I like Alibre, I have used it since 2006 (V7?) and I think it's one of the best and easy to learn traditional cads on market - in it's price class +-100%.
Just out of curiosity few questions to people who think cloud is satan's plan to steel your data
- Do you think your local $100 hardrive with that 5year old usb drive backup is safer than for example Amazon servers (where Onshape data is stored)?
- Any modern cad has licensing server that defines whether you can access your own files or not. I suppose it doesn't help that much to have the data in you local harddrive if you can't access it?
- Many people store their cad data into dropbox or similar to access anywhere. Isn't that in cloud too?
- If you can access and edit your data in local server remotely, is that same as posting your files to this forum?
- Do you use email or internet often, that is the cloud, dude..
Cloud CADs do have export possibilities so if you wan't you can spend all night making local backups and that way create a thread that someone steels your backup files while you sleep.
I have used Onshape for two and a half years now, my greatest reliefs have been:
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no crashes, not a single crash that takes an hour to re-install and lose work due to poor saving schedule.. just few browser refreshes and data is always saved
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no installation, never. Just reveal every few weeks that you got some new functionality, immediately in use in all your computers. No waiting for having all the projects done and safe place to run painful updates to each machine - just to notice there is a major bug and you need to rollback and wait few months for service pack.
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no files. Assemblies work everytime you open them, if you break it, you can always pick a point in history to go back when it worked. If you wan't to show your model, just share a link, no login needed to review and you decide when to stop sharing. If you email a file, it's pretty hard to get it back.
- when I have problem or find a bug, I don't need to send any files and wait weeks for answer. Just two clicks to share whole document with all parts and assemblies with support and include screenshot with your comments. If they are sleeping, another click to create a version for them to investigate the exact moment when you ran into problem. No need to strip down anything and trying to replicate the problem with simplified model that you can fit into email attachment.
It's not (yet) perfect in any way but my concerns are currently in real stuff like wanting a new feature to automate something and save time - not fearing that my cad crashes when I have tight schedule. For me, cloud is the only way to go and currently lightyears ahead of installed cad. If I were behind very bad connection, I would have Alibre and Onshape working together to cover offline working.
On edit: No, I didn't write this offline with my notepad and I didn't save a copy into my local harddrive.
My 2c