SOLIDWORKS Design & Help

There’s probably a definitive crystal clear answer with statistics out there.

In my opinion (as is all of this) .. the simple answer is “revenue” !

Solidworks is at least 1/10th cost of Catia and therefore has more viable customers. In the U.K., I believe one basic license of Catia is £50,000 compared to around £5,000 for Solidworks.

It’s much more intuitive and easier to learn, yet Catia is used by the the big guns of engineering ... the likes of NASA, Boeing and major car manufacturers. I’ve not used Catia properly, but had a go with it and thought ... my god, this is something of an animal. So if you’re working for a big company that will train you in Catia, it’s probably going to set you up for life with a decent job.

Me ... I’m totally sold on Solidworks and wouldn’t particularly want to learn Catia at my age. You have to do allot more from what I saw to achieve the same model you would draw in Solidworks. Check out lofting for example and creating workplaces which is the thing I did with one of my ex students who went to university and had to use Catia to create an aircraft. It was not straight forward.

I’m sure, like anything else, once you know what you need to and had experience it’s a breeze.

Well said! You need to understand French to learn CATIA, LOL! I've played with CATIA and would rather pull teeth. At the time, CATIA was the best thing. SOLIDWORKS is my video game. POWERFUL and intuitive to use once you understand the program. Some aerospace companies are designing with the software. NX and Solid Edge use the same colonel which is saying something

Я тоже привык работать в системе SOLIDWORKS. Мне даже на работе говорят ты в своей программе так работаешь, как будто мультики смотришь)))

I ran it through google translate ... and I can see you have the same enthusiasm as I have and my son has for scooby-doo.

I can't speak for some companies but a local helicopter manufacturer uses both ProE/Wildfire and Catia. There are various design divisions throughout the company, but their tooling design department tends to use ProE, whereas the copter side, uses Catia. How these things are set in motion, one can only guess, but this is also true of Boeing and others.

We are a multinational company (gas turbines) and while most of the company runs on Siemens NX, other divisions in Canada and elsewhere use Catia. A lot of this may have to do with legacy systems from acquisitions, etc.. Then the fact that these other divisions do 'other' things... not gas turbine related, so the need for collaborative design efforts isn't a driver.

When I look at the mother ship's software licensing... there are seats of NX, Catia, ProE, Vericut... so software licen$ing obviously isn't something they're pinching pennies over.

@sakib ahmed :- it totally depends on the company what they want from these software, like NX, has good on cam

and Solidworks good in 3d model but this is my point of view.

(if you're asking why Dassault sells 2 different CAD software....)

It's all about marketshare - which I guess is another way to say "revenue"

Dassault has CATIA, SolidWorks, Draftsight, 3DExperience, and many other products which fit into different marketing categories (with some overlap)

Likewise, AutoDesk has AutoCAD, ME, Inventor, Revit, Fusion, etc.

It's a very common marketing strategy used by many companies (especially in the auto industry; ie Honda and Toyota).

I believe CATIA is used due to engineering traceability and file documentation especially in industries where legal repercussion can be costly due to using non approved files. The program incorporates file management across a multiuser project platform.

Well, revenue is definitely a thing to consider but looking at it from a user perspective, CATIA is a lot more optimized for larger, more complex assemblies (at least what I've known from my limited experience). Also, I believe Solidworks is more centred towards student learning since the interface, commands and overall visuals make it easier for a beginner to grasp the basics of CAD/CAE.

CATIA is more inclined towards industrial works as can be seen from the fact that they have separate packages for different applications such as the Dymola for Automotive, Aerospace.

(if you're asking why would a company use 2 different CAD packages...)

There are many reasons; as many people have already mentioned, 2 big reasons are function and cost.

I'm currently working at a small company (less than 10 people in the Engineering dept) that has both SolidWorks and CATIA. Many of their customers are aerospace, so having CATIA helps with data exchange. CATIA's composite tools are also used here - an application that's not avail in Solidworks. But the majority of engineers use Solidworks because they are more familiar with it as a design and drafting tool. Management doesn't care which CAD you use, as long as you can get your job done, and you can produce drawings in pdf format.