Advantage: Onshape.

When working on a CAD project, the majority of my time is spent focused on a single view of my subject. But when it comes to align parts into an assembly, it is very useful to have multiple views, and this is where Fusion 360 falls behind Onshape.

Fusion 360 can toggle between the standard single-view mode and a quad-view mode. In quad-view mode, the window starts with four equal-sized views and the user can adjust the relative sizes within the window.

This is a bare-bones baseline level of functionality. I can work with it, but I’m not happy with it. Onshape does it better.

Onshape takes advantage of the fact it runs in a browser. You can have multiple browser windows open on the same Onshape project, and each window can be a different view. Onshape infrastructure keeps all the windows in sync – any change made in one view is immediately reflected in all the others. Want four views? Open four windows. Want 6 views? (top/bottom/left/right/front/back) Open six windows.

And since these Onshape views are all separate windows, they can be placed on different monitors to build a great multi-monitor workspace. Fusion 360 is limited to a single window. Trying to use Fusion 360 across multiple monitors means manually scaling the application window across them. Toolbars get cut in half, resolution doesn’t match, problems left and right. It is not ideal.

What about opening multiple instances of Fusion 360, one for each monitor? It turns out that doesn’t work because the instances are unaware of each other. Change made in one instance is not reflected in the others until the user hits “Save” in one instance and “Reload” in all the other open instances.

The obvious conclusion is that Fusion 360 works best on a single high-resolution display instead of multiple screens. Sadly this is also false. As mentioned in my first Fusion 360 vs. Onshape comparison, Fusion 360 does not scale to high-resolution displays (4K, Retina, etc.) whereas Onshape takes advantage of the fact browser makers have long since handled the problem of scaling for high resolution.

Since the time of my first comparison Autodesk knowledge base published a workaround for running Fusion 360 on high-resolution displays. With these workarounds, Fusion 360 now runs poorly at 4K, which I guess is an improvement over not running at all.

With more multi-view options, including multi-monitor, plus superior support for high-resolution displays, Onshape handily wins this comparison, and they know it.

After using Autodesk Fusion 360 for a few weeks on the Luggable PC project, I’m getting more comfortable with it. Here are some thoughts and updates on a few items I mentioned in the “Round 1” post:

Constraints: Onshape has very good constraint notification and management. I know exactly when dimensions are fully constrained, and when things are over-constrained, I can see where the conflicts are. In the current default configuration for Autodesk Fusion 360, none of that is available.

However, if one goes into the Preferences menu and go to the feature preview section, there’s an option to turn on the work-in-progress support for constraint notification. This feature, while far from parity with Onshape’s excellent design, goes a long way to easing the pain.

The complaint about over-constrained situation still applies: an error box is still all we get without any further details. But at least we get a color change to notify us when a feature is fully constrained, even if it isn’t completely reliable yet. Sometimes a feature’s color changes even though it hasn’t been fully constrained, and sometimes a color doesn’t change even when fully constrained. I am still occasionally surprised by how features would move unexpectedly later on in the workflow. Still, it is far better than nothing.

Advantage: Still Onshape, but by a much thinner margin.

Sharing: I was unhappy with the complex access control system, making it difficult to just share a design to everybody. But they have since added (or I just noticed) an option on every design in the project navigation tab: “Share Public Link”. It will generate a link to share publicly. This one is actually a step above Onshape, where I can choose whether the sharing link is a snapshot or a live link to the current state. Choose whether the design itself is downloadable.

And best of all, the design is visible without creating an Autodesk account. Unlike Onshape, where people have to have an Onshape account to access public documents.

Advantage: Fusion 360 takes the lead from Onshape because no account creation is required.

Offline: And now, a sour note. Since Fusion 360 is a native application, with an option to “Work Offline”, I had fully expected it to continue functioning when my internet connection failed. Unfortunately this was not the case! It appears that one needs to be online to enable offline work. I guess they need to download some information before the application can function offline. This make sense when the scenario is to prepare in the office before taking a computer on the road. But when the internet connection is unexpectedly severed, such preparation stage is not possible and things grind to a halt.

Advantage: Nobody. Inopportune network outage renders both useless.

I’m personally comparing use of Onshape vs. Autodesk Fusion 360, seeing which one I prefer to use for my own projects. As I wrote earlier, each of them offer something I would miss if I started using the other exclusively.

In a close competition, everybody would learn from everybody else and the most important user features will propagate through all the offerings in the market. I wasn’t sure if the people behind Onshape and Autodesk Fusion 360 saw each other as competitors, but now I’m fairly confident that they do and are keeping an eye on each other.

The proof: Sheet metal.

Onshape just unfolded their sheet metal feature. (“unfolded” their joke, not mine…) Autodesk said theirs is in a closed invite-only technology preview coming soon to all users. Such a similar feature introduced within a few weeks of each other might merely be a coincidence, but I doubt it. It certainly looks and sounds like they’re working to reach parity with each other’s features.

Additional proof: Constraints

Last time I wrote about the fact Onshape does a great job with constraints, letting the user know exactly where they stand in a way that Fusion 360 does not. At the time I didn’t know Fusion 360 has constraint visualization available as a “preview feature” that is turned off by default.

It is a good step forward for Fusion 360. As of the current preview, Onshape still holds a significant advantage in user friendliness, but the mere presence of the preview assured me that it’s on Autodesk radar and they’ll keep working away at it.

I like the progress I see so far. Competition making everybody better, and consumers win.

Since completing the Udemy overview of Autodesk Fusion 360 a few days ago, I’ve started working on a project to get hands-on experience. Here are the items which made the strongest impressions after my first few days:

Advantage: Autodesk Fusion 360

UI Responsiveness: As an application executing locally, it is vastly more responsive to my actions than Onshape executing across the internet.

Integrated Assembly: In Onshape, parts are created in Parts Studios tabs and put together in a separate Assembly tabs. Parts need to have designated “mate connector” added to their designs before the assembly can occur. I never got the hang of this system. In contrast, every Design window in Fusion 360 can import parts from other designs without special entities like mate connectors.

Advantage: Onshape

Constraints: Onshape is really good about informing the user of constraints. Sketch entities are blue when they are under-constrained. When they are properly constrained, they turn black. When they are over-constrained, the conflicting constraints are all highlighted in red.

In contrast, Fusion 360 makes no distinction between under and properly constrained. My only indication an entity was under-constrained is long after the fact, when it would move unexpectedly in response to a change elsewhere. When over-constrained, a dialog box tells you the latest action causes over-constraining, but it doesn’t show you the conflicts so you’d have to go hunting for conflicting constraints yourself. This is a lot of lost time and a huge drain on productivity.

After a week of Fusion 360, this is the Onshape feature I miss the most.

UI scaling: Browser makers have lots of practice dealing with variable sized content on variable sized screens. Running Onshape in a browser window at 4K resolution was painless. In contrast, Fusion 360 scales poorly on a 4K screen, leaving many UI elements tiny and difficult to use.

Other Notes:

Sharing: Onshape free tier users are not allowed private documents, so every file is automatically shared with the world. Fusion 360 was designed for a world with designers and customers and clients, so it has a bunch of tools to manage access and permissions. In all that complication, they seemed to have forgotten to include a simple “share with the whole world” option.

Updates: Both of them update frequently. While it is easier to pick up an update in Onshape (refresh the browser) the Fusion 360 auto-update has been fairly seamless so far.