Hello everyone. My first post. A little background. I have followed Alibre for about 2.5 or 3 years now (lurking here in the forums). I finally decided to purchase my own copy of Alibre Expert about 1.5 years ago. I use it for hobby and to keep myself educated in 3D modelling. Ocassionally, I use it to do quick models for ideas related to my job, but my current employer (about 65,000 employees worldwide) uses ProE wildfire 3. I used Inventor version 8 and then version 10 at my previous job (about 70,000 employees worldwide). I taught myself Inventor because our facility mainly used Autocad Mechanical Desktop, but Inventor was available to us so I started playing with it. My previous employer used ProE for a period of time before I started working there, but apparently it was not satisfactory in some way because they switched to Inventor.
Some observations and opinions (of a reasonably intelligent but non-expert person):
I have never thought highly of ProE. I completely recognize its power, but that power is so poorly implemented that I consider it intolerable software to use. A Pinto car with a V8 certainly has power, but it still handles like crap and is ugly to look at. ProE is not intuitive software that you can be quickly productive with and trying to implement parametric equations can be quite confusing.
Inventor is very capable. It was very intuitive for me. I was able to make parts and drawings within an hour or two without having ever seen inventor before. In my opinion, Inventor and Alibre are comparable for ease of use. Inventor is far more powerful than Alibre. It's 2D drawing capabilities are far superior. Alibre has neglected 2D for quite some time. I think over the last year they have gotten the message about 2D and will be rectifying the neglect of 2D in the future. An example of Inventor's superior 2D capabilies; cut-away views can be created by drawing an aribitrary shape in one view and selecting the depth to cut away in another view. For example, drawing a closed spline on a front view and then drawing a line or curve on a side view would cut away all parts in the front view that lay in front of the line or curve that was drawn in the side view. That is probably a poor explanation so I'll elaborate. Imagine an illustration in which an artist or illustrator draws a sketch of an object and breaks a portion of the object away and draws what lies beneath the broken out portion. This is something that is easy to do in Inventor. Inventor can shade any 2D drawing view. Inventor can correctly dimension isometric views. Inventor has a convenient way to create revision tables. There are many other 2D capabilities that can be done in Inventor that Alibre cannot do or it does it poorly. Some 3D capabilites that Alibre can not do: Surfaces, 3D text operations, texture mapping, sharing sketches among parts in assembly, importing sketches, surfaces, and solid geometry from parts into other parts and assemblies for reference and sharing parameters. I wish very much that Alibre could do even elementary surfaces to use as cutting planes. In inventor, an arbitrary surface can be used to cut a part into two parts and either both parts can be kept or one side or the other can be discarded. Alibre can import surfaces and work with them, but at least being able to define a cutting plane within Alibre would be nice. Texture mapping is very handy for making a simplified 3D model look correct. For example, I modeled a tubular cylinder in Inventor that was formed from relatively fine wire mesh. Rather than actually modeling the mesh (this would be insanely computationally intensive), I modeled the tubular cylinder with a thin wall having the same thickness as the mesh. I then texture mapped a mesh onto the cylinder so that the model looked like it was made from mesh. Very easy to do, very computationally efficient (didn't bog the computer down), and produced a model in which it was very easy to tell which parts were mesh. And this was not done in the rendering portion of Inventor, texture mapping can be done in the part modeling module. 3D text can easily be embossed or engraved onto or into a part and any surface color can be changed so it was also possible to changed the color of the 3D text so that it was more clearly visible. Inventor also handles large assemblies very well, Alibre does not. Creating exploded assemblies was better in Inventor than it is in Alibre. Much easier to position parts in Inventor.
Here's the kicker. I was able to figure out how to do all this in Inventor in a matter of weeks without training, books, or manuals. Only fiddling with it and using online help. I have learned Alibre in the same matter so I don't consider Inventor to have an advantage in usability. I don't think it is possible to learn ProE by fiddling around and using online help only (ProE online help is a disaster). Ok, it is probably possible to do so with ProE, but you will have pulled all your hair out long before you have figured out ProE.
Now, as Miles said earlier, Inventor is Autodesk and that's a minus in my book. I like Inventor, but Autodesk likes to spend more time figuring out how to make their files unusable by other software (and their own for that matter) rather than fixing stuff. Autodesk could probably cut their software prices by half if they would quit screwing with the file format so much.
I really like Alibre's business philosophy, but I feel they have made some serious errors like neglecting 2D functionally and not developing really useful 3D capabilities because they feel they are for high end software only.
I'm getting tired of writing and this post is much too long for a first post so I will stop here and summarize.
I like Alibre, but it is not nearly a powerful as Inventor. I estimate its 3D capability to be about 50% to 60% of Inventor maybe as high as 70%, its sheet metal is about 40% to 50% of Inventor, and its 2D is about 40% of inventor. Some would say the capabilities lacking in Alibre are only for the esoteric, but I disagree. Hopefully, some of the examples I give above show this. I don't say this to disparage Alibre, I am just realistic.
Hope this helps
Good day to all
