There's currently a 20% discount on Fusion 360, visit this link to see current pricing on the Autodesk store - www.dpbolvw.net/click-9205628-15225129

I think one of the biggest pros for Fusion 360 is it’s barrier to entry. As a (former) hobbiest, I found F360 a delight to use, with a small learning curve. As features were added, I began to understand the industry standard of design process. Once my hobby became a full time business, I didn’t see any value in changing the design software to something like a Solidworks or an Inventor. F360 did everything we needed it to do! We have projects in F360 that run deep, both on PC and Mac. We were easily able to work remotely during the pandemic, and continue to do so today. I gave Solidworks a go, and it does everything we’d ever need it to and it was a great experience, packaged with Catia, but the cost and the machine upgrades wasn’t worth it to continue using it. Choice I guess.

Love your videos! As a Product Manager working at Autodesk on Inventor and Fusion (responsible for CAM) I found this video particularly enjoyable.

I have never understood why Inventor is the "red headed step child" in professional 3D cad software. When I was a reseller I got to watch an internal video comparing Inventor, Solidworks, Pro E and Catia. 16 different tasks. Inventor was the best/fastest in 14 of them. Granted Autodesk may have picked stuff Inventor is better at but I've used SW and Inventor both and the sheer amount of clicks needed in SW for similar tasks is ridiculous. I will be an Inventor guy for life or until I can't use it/don't need it anymore. The cost is well worth it to have control over my files and all the other pros you mentioned. Great vid Neil 👍

as a hobbyist I miss using inventor! I had to learn fusion and it was easy to switch but I definitely prefer inventor.

Thanks for all the Inventor videos you've done over the years. I still refer back to them all the time.

Nice video mate... cool to see so much of our MFG work from NZ in the showreel footage you had in the background as well. That video is really doing the rounds. 🙂

This is a fabulous breakdown. I've been looking for a video like this for years. Thanks!

I was a Solidworks user until they changed their licensing that made it a pain to be able to work at home if I had to. In the past they had a home license that was part of your main license but greed got rid of that so I switched to Inventor. Now I use both Fusion and Inventor and love them both along with Inventorcam for my programming. The big plus for Fusion is that Fusion works in both Windows and Mac! That's huge! All I wish is that the files can be saved locally. ITAR prevents me form storing in the cloud.

Hey thanks really appreciate your videos, built a rack workstation this year got to use your tools to help me build a killer workstation switched to inventor to get more modeling features. I have the manufacturing suite but still do cam in fusion because it's honestly more feature rich but would rather model in inventor. Thanks appreciate it!

Literally the one I was looking for, always precious, thanks mate!

I'm a few decades long Inventor user. Thank you for clearing that out for us!

Nice comparison, I look forward how this story will end. Fusion 360 is getting better with every monthly update and the closer connection from design to manufacturing is well appreciated by the engineering teams. I guess it will all come down if there will be a more advanced PLM integration in Fusion 360 available. The Fusion Manage Extension is a first step, but if there would be a proper Fusion Manage integration I know several design teams immediately jumping onto Fusion 360 + Fusion Manage. Simply because it can do 90% of their work in a much simpler integration. Any yes there will be those special cases were you Inventor Veteran will help you out to save his pit file directly in to Fusion Team ;-)

I loved the workflow in Inventor. It's what is used in school. After using Fusion I still enjoy the flow of modeling in Inventor. Yes you can make the same model in both, but I would rather work in Inventor.

WOW! amazing video... exactly what I was always wondering about!!! thanks mate... keep 'em coming

When I started, I've downloaded Inventor, and you were basically the only one making tutorial on KZfaq. Sadly I like inventor more, that F7 feature is the thing that I miss more with other SW, but I've switched to Fusion to have more support since I'm self thought

You are shining again Mr. Neil ! i am letting my boss watch this whole video ! thank you for summing it up :)

thank you Niel, this video is very useful. I am sorry your work to promote inventor over the years did not get that much attention from the community,. They sure got mine! You helped me and my team become higher level users.

I like it when you spoke about system requirements. I built a wokstation in 2020 since the only work I coud find was contrat work. I made sure I got the best CPU I could "afford" and skimped on the GPU since I knew the CPU and memory was the limiting factor. Fast forward to today, and I am working in an office that has laptops that can barely run one instance of Revit, much less the typical 2-3 I normally run. My he workstation could do 4-5 no sweat. I love the portability of the laptops but the limited compute is irritating.

