Perpetual licenses are available, that are yours to keep forever. There is no compulsory subscription and you don't have to be connected to the internet to use the software.

Your first year of upgrades are included in the purchase and you can choose to upgrade as desired or take annual upgrade subscription to always receive the latest releases and a ‘Home Use’ key for when you need access from home as well as the office.

Not in IronCAD. Other products use a structured history-based approach, this means the order in which you model your design is critical to the way your model behaves as you make changes… Get the order of features in your model wrong and one simple change to one small aspect of your design could mean the most bizarre results and time consuming re-building to make the model work again.

IronCAD is different because it has both structured and non-structured part design. Non-structured works particularly well when you are in the more creative stage of design and are testing out concepts and ideas and need to make radical changes quickly without being constrained by the model's sequence of construction.

This video visually explains why it is important to have both ACIS and Parasolid modeling engines.

Configurator is a unique tool (available on an annual basis at very low extra cost) that lets your sales people interact with your clients to visually show how multiple components or assemblies come together into a configured system, by dragging and dropping them into a scene. Instant BOMs and Quotes can be generated from the completed configuration using this tool and the production team have absolute clarity when the time comes to create the order.

IronCAD allows more intelligence and even domain-specific knowledge to be added to your components through a process we call Smart eBEHAVIOR. You can create intelligent features, parts or components that position, size and orient precisely onto other components. You can even add behaviours such as predefined constraints that can provide accurate movements in mechanisms. Further extend your design process by adding connections to other business related processes such as ERP to provide information such as pricing, availability, or manufacturing delivery to make more informed design decisions on your new products. Store this intelligence into your catalogues as Smart eCONTENT to share across your organization and even with customers using any one of the IronCAD products to meet different users’ levels of expertise.

Here are some Frequently Asked Questions to help you out.

Why should you switch?
IronCAD can most often do the same job in half the time of other traditional MCAD systems. When you add this up over any realistic company time period, using IronCAD can provide your company with far more return on investment and more profit. Further to that, IronCAD makes it significantly easier to make design changes, so you will likely have a far more enjoyable experience.

What about training time?
We have a free one week training course, which should have most people confidently using IronCAD by the end of the week. It’s about 8 hours of self-paced videos, so you can also do the whole course in a day if you want to, that’s how quick it is to learn IronCAD. We also have tons of free online tutorials, and can provide personal tech support to make sure you get up to speed quickly and easily. Many of our users and team have experience in traditional MCAD systems like SolidWorks, so can help guide you through our new design methodologies that can help you.hen facing real-world engineering design challenges. IronCAD represents a fundamentally better way to design in 3D, it can help you be more profitable, train employees faster, and react faster to real world design challenges.

My employees already know and use a different product.
The first thing to note is that you can train someone to use IronCAD in just one week of our free training course. So within one week your employees could be trained in a system that will likely enable them to work twice as fast. In any long term business profit calculation, IronCAD should very quickly pay back any short time you spend training employees.

What about industry standard?
There is no ‘industry standard’ in CAD software because there are so many systems available and companies often use different systems, some even still use 2D only systems. At the end of the day there are two things that matter here, producing manufacturing data that can be shared (2D Drawings, DXF files for CNC etc), and secondly being able to open and share your 3D data with other companies. Both IronCAD and SolidWorks can easily share data in the common “STEP” 3D file format, opening each others files. IronCAD can easily produce accurate manufacturing drawings, DXF files etc for CNC. The output is what matters at the end of the day for most companies choosing a CAD system. IronCAD can often provide double the output of SolidWorks in the same amount of time.

Who uses IronCAD?
IronCAD products are used by hundreds of thousands of people around the world. From one-person-garages, to multi-billion dollar corporations. Companies like Toyota, Hitachi, Huawei, Ericsson, Ricoh, Husqvarna, and many more.

Want to get technical?
Other traditional MCAD systems have a different core technical methodology to IronCAD. This (as well as IronCAD’s innovative tools), is what makes a huge difference on a technical level.

The alternatives have what’s called “Dependent History”, which means that almost everything that is created, is dependent on the item above it in the history tree. So when you go to make a design change on a detailed model, you often get “History Tree Crashes” or part failures on the items below the item you changed. This is a famous error in these types of systems.

IronCAD has “Independent History”. Each item is supported by itself, and is not dependent on other items above it. This means you can make a change and not get a broken down history tree like in traditional systems. In modern engineering, changes happen all the time, and IronCAD has been built to more effectively adapt to those technical real-world engineering challenges. If you need to, you can assign dependency between parts in IronCAD, using it in a similar way to traditional MCAD. However, in most cases this will likely be a much less efficient way to design, so even though we provide the option, we don’t recommend using it on a regular basis.

On top of this, IronCAD has some extremely powerful tools built to get the most out of this more flexible design environment suited to modern engineering. You have the TriBall, which is a patented tool that replaces the need to use reference planes, and allows you to copy and position things in far less time than a traditional system. You also have IronCAD’s drag & drop catalogs, allowing you to skip past the old “make plane > create sketch > extrude sketch” approach in traditional systems. To do the same thing in IronCAD you simply drag & drop a 3D block. At the core of this 3D block is still a sketch and an extrude which can be customised, but you have skipped the unnecessary steps. IronCAD then provides push-pull handles to make common size changes even faster.

At a design environment level, traditional systems like SolidWorks have the user design each part individually, then at the end connect them into an assembly with a time-consuming mate and constraint process. IronCAD allows you to design parts individually if you want to, but generally this is a less productive way to design. Design can be better when it is done in context with the rest of the model. For example if you’re designing a car door, you want to be able to see the car around it so you can make sure it fits first time. IronCAD has a unified design environment, so you can design as many parts as you like in the same file. This creates a fundamentally better design process, and also means you can skip most of the mating and constraining done in a system like SolidWorks. All your parts are already in the right place and fitting perfectly, because you design them in place, in context of the rest of your design. You can still apply mates and constraints if and when needed, but after learning IronCAD you’ll likely notice many of these are no longer needed, and you can operate at a much faster rate.

This is just scratching the surface of the technical details of each system, and we are more than happy to discuss this in more detail. We believe IronCAD’s core technical methodology is fundamentally better, and we are happy to compare and discuss anytime.