>I wasn't asking for alternatives, that's not an option. You have to stay compatible with the rest of the company/industry. Also do you really think these CAD t

>I wasn't asking for alternatives, that's not an option. You have to stay compatible with the rest of the company/industry. Also do you really think these CAD tools are comparable at all? If you're building a helicopter, they're not comparable at all. However, the word professional is a rather wider scope than that, and they're excellent for anyone whos business does not revolve around engineering, but has it as an auxiliary. Just as there are whole industries, like banking, that have software developers as a subset of the org chart, there are whole industries that need just a little bit of 3d CAD work. I would not recommend professional grade adobe editing packages to an independent real estate agent that basically just needs to crop and color-correct photos, and I would not recommend autodesk inventor to a city planner that just needs to 3d print stand-in terrain. Nor would I suggest a $40,000 stratasys printer to them by the way. If you're not going to use the advanced features then the cost is high and the licensing compliance is more painful for no net benefit. GIMP and FreeCAD are exceptional front-runners for these kinds of purposes. By the way, staying compatible with the industry is a great way to be non-exceptional. I'm not saying linux is the magical bullet of business success (because it's not), but if whatever you're doing is 100% compatible with industry software, then you're not doing anything that someone else hasn't already thought of. If you ever decide you want to move outside the bounds of what others have already done, you'll suddenly discover that open source is a competitive advantage, because it's much easier to extend it to the bleeding edge.