Boston Engineering Presents, Pro/ENGINEER vs. SolidWorks: Which CAD System is faster? PTC

[6069mkob]

SW: Try driving a pattern with more than X-Y. How about X, Y, and theta? How about X, Y, Q, theta and L? How about letting me, the user, determine the orientation of a sketch? how about allowing me to use negative numbers in a sketch?

Pro/e Wildfire (Creo): how about full screen usage? How about bundling your software with a decent graphics library? how about bundling with a decent materials library?

PTC, how about listening to your customers instead of dreaming up new lame names?

[kimc53]

Having learned Pro-E and Solidworks simultaneously and side by side, I hands down prefer Solidworks, it is user friendly, Pro-E is user hostile. People only prefer Pro-E because it's all they know, they have no idea how powerful Solidworks is because they simply don't use it enough, or they don't know how to use it period. It doesn't matter anyway because Solidworks is growing SO fast and most companies and young engineers prefer it over Pro-E, that I would bet PTC goes out of business.

[nightowl8936]

I don't think this test reall pushes either software package to the breaking point at all.

I would like to see a comparison of expressing complex geometry. Try doing your own mockup of a fictional fighter plane airframe with both of them and use surfacing if you need to and lets see which one holds up best.

Are there any insights available about the underlying data structures used to represent or hold the geometry, and then how powerful is the kernel or solver that recurses through these?

[markyboy1704]

As a 14 year user & owner of Pro E & Now also own Solidworks for 3 years now, Pro E is a more flexible & powerful package. It is in fact easier to use than solidworks in my mind.

The only part of Solidworks i find overall that is better than Pro E is the drawing package of Solidworks.

needless to say, though solidworks drawing package does have it's poor qualities.

The biggest downfall of Pro E in the UK is PTC & it's resellers..both are awful

Pro E or Solidworks....for me Pro E everytime.

[jkhuskies09]

@markyboy1704 there is your problem you have used pro e for so long that you have know clue how to use solidworks at all. I have talked and learned from many instructors that have taught both software's and 6 of 7 instructors have said solidworks is easier to learn (avg 6 months vs 9 months) I have used both for about the same time and find that Pro E is actully harder to learn and is slower on my machine. It is more powerful but I have yet to try their newest version of CREO.

[markyboy1704]

@jkhuskies09 Having used & still use both packages I use Pro to do work for companies like Mclaren Racing, VW/Audi & BMW & can assure you that Solidworks is simply not powerful enough to cope with the tasks that were involved in those jobs. A customer had to do some shock analysis on an assembly 2 weeks ago they quickly learned after speaking to Solidworks that Cosmos could not handle the data hence they sent the work to a supplier using Mechanica

The video speaks volumes about both

[shinynewlincoln]

Hey thanks for the info. I am only starting out and I have tried using Solid Works, but found that If I had to change anything in the design, I had to shut the program down, and redesign the part from the very beginning. I created one part seven times in SolidWorks, and each time I thought I had created it to spec. Even so, after saving the part I would have to go back and recreate the part from the very beginning all over again. Thanks - I really am glad I saw your video!

[jkhuskies09]

@shinynewlincoln ever heard of rebuild and scale back on the left tree. I almost never have to scrap a part beocuse i screwed up on the model. you can allways go back and edit it. the good thing about sw is that it gives codes and hints at what is wrong with the model.

[gavatron06]

Agree, I feel Pro-E is the better package, but harder to use, it really depends on what your drawing. Couple of points;

1: Auto dimension, Im using PROE WF3, great if you have a simple rectangle part, 2-3 dimensions are shown but If I have a complex part say a sheet metal part the auto dimension could throw up 20+ dims, time consuming to clean them up and sort them out.

2: Pro E doesnt really explain why so features fail or wont create.

3: The family tables in Pro-e are fantastic

[sbruffin]

Granted putting in ProE, Pro/E , ProEngineer, Pro/Engineer, Wildfire, cocreate (you forgot CoCreate) all at the same time does yield 370 total results. I forgot that even the Pro/E product name was convulted and difficult. ;)

Still I'd like to have the SolidWorks model to show your team how a couple of checkboxes would have yielded faster results and allowed the part to be made scalable.

[boseng411]

ProE and CoCreate are different products, like Dassault's low end SolidWorks vs the high end CATIA.

