, AutoCAD is primarily a design tool, and generally not used for manufacturing or the product lifecycle, but it’s perfectly suitable for many aspects of civil, architectural, mechanical, and electrical engineering.  CATIA is strong on the conceptualization and design but on the post-processes generally companies go to third party products.

 Let me take a few minutes to talk about the products I am most often asked about.

About CATIA

CATIA stands for Computer Aided Three-Dimensional Interactive Application.  It is also how you say “Kathy” in Russian, but you pronounce the software name “kah-TEE-ah”.
 

This is the software that’s used by the big automotive and aeronautical companies.  Boeing, AirBus and Bombardier use CATIA for their planes.  Both the 777 and 787 were designed in CATIA.  Lots of auto manufacturers use CATIA – Bentley, BMW, Citroen, Chrysler, Fiat, Ford, Hyundai, Peugeot, Renault, Tata, Tesla, Toyota, Volkswagen, Volvo and more.  CATIA is also used by GoodYear, and the United States Navy for shipbuilding.  World-renowned architect Frank Gehry used CATIA to design his many curvy buildings.

Generally CATIA isn’t taught at the college level and isn’t used by small businesses because the licensing is pretty expensive, about $25,000 per seat. When you learn it, it’s usually in-house by private trainers that cost your company an arm and a leg.

 CATIA version 4 is unix-based, and some companies are still using V4, but in the last few years even most of the big guys started switching to V5, the Windows-based version of the software. The kernel of V4 and V5 is different, so sometimes conversions result in a loss of data. You can imagine what a pain in the butt this must have been for a company like CERN or Boeing.  The versions are of course are not backward compatible; you can’t open a V5 file in V4. None of the products have backward compatible capability (of course!)

 

CATIA has already got a Version 6, still Windows based, but generally CATIA  is so expensive that not many of the big companies have migrated to it, and there is just now more . CATIA v6 has a 2011 release currently, and Dassault continues to improve the V5 release (R20 these days).

 

CATIA was developed by a French aircraft manufacturer, Avions Marcel Dassault, in 1977. It was written in C++. Back then, it was used via mainframe.  A mainframe is a huge computer that individuals connect to with local terminals.  Dassault decided to market and sell the software in 1981.  Boeing became a user of CATIA in 1984; they were the largest customer of Dassault.  In 1988 CATIA was ported from mainframe to UNIX workstation.  (For you young’uns, the personal computer (PC) in 1988 was still a long way from being ready to host this resource-intensive application). CATIA was adopted by aerospace, automotive and shipbuilding industries pretty quickly.  CATIA’s V5 came out in 1998, which is wow, already ancient history for computer users!  The support for Windows NT and XP was provided in 2001.  The 2008 v6 runs on Windows, Linux or AIX platforms, but Dassault only provides support for Windows platform installations.

 You can customize CATIA, too. V4 can be customized using Fortran and C. CATIA V5 can be customized using Visual Basic in the Visual Studio environment, or C++.  It’s not like you have to write raw code anymore; the object-based environment of Visual Studio and the CATIA help files let you get by pretty well without much programming experience.

 Don’t let the fact that a Frenchman was at the heart of CATIA put you off; it is generally considered to be much more versatile and flexible in the domain of surface modeling and design than the other products.  For example, if you’re trying to model something like an irregularly shaped tomato with a bruise, it’s a lot easier to do in CATIA than using the free-form surfacing tools in SolidWorks or Inventor. 

 Keep in mind that 3D software breeds cliques that put teenage girls to shame: CATIA users really turn up their noses at Inventor and SolidWorks.  CATIA is the preferred tool for creating what are called Class A surfaces. This is a term used in automotive design to describe freeform surfaces which look great, work well and are of high-quality (technically they need at least G2 and preferably G3 continuity, whereby, for example, two body panels on a car transition smoothly together with a continuous rate of curvature between the two sections, so that they appear connected and smooth).

 

I have a good CATIA video tutorial at www.video-tutorials.net, and you can see lots of sample videos at our youtube channel, http://www.youtube.com/videotutorials2.

About SolidWorks

SolidWorks is a 3D CAD program that runs on Windows.  It’s the most widely used 3D CAD program on the planet, because it’s quite a bit less expensive than CATIA, ranging in price from $6000-$10,000. AutoDesk’s Inventor is a competitor for SolidWorks, but it’s newer and hasn’t tackled SolidWorks’ market share, at least not yet! AutoDesk is of course working hard on this.