I would like to thank you for all the effort you placed into TFI videos. I was definitely one of those stats on all your inventor videos and I still go back there sometimes when my memory needs refreshing on a task I may not have performed in a while. I have transitioned from working for employers to now running my own business and supporting many of the smaller fabrication shops in my area across Inventor/Fusion and Advance Steel applications. Fusion has benefits in some areas that Inventor lacks, for example in obj, stl file formats, Fusion does that better. I perform a lot of sheet metal work and inventor is simply better there. With some great add-ons used for drawings in inventor I would never consider Fusion. All in all, I was there as fusion began and I have watched it develop and always have it on hand with the manufacturing suite as I do require it sometimes. Thanks again for all of the effort you had made in the past to TFI Inventor training videos, my life has been impacted in a positive way due to your efforts.

Thank you! Very helpful info

Good video! For my purposes as a 3D print hobbyist (blue collar?), Fusion 360 suits me fine 👍

High quality. Thanks for your time.

BROTHER, YOU ARE THE BEST!!! You oooh really helped me!! THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

Excellent summary Thank you

We use both For big models only inventor! The same model with close to 10k parts Inventor - fast, no problems, smooth 3d view F360 - slow, crashes, freezing 3d view

I am responsible for teaching both of these platforms and there are some huge differences between them. Fusion 360 is a lot easier than Inventor because the basic transition goes Tinkercad, then Fusion 360, then Inventor. As much as I cringe with Autodesk's dominance in the CAD market, they have spent the time to research what is developmentally appropriate for teaching.

Great breakdown , industrial designer with mostly rhino3d skills I found inventor just felt like big boy software. 360s interface was fragmented and I struggled feeling like I was clicking so many thing to achieve little. Too me that's the difference. Interesting about the white collar blue collar in regards to cam exports. I've found it's never great to put eggs in one basket. Machinists use so many different bits of software I think you exporting from cam cos you can would result in them hitting problems unless you have the post finely tuned. I can see them just running it through their tried and tested can solution on the floor more often. Maybe in a small shop where you don't have that foundation and that makes it easier to roll out this as a workflow. Give me inventor with ai regenerative design features as a subscription cloud compute Option and they'll kill it.

There are many third party very heavy duty applications designed to run inside of inventor. Since Inventor was introduced and Mechanical Desktop was ended I have used Openmind Hypermill for my CAM solution. It lets me generate g-code right inside of Inventor. It is extremely high end (5 axis and the like). I wear both white and blue shirts. Cheers

So number one... You absolutely can save everything locally. I do. Because someday I'm not going to be able to access the cloud... But using decent practices, I've managed to keep all my files since the late 1990s...

I agree, making tutorials about Fusion 360 will help you grow the channel.

its also worth noting that fusion has quite the following in film. its fast becoming an essential tool for artists building props and concepting things for movies, tv and games

Happy... it's Saturday now, all! This was a BIG video to make, it'll spawn some reactions, but I do plan on releasing further videos re functionality differences, pros and cons between the two etc. I understand a lot of people feel the need to tell you that you've 'forgot' to mention something, but I intentionally steered this away from product level features. Re the System Requirements and the GPU part, this debate was somewhat limited to Autodesk offerings, I know Solidworks has an arguably arbitrary requirement for a certified GPU but that still isn't or shouldn't be the bottleneck when it comes to handling large datasets. There's just so much more to this than seeing a model spinning on screen. But I didnt have the time to get into that as an off-topic waffle. One part I feel a little anxious about is the community bit. To be clear, I stand by all of that 100% as that's my take and perception on it having lived it for several years. But just for clarity, I'm not implying there are no community events or activities for Inventor, the point being made was in context to fusion 360 AND the overall size of the Inventor license base globally of which there'll be well over a million, the wider user base are generally not interested in engaging in community activities relating to Inventor, I can attest to that with receipts. Inventor does OK at Autodesk University and OK when a significant marketing push has happened via Autodesk for a learning event, and I'm not referring to community here in context of the help provided on the forums. Either way, there are a few super enthusiastic Inventor users who engage in community discussions... some of them are in my Discord server, totally not saying that doesn't exist, just saying it's nowhere near on the scale of Fusion 360 and those guys are somewhat of a minority!