Regarding the video it was an exercise in ease of use. We gave a designer a new model and said model it in both tools, these were the results. It was an exercise in intuitiveness not capability. I believe you when you say the tool could do it, our question was just how easy is it to do. The need for adv part modeling course only proves the point. I'll still send the model though, email?

[tedknaz]

I'm wondering, how much Solidworks experience did the engineer have? If your company was considering becoming a ProE reseller I'm guessing that's your bread and butter.  Personally I use AutoCad LT w/ mild dabbling in Solidworks and am much more effective in AutoCad. That wasn't the case 3 years ago when I left college and Solidworks was all we used.

So, what was the breakdown in ProE v. Solidworks hours over, say, the past year?

[sbruffin]

Send me the fan file and I'll make it salable in SolidWorks in a couple of minutes for you and send it back. I'd be curious to know how much classroom training has been given your users on each product. Looks like someone needs an advanced modeling class.

From a career standpoint checking job postings on monster, there are 62 positions for ProE, and 492 for SolidWorks. In today's job market I'd rather know SolidWorks.

[boseng411]

Sbruffin- you sound like a reseller I know who always struggles to find a way to position SW against ProE. I love these job market comments because they're very crafty attempts to add value to a product. I commend the effort but you only prove search keywords are critical. As of 12/9/09 I found 496 Solidworks offers and 60 ProE nationwide, however, there's also 215 for Pro/E , 25 for ProEngineer, 117 for Pro/Engineer and 47 for Wildfire. In today's job market it seems I just better know CAD!

[devopro]

It's nice that you can afford to have multiple licenses for both products. We are a small firm and cannot. Why not drop one or the other and save your customers some money and stop wasting resources? Use what you like, like what you use!

Larry

[boseng411]

An interesting suggestion although unrealistic for our business. I'm assuming your firm isn't an outsourced engineering group by the comment but the software solutions utilized often are customer driven. At BE we are ready to address any customer requirement and our success at this is what allows us to continue to offer the desired solutions to our customers. When no requirement comes in we select Pro/Engineer because of its advanced capabilities. This is what we like and this is what we use!

[boseng411]

Thanks to all for your comments. To clarify this assessment was performed by an ME from our services department. They use both SW and Pro/E for customer projects. They wanted to assess the tools ease of use. If you listen to Morgan he doesnt claim one is easier to use, he just prefers ProE. The purpose is to inform the user community their both analgous regarding ease of use. As for dimensioning Pro/E displays afully constrained sketch OOTB, SW doesnt or at least not like Pro OOTB.

[tedknaz]

Going a little further down the comments I came across this; if he only commented that he liked ProE a little more, you must have shaped this strongly in the edit room.

[mackrc51]

If you are honestly lookign for information on the pro's and cons of the two products, disregard this video as its from someone trying to sell you PTC.

[mackrc51]

Lets give them the benifit of the doubt and presume they didn't know about all of SWX cool functionality (rather than thinking they did know and are intentioneally misleading people). There are quite a few well qualified SWX VAR's in the greater Boston area they could send this PTC AE to take a basic SWX class to learn some of these things before trying to make a honest comparison.

The only problem is that the PTC AE may want to jump ship after taking the SWX class!

[mackrc51]

LOLZ!

Teh PTC reseller picks PTC as easier to use! Who could have forseen that happening?!?!?

They don't have their facts straight about SWX *AT ALL*. For example when the PTC AE made the comment about PTC being able to automatically add all the dimensions for a sketch but SWX couldn't, etc. etc. SWX has had that capability for years and years.

[giovannipajarillo197]

hey people. its all about the hand who's clickin' the mouse.  duuudeeee !!!

[bumwheel]

If this group truly is a Pro-E reseller that immediately biases their view and basically taints this comparison. Even showing the mouse clicks and time doesn't necessarily give a fair comparison if the person conducting the eval has more experience with one package and knows the shortcuts for that system (Pro/E) but not the other (SW).

[AdamScheible]

1. SWX has had Fully Define Sketch for years. Driven/Driving toggle.

2. No one uses out of the box installations. Not even my college students.

3. Thank you for the preview kudos.

4. Pre-planning is a ten-fold time saver. Maybe you could offer your model requirements online with public submissions of results.

[jahilkiolad]

Why you peoples compare ProEngineer to Solid Works, there is no comparison between these two,because Solid Works can just do 80% of what ProEngineer can If you guys want to conduct a comparison to find out which one is the best than choose Pro Engineer ,Catia,and Unigrafics or UGS NX. Because these three giants are more or less similar in performance.