 SolidWorks was introduced in 1995 by an American company, SolidWorks Corporation.  Dassault, which owns CATIA, promptly and cleverly snapped it up in 1997.  Now, Solidworks gets a new release featuring minor nips and tucks every year. The last full face-lift was in the 2008 release. But basically the 2008 through 2010 releases are pretty much the same, with several little improvements in how some tools work.

SolidWorks is used by a greater number of industries in the product design and manufacturing sector simply because it is more affordable.  As you can see, Dassault has basically got the market cornered for 3D-design.  You’re able to buy SolidWorks through a local distributor or reseller rather than via Dassault directly.  SolidWorks has a student version, so with appropriate credentials you can get a working version of the software for as little as a couple hundred dollars, and you can study classes at your local technical college or university and get a certification that may greatly increase your marketability.

 SolidWorks was the first product to use the “End of Part Marker”, where you can easily roll back through the history of your part to make changes and add more features.  Inventor and CATIA use this now, too. SolidWorks introduced advanced and cool mates like gear, followers & cams, which let you model the movement of gear assemblies.  Inventor incorporates this now, too. 

 SolidWorks includes a number of add-on utilities that can be purchased separately from the main license.  These are so common that I’ll take a moment to explain what some of them do.  The Design Validation products include:

• Simulation, which lets you test how your models behave as physical objects, and Simulation Premium, which basically lets you do the same thing even if you don’t have a chemical or mechanical engineering background. Simulation used to be called Cosmos / Cosmos Express. There’s also a Simulation Express.
• Motion is a virtual prototyping tool that lets you see your model in action, to ensure it works properly.
• Flow Simulation tests fluid-flow and thermal analysis on your virtual prototypes.  
• Sustainability measures the environmental impact of your models.

Then there’s the PDM, collaboration & communication tools (PDM stands for Product Data Management). 

• Workgroup PDM is a client-server based setup where 10 or fewer users can work on designs at the same time.  Enterprise PDM is for larger groups. 
• eDrawings and SolidWorks Viewer let you share your designs with your client even if they don’t have SolidWorks
•  

You’ve probably heard of many other SolidWorks utilities. I’ll just describe them briefly here so you know what they do:

• ToolBox is a part library with cool ways of placing and sizing the parts.
• Utilities is used to identify differences between two versions of the same part, and to make modifications.
• FeatureWorks is a feature-recognition utility that lets you import and improve 3D models created with other software into SolidWorks.
• Routing is used for electrical mapping.
• MoldFlow Xpress is a mold design validation tool
• MoldBase is a catalog of standard mold base assemblies and components

You can customize your SolidWorks tools using Visual Studio, also. We publish an enormous SolidWorks video tutorial library at www.video-tutorials.net, and you can see lots of sample videos at our youtube channel, http://www.youtube.com/videotutorials2.

About Inventor

Inventor was created by AutoDesk, the CAD pioneer who started AutoCAD in the early 1980s. AutoCAD is easily the most widely used 2D CAD design tool in the universe. Everyone from interior decorators to astrophysicists uses AutoCAD, in hundreds of countries.  In the mid-1990s, AutoDesk started releasing specialty CAD applications targeted to specific industries –AutoCAD Mechanical, AutoCAD Architectural etc. 

To get a foot in the rapidly expanding 3D modeling market, AutoDesk developed and released Inventor in 1999.  In that time, Inventor has had at least a release per year, and currently is much more stable than it used to be.  AutoDesk continues to gobble up smaller specialty companies to this day to corner a greater share of the 2D and 3D design, manufacturing and post-processing software market.

 What’s very cool about AutoDesk is the AutoDesk Developer Network.  Publishers and developers can access beta versions of products and current releases so that we can develop third-party tools and publications about AutoDesk products.  This definitely helps drive users to AutoDesk products.  Dassault allows no such thing for CATIA or SolidWorks!  Inventor has free student versions and free trials of its full products, also. 

You can also customize Inventor using Visual Studio to create your own custom tools & macros etc.  Video-Tutorials.Net publishes a very large Inventor video tutorial library at www.video-tutorials.net, and you can see lots of sample videos at our youtube channel, http://www.youtube.com/videotutorials2.

Which one for me?

Like CATIA, SolidWorks and Inventor are parametric modellers.  Parameters can refer to measurements, like the length of a line, radius of a circle, angle between two lines, etc, or to the relationships between geometric entities—for example, whether two circles are equal in size, tangent to each other, concentric, etc.; other types of geometric relations (these are called constraints in Inventor) are coincident, parallel, horizontal, vertical, etc. The parametric design lets you make changes to a part later on and have other parts update automatically based on the relationships they share. 

 

All the 3D modellers build parts in the same way.  You start with a sketch.  It’s best to keep your sketches simple, creating more than one sketch for a part rather than a really complex sketch. This makes troubleshooting easier later on. You add dimensions and relations or constraints to the sketch. Then you turn your sketch into a feature—for example, an extrude, a cut, sweep, or loft.  The features are the building blocks of your part. You work in the solid model environment or the surface model environment. Then you put your features or parts together into subassemblies and assemblies. You use “mates” to position your parts in the right place within the assembly. You can animate your assemblies to show how they work.  You can also generate drawings from your parts or assemblies; all the software offers a variety of views automatically generated from your model. You can also annotate your drawings and generate photorealistic representations.

If you’re wondering which product to use, keep in mind that CATIA and its sister products (with the ugly stepsister names of Enovia, Delmia and Simulia) were developed as tools for huge aerospace/automotive companies, focusing on 3D modeling & prototyping as replacements for engineering drawings, whereas SolidWorks and Inventor give you a broad variety of 2D and 3D tools for mechanical engineering.

AutoDesk and Dassault work hard to prove that they are the  top selling 3D parametric modeller…both companies are elbowing at each other in an attempt to dominate the high schools, colleges and university market.  So far, more colleges and universities teach SolidWorks, but Inventor is gaining ground fast, because AutoDesk can slip Inventor through the door where AutoCAD is currently taught (eg, in every Architecture program in the world). Since “Project Lead The Way” is a national curriculum program that AutoDesk managed to secure, Inventor is now gaining footing in classrooms fast!  And did I mention that AutoDesk has a free trial of Inventor Professional, as well. Nice!

 

What about of stability? In the past, if you were working with huge assemblies, many SolidWorks users complained of unworkable instability. SolidWorks now has ways to reduce the load on your CPU so that your computer will crash less often. The current SolidWorks 2010 release is more stable than the 2009 release. Same with Inventor, although I personally find it to be a bit quirkier.

 

Many Unigraphics users feel that even CATIA v5 is barely production-ready even now, and that Unigraphics is much more stable than CATIA v5.  Unigraphics built the math engine behind most 3d modellers, including SolidWorks, but not CATIA; CATIA’s kernel is proprietary and closed to easy data communication.  Unigraphics has a little,affordable brother, SolidEdge, that many users prefer to SolidWorks, and that is fully compatible with Unigraphics, whereas Dassault has gone out of its way to keep SolidWorks from opening CATIA files, in order to drive business to CATIA.  This fact has long annoyed SolidWorks users and basically everybody. Even Inventor now reads CATIA files, whereas SolidWorks doesn’t.  SolidWorks has more compatibility with NX, Pro/E and Inventor than it has with Catia.  What can I say? You can be a jerk when you’re on top.

 

Which is easier to learn? SolidWorks has so many more learning resources for it than Inventor or CATIA, and, notably, many more that are translated into languages other than English.  There are tons of books and self-study video tutorials for SolidWorks.  You can check SolidProfessor (expensive), IGetIt (good price), or Video-Tutorials.Net (very good price).  This makes SolidWorks more attractive to users outside the USA, for sure. Once you know basic CAD principles, the idiosyncracies of the software are learnable pretty quickly. Naturally I recommend our video tutorials! We have Solidworks tutorials, CATIA tutorials, Inventor tutorials, AutoCAD tutorials, and Visual Basic tutorials at www.video-tutorials.net

 

Which is easier to use? You might be wondering which software is easier to use…first of all, before you start 3D-modelling, you need to understand how a part can be created from its component pieces as 2D sketches.  You don’t need expertise in AutoCAD per se, but some general understanding of how you’d go about building a model of a bottle, a car, a cell phone, video game etc is a must. If you don’t have this general know-how or experience, you will be mystified by all the available software and experience the identical frustrations with all products.  Fortunately SolidWorks and Inventor have so much internal learning support, and all three products have excellent online communities and forums where you can get ideas.

 

That said, the drawing and modeling tools are pretty much the same. You start with a sketch, then you make it 3-dimensional by extruding, cutting, revolving, etc. You can cut or extrude holes or irregular shapes etc. During this process, you choose whether to create solids or surfaces. A surface is the “skin” of your geometry.  CATIA is a surfacing specialist, and offers more and better tools for creating surfaces (as is appropriate for designing cars, boats, turbines, and spaceships!)

 

You must keep in mind that a 3D modeller is like a toolbox containing tools you use to create something.  The question of “which is easier” is not really appropriate here.  The modellers are not like MS Word, which is essentially one tool, a typewriter, just dolled up to print labels, too.  It’s not like an HTML or programming editor, which is of course easier to use than raw code and simplifies coding greatly!  Programmers of the past, had to write raw code, find and fix all the itty-bitty-boo-boos, and compile it.  Now, there are object-based programming tools like Visual Studio which let you manipulate the Visual Basic language without doing all the raw coding and syntax error checking. So, clearly, using Visual Studio is easier than writing and testing all your code without an editor. 

 

You need to think of the 3D modellers differently.  Your software is a tool box containing hundreds of sculpting tools.  Each sculptor has different ways of using applying the tools to get different results.  Sculptors can use different tools to get the same results, too.  Practice and experience make the greatest difference in ease of use.  CATIA simply has way more tools than either Inventor or SolidWorks, but you may not need all these tools depending upon the industry in which you work.

 Essentially SolidWorks and Inventor are identical programs. There are also some small hardware differences--Inventor can work on most consumer systems as-is, but SolidWorks usually needs an AMD or NVidia video card.  The current Inventor release has an awesome Content Center full of parts and features; Design Accelerator let you build gears, pulleys and springs more easily. Also, Inventor supports DWG files with more fidelity than SolidWorks, so this might be important if you’re bringing in a lot of data from AutoCAD.

 There are small nuance differences in the way the tools work, of course.  But overall, there is so much customization in the way you design, based on your own personal experience, that it is only natural for a user with even intermediate skills in one software to find it more intuitive, easier to use, more flexible; less searching through toolbars, easier to manipulate parts and make edits, etc.  If you’re used to SolidWorks, you’ll find that some of the AutoCAD-like functions in Inventor will feel “klunky” and designing is just slower. If you’re used to Inventor, you might find SolidWorks confusing.  All of this is pretty much subjective.

 The question of which is easier to use definitely shouldn’t come into your decision making process. Instead, you need to base your decision on what you need your output for, your budget, your client base, etc.  If you are a small company that provides design services to the aeronautic and automotive industries, you probably need CATIA.  Inventor has a lot in common with AutoCAD, so if you’re used to AutoCAD and need more 3D modeling capability than AutoCAD currently offers, Inventor will be a natural fit.  Also, these days, you can get AutoCAD free when you buy Inventor from AutoDesk.  If most of your product development chain (suppliers, vendors, clients etc) use SolidWorks, you will need SolidWorks, too. 

 

Both AutoDesk and Dassault release annual updates to Inventor and SolidWorks that require about a $2000/year subscription so they can milk as much as possible from their client base.  Both companies offer a lot of free training and support online now to keep you as interested as possible in spending this amount on a subscription.

 

Which can get me a job?  Unfortunately in this economy, there are plenty of good engineers who are unemployed or working part time for the census bureau for $12/hour.  Currently many more companies require SolidWorks experience than Inventor experience. Automotive / aeronautic companies will require CATIA experience.  Every time Boeing gets a big contract I see a boost in our CATIA sales.  I’m not sure how the Gulf oil spill mess will affect the automotive and aeronautic industries in that area; I don’t expect good news from that. 

 
Most of my customers who are retraining to remain competitive are learning SolidWorks.  Most of my CATIA customers are experienced V4 engineers moving to V5.  Most of my Inventor customers oddly enough happen to be European; perhaps Inventor is gaining more ground there than in the USA.

I hope you found this article to be helpful and informative. Good luck with your studies.

Kind regards,

Training Dept, Video-Tutorials.Net
For SolidWorks tutorials, CATIA tutorials, Inventor tutorials, AutoCAD tutorials, and Visual Basic tutorials, please visit http://www.video-tutorials.net