I think that a lot of negative posting boils down to this: Albire got off to a great start. When I bought it, there was only one version, I think that was V6. Steady improvements were added - not all this tangential stuff, and all was well. Somewhere along the way, Alibre started adding features and jacking-up the price; hence Pro and Expert - all fine. But Alibre is absolutely NOT in the same league as Solidworks. The workarounds to get the features that were standard in SW years ago have yet to be implemented. Up through V10, I thought AD was doing a good job of chipping away at SW and satisifying one person and small office businesses with their software - not so much now.
Vault is flawed, drafting is lacking, assembly tools continue to be unimplemented and there are ZERO tools to manage WFS. As a loyal Alibre user I use to be excited about the product; these days, it's very discouraging.
From a file management standpoint, I find it hard to recommend the software to shops that have any complexity/agility requirements. From a drafting standpoint, AD is sorely lacking behind SW. Managing assemblies can be VERY time consuming in terms of part replacement, etc. All of the above is fine if one has time AND the client (or your boss) doesn't care that time is money; but if you have to charge the client more hours to make the work arounds that have been around with SW for years, to me, is unfair. Right now if a client asked me what they should do on a tight budget, I'd recommend a seat of SW and forget the maintainence. With AD's lousy track record of implementing enhancements, you could use that seat of SW for 10 years and be confident AD would have not caught-up in terms of features.
Bill
