SolidWorks Premium vs Revit: Which is a better fit?

Dev K.: Hi there. I'm Dev with a small company called Studiokumar and I would give SolidWorks Premium a rating of four out of five. I started using SolidWorks Premium to replace a previous product, which was Autodesk Inventor, and Autodesk Inventor is a fine mechanical CAD package, but I found that more and more when I was collaborating with other companies that SolidWorks is essentially the defective standard these days for 3D modeling and mechanical CAD, so it made it a lot easier working with other companies to be using the most mainstream product. I found SolidWorks to be a good choice for my business because it has a lot of the tools for both design modeling as well as analysis, and it also supports all the file formats and vendor specific extensions that I might run into in my work in mechanical design and product engineering. Getting started with SolidWorks was fairly straightforward. It had an installer package, if memory serves, so it was not too much different than installing other desktop software. The total setup time for installing, downloading and getting it going was probably not more than about 30 to 45 minutes, and once it was there, it was pretty easy to get going. There's tutorials and there's a lot of information about SolidWorks works if you're totally new to it in terms of how to use the modeling and mechanical CAD parts of it, but those are pretty standard compared to other types of CAD that you may be familiar with. So not too much that's going to be different or hard to get going with on SolidWorks. In terms of recommendations for other businesses regarding SolidWorks, I think SolidWorks would be a good choice for you if you are looking for a mechanical CAD package. I think it's particularly good if you're looking to work with other companies that might be using similar assets. It's a very common choice and it has a lot of powerful features that are considered standard in mechanical CAD these days. In terms of SolidWorks versus SolidWorks Premium, I think you have to look at the use within your business of whether you're going to need some of the more advanced modeling or analytics features that that includes. For my business and for my work, it made sense, so that's why I ended up using.

Greg: My name is Greg and I'm president and CEO of a design build company in San Diego, California. My rating for Revit is five out of five. Prior to using Revit, we were using Chief Architect, which did okay, but it was frankly unimpressive as far as the modeling in 3D and going over to Revit was a completely different experience that our customers love. The reasons we went over to Revit was because we wanted better modeling, better construction documents, and at the end of the day, we wanted a better presentation for our customers to see 3D and virtual walkthroughs so they could really see ahead of time what their construction or remodel is going to look like. So we consider Revit an enterprise program, so it does take a little bit of learning and setup, but once you're through that and you're up and running with the program, using it for construction documents and modeling, it definitely pays off and our customers love it. My recommendation, if you're considering Revit, is to make sure either you have someone on staff that's familiar with the program and can train others, or that you get support for setup and training so that you make the process as smooth as possible.