Anyone using this software? How is it different from Fusion 360?
Inventor is a much more mature product than Fusion. It’s been around for ~25 years, where Fusion was started ~10 years ago
Inventor UI is more similar to a traditional CAD program. It’s their original professional 3D CAD design solution, and is priced as such (nearly 4x cost).
Inventor doesn’t have the cloud capabilities and mesh modeling features, but is likely much more sophisticated in other areas, and is probably more similar to SolidWorks as an offering.
For a detailed comparison, look here
I used Inventor for years when I could get a ‘teachers license’ for free through my wife. It’s an amazing product.
I switched to F360 at some point before they started crippling the free version. I think it happened after my wife switched schools and her old Autodesk login stopped working because the old email address died.
I haven’t bothered going through the trouble of having her get a new account again. F360 does everything I need it to do. I do wish they had a better ‘hobby use’ license that was cheaper. I can’t justify their cheapest license for what I do.
It always makes me wonder how great things would be if they combined forces and made autocad, fusion, and inventor one product. Why maintain 3 very similar products…
Also shows I know nothing about being a software company.
Likely has to do with marketing/financial stuff.
They have 3D capabilities in AutoCAD, yet have 2 other packages.
They have PCB design in Fusion and Inventor, but still have EAGLE.
There’s crossover all around, but to combine all of them into a single package, they would have to raise the cost high enough that it equals out, and would cause sticker shock to the loyal customers, who say, only want 2D CAD.
Likely, or at least it should be, that the cores of some of those are shared where possible.
At least they do have a free one though. That is very unlike Autodesk.
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Sounds like capable software, I just started a course on Autodesk Inventor.
Hopefully, I’ll learn something!
I used Inventor a couple jobs back. It was pretty capable but at that time had some limitations on the surfacing side of things (similar limitations as Solidworks at the time). I hope the surfacing capabilities have been improved by now.
One nice thing, at that time, was that I was able to install it on my home system for free in addition to my company laptop. I believe they were trying to get more market share at that time. So you might want to see if that is still an option. Downside is that they didn’t have CAM capabilities but it looks like that’s an option now.
Overall, a decent CAD package if you have access.
They made the brilliant Sketchbook free on iOS and are actively fixing bugs and maintaining it.
I am going to have a look at inventor if it is included in the education package. 
Another option that I’ve played around with is Design Spark Mechanical.
I believe they have it for free to students/education. Might be worth checking out.
Oh. I know they do, but you can’t sell any products designed with it, and I’d have to have my wife send me codes anytime I had to log in to something. It was really a bit of a hassle the years I was doing it.
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Yeah I wasn’t thinking about the selling part. And yes the codes are a pain. I did it for a little while with my kids school email address and it was a real pain. And for what I am capable to do with it It didn’t add anything I cant do with a free license. Which you are supposed to sell with either I don’t believe. But I couldn’t sell a glass of water to a man stuck in a desert so that’s ok here lol
I’ll have to go look. I thought there was a dollar per year cutoff where your allowed to use the free f360 license.
That’s possible but I’m not sure. Unfortunately it wont really matter for me LOL
Yea, it’s $1000.
Fusion 360 for personal use is a limited, free version that includes basic functionality for qualifying users who generate less than $1,000 USD in annual revenue and use for home-based, non-commercial projects only.
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I downloaded Inventor and tried it out. I don’t know why, but it somehow feels better than Fusion, even though it looks a lot more dated. I am going to try to recreate something that I wasn’t able to do in Fusion. Let’s see how that goes. 
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Exciting. I haven’t downloaded it yet but it looks like I’ll be using the 2021 edition. Are you on 2024?
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Yeah, but rather stumbling through the options right now.
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