Thanks Neil

Monkey Island reference was appreciated

I personally love fusion 360, and I save all my projects locally.

Really good video, and for me, a hobbyist who loves to design, it confirms Fusion 360 is the correct tool. Can't agree more about the Fusion 360 community, there is so much help and support out there with Lars being a huge help.

I take one class at my community college every ~two years and that gets me 23 months of a free Inventor student license. Technically you get one free year but when the year is almost over and they send you an email, you can re-check if you're eligible and so far, since it's still within the year of taking my course, it has went through and given me another year even though I haven't taken a course in 8 months. I use Inventor at work, so it's nice to be able to use what I'm most familiar with for my hobby use. Plus I'm learning to weld at the community college and a course is ~$400 rather than the $4380 that two years of Inventor would cost.

I feel like you really need to check out what the interactions are between Infraworks (bridge tools and generic objects) and Inventor. Essentially Infraworks runs Inventor server in the behind Infraworks and uses that to generate all the components you see in Infraworks. The benefit is that you now get thousands of Inventor models instanced to the dimensions they should be at that specific location in the world. Definitely something that puts Inventor into a new category as a means to really kick some "a" in the Infraworks side of things (and shake up the Revit fanboy community).

If one had access to BOTH Inventor and Fusion 360, What would be (in your opinion) the NECCISARY minimum combination of extensions one would need to CAD,CAM parts in a production environment consisting of a 5'X10' CNC router and/or laser?..

Inventor's engineering drawing is superb as far as I'm concerned. One of the biggest reasons why I went back to inventor from fusion 360 is the drawing creation in fusion lacked development. I do not know what it is today, but the problem is it feels like there's a weird middle area where both need to be installed for small young companies that want to design their own products, make the blueprints professional, use next gen or cutting edge manufacturing techniques (such as additive manufacturing or generative design) and manufacture it in-house. There's a weird middle ground that isn't quite full inventor, isn't quite full fusion 360 and for the past few years I've needed both installed in a company. Largely because of inventors drawing and GD&T section. Which is annoying because toolpath generation requires VRAM and cuda core count and heaps of CPU memory which means more toward like gaming hardware specs which has been crazy expensive the past couple years. Toolpath generation with adaptive clearing is one of the greatest inventions in subtractive manufacturing, but omg it is taxing on hardware, in both platforms.

I’ve tried both for multiple years each and honestly being able to model threads was the selling point on fusion for me

What about designing capabilities? Is inventor more professional? When using only part design, assembly, drawing and maybe simulations, is inventor worth the price difference?

Despite all, I still love your Inventor videos and have learned a lot from them. Keep up the great work.

Heck the only thing that Inventor has that 360 does not is the local files. I would really love to have that in 360 and always hated the idea of not having complete control over my creations!

6:21 Whaaat? Autodesk Inventor does have Generative design! 🥴

360 cannot compete with Solidworks, Creo, Catia etc. - Inventor can.

Fusion being free does help people find their niche, since no one models everything, or every category. Then if you start making money, and need more powerful tools, you then pick what you need. I use Inventor every day, and I use AutoCAD for sending out drawings to vendors. I have access to a product suite that includes Fusion, but it is rare I ever start it up, or actually use it for my job. I do want to learn Fusion, but there are only so many hours in a day, and I have a lot of technique with Inventor that Fusion would need to duplicate.

I use Fusion at home and Inventor at work. More often then not, Inventor's UI frustrates me. Maybe I need to spend more time with it or I need some proper training. Fusion I picked up pretty easy with no formal training.

Biggest things for me: Fusion 360 runs on Mac not just Windows, as a hobbyist Fusion 360 is free, and community is engaged.

Hey there mate!

I am confused between Solidworks and Inventor, what do you advise?

Before watching this video I've never heard of Autodesk Inventor, even though I've been using Fusion 360 as a hobbyist for multiple years now.

Why not both?? I use both for work, they both have there own use cases but work very well together. Fusion is great for quick design/parts and 3d printing and if you're only looking for something for home use. When putting together large designs and assemblies in a professional setting then Inventor is far superior.

I was the founder of a manufacturing engineering firm.. We used solid works, NX, Rhino, alias, and a few others. When I started my next company my hatred of solid works was maxed out, that program is a nightmare. So I tried fusion, for a while it was great, but more and more tools are broken, things don't work, and basic drawing features or mold making tools just don't exist. So I'm done with fusion. On to try inventor. If not I guess I'll go back to NX.

Can’t find the hardware leader board link

I think Inventor is massively underrated. In the furniture industry, as I am, I see Solidworks lauded all the time as being the best option but when you actually start to try and do complex drawings of your model it's a flipping nightmare! It's like they originally designed the Solidworks drawing capability on Windows Paint and have been trying to fix it ever since! Bill of materials is also a complete joke. I think Inventor is a much more mature program in terms of the 2d drawing offering and the bill of materials interface is much more usable as well in my view. The fact you can also use AutoCAD to do 2d drawings of your Inventor model and maintain a link between the two is awsome, especially for where you have company with a mix of old school 'just using AutoCAD' types and those preaching the good news that is parametric CAD 🙏😆! I hope Autodesk continue to invest in Inventor as currently I think that's the closest thing it has to compete with Solidworks.

I use both everyday for work at a yacht company (in addition to rhino). I personally prefer Fusion, but all my coworkers seem to favor inventor. We use autodesk vault for storage, and we check in files after creation. On day to day basis I have more issues with lagging and crashing in inventor. Fusion rarely has issues, however it doesn’t handle the insane assemblies as well as inventor. If I were to start my own company, I would use rhino and fusion only (so long as I wasn’t doing 1000 part assemblies)

Would you say "Inventor CAM" is inventors answer to integrated cnc machining tool path generation? and is in fact just about identical to fusion 360's CAM functionality? Although yes it is a separate license/purchase/download/install. It would me nice if it were truly a part of inventor. I think if Fusion 360 had a better offline solution. To ensure no data is uploaded. (There is a way to do it but it is messy). Then Inventor would be obsolete.

Can you control a machine directly from autocad?

At least you know this guy had a job before. "who is doing real work" made me chuckle.

You're wrong you can still save your fusion files to your local pc if you want.

A fun fact is that OTX next week doesn't contain a single Inventor session (Only one factory) but several Fusion 360..... Personally I hate it....😒.... Thangs anyway for all your Inventor content. Specially all the hardware stuff.....👍👍

Inventor wins hands down, Can perform all tasks offline where Fusion can't, + no need for cloud where your info can be compromised.

Inventor needs better marketing....but the localization is a huge positive for it it could market to

Great video

The best part of fusion is the assembly style workflow

Fusion 360 is aimed more at hobbyist and startup companies with great design tools for 3D printing. Inventor is much more expensive and require more effort to implement in a company but offer better features and tools for complex assemblies and mechanical design.

I wish Fusion would use more of a powerful computer. I use it a custom gaming/workstation PC I built and it barely uses the computer's resources at all. Even when it bogs down and is running slow because I'm doing something complex my RAM, CPU, and GPU, are all barely in use.

To the point about Autodesk having to decide where to draw the line between what "Inventor" functionality F360 gets. I suspect that they do not want to limit F360 as much as you might imagine. I previously worked for several Autodesk distributors over a period of more than thirty years. I would put Autodesk's motivation behind F360 as a means of creating a cloud centric product with the ultimate goal of phasing out the desktop products. They already shifted (like many other software suppliers) to a subscription model several years back because there was limited value they could add in successive version releases to justify upgrade revenue. F360, IMHO, is part of a much longer plan to shift to the guaranteed revenue stream of service provision as opposed to the more lumpy licensing model. They'll most likely solidify this (pun intended) by adding cloud based AI like features that would not be feasible on desktop products.

Just a shame inventor cam gets left behind......I for one am not a big fan of the cloud environment and will not ever risk being able to access my data on whether or not I have an internet connection.

This is not a joke sir. I was a welder/ fabricator for fifty years never touching a cad program in my lifetime. My life’s mission has been to become current and relevant. At 60 years old, yup my old man believed in cheap labor… Could an old school learn Fusion 360 then implement it down the line into my shops CNC’s ?

I use inventor when I have to design/engineer something. At work we use PowerMILL and Fusion since we aren't creating data but simply fixing broken models and manufacturing. Inventor is miles better than Fusion.

God i hated the generative design thing when i tried it, i had unlimited cloud credit yet i hated it. No amount of cloud credit would make me work with fusion.

Make a comparison between Siemens NX and Fusion 360 please🤣

Autodesk creating to much expensive software's that do similar work till a point it become so much confusing like in a supermarket where you find the same in 100 diff bottle but each one with a slightly diff taste its kind of a high level of scamming

Guys, a noob here! I wanted to learn 3d modelling, and I was wondering, what would be the best software, available for free, that you would recommend? If there are tutorials o skillshare for it, that would be great too, haha. Anyway, I would love to be able to use the files for 3d printing at some point.

Yet fusion 360 lost its shine when Autodesk decided to cut functionality on the free version. Don’t buy into the bleed game use open source freeCAD and pay to own software like solid edge.

Fusion files can be saved offline. I'm not sure what he meant by only saving it in the cloud 🤔

Is it possible / easy to export Inventor files (Pack 'n' Go?) to Fusion 360 to use the latter's CAM package? Thanks.

inventor users love inventor, but wish it was more like F360 F360 users love F360, but wish it was more like inventor

The "cloud" part of fusion is a total deal breaker for me! I was recently dumbfounded by how cloud centric it has become...I couldn't view a file without first uploading it to the cloud. And better yet, the option to access local files is locked out until you purchase a subscription! Cost me a 1 month subscription fee to find out that I can't do anything without first uploading everything to the magical cloud.

You would talk about FreeCad !

Fusion 360 is now US$372

It's almost like you intentionally put that Monkey Island reference in there just to remind me how old I am.

Didn't you used to be TFICADTips?

I've been really surprised every time I find out Fusion 360 has features I previously assumed were Inventor exclusive, but it happens a lot. BTW, files in every format that I know of can be exported to the PC? At least, work files can have backups created and archived files.

Fusion 360 with large assemblies is pure pain.....

Form my personal experience: Autodesk does allow you to keep a local backup of ALL files and team data. This backup automatically sync with the cloud everytime you are connected to the internet. This is also relativity simple to setup, all you have to do is download the client service from your online team portal.

The single greatest downside is the cloud. The fact we dont really control or protect the files is a nogo.

I have fusion 360 running on a win 10 virtual box on my pretty old linux gaming rig. I don’t know enough to know what to expect with performance but it runs fine for me. It put up a couple warnings about performance but I was able to make them stop popping up and it works fine for me. All this to say if you are a hobbyist you do not need a crazy workstation.

@tech3d Here's a speedmodeling showdown between an F360 user and an Inventor user - thought you might dig this: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/j9OBed2guZeog3U.html

I work with inventor pro (actually the collection) and I must say that the biggest difference, that I expected to see listed here, is the environments. I last used Fusion 360 in 2018 so they might have been implemented but I doubt, since some are only available in the pro version of inventor. For example, metal sheet environment is gold. It makes easy as hell to create parts that can be manufactured dirty cheap, and combined with frame generator and piping environment you can really scale up productivity and design process.

AutoCAD 8 ~ to Fusion, yeah $500 a year but oh the 4th and 5th axes is $1600 a year in Fusion. but all and all best bag from the buck imo.

Soooooooo?, Which one performs most like Apple products and makes me start craving soy, glittery-things, and sitting on inverted-stools with three of my buddies?

#1 you can work in offline mode. Export your files locally and open files from your local computer. Clear the offline cache before going back online. And your files will not be uploaded to the cloud.

I use Rhino3D, The way inventor and fusion handle object manipulation is so alien to me. In rhino you can specify a grid of 10x10 meters and place hundreds of objects and work on them one by one. Move them at will and do almost anything without using popup menus. I have tried fusion and was incredibly frustrated by the interface. I love that I can type in the first 3 letters of a command, get 20 options and then hit enter as it auto selects the most used command with those 3 letters.

Yeah, its mostly the cam. There are zero competitors. A hypermill seat is something like 27 thousand dollars.

PRICE

I'm very interested in Fusion 360. The Price is just great for "normal people". BUT, I simply HATE Cloud solutions so I can't own this Application just buying it. I also hate Subscriptions. And the free version is very limited without any access to Eagle.