A Free SOLIDWORKS Alternative in Your Browser

If you learned SOLIDWORKS at school or work and want to keep designing at home, BasicCAD gives you the same sketch-and-feature workflow without a Windows-only install or a yearly licence.

Try BasicCAD Free

BasicCAD Boss-Extrude editing dialog with Add, Cut and Intersect, end conditions such as Through all and Up to face, draft and thin wall options, next to the design tree — Boss-Extrude with end conditions, draft and thin wall — editable any time from the design tree.

At a Glance

Question	BasicCAD	SOLIDWORKS
Price to design	Free — every modeling feature	Paid licence (Makers edition $48/year for personal use under $2,000 revenue)
Platforms	Any modern browser: Windows, Mac, Linux, Chromebook	Windows desktop install
Workflow	Ribbon, design tree, sketch → feature, properties panel	Ribbon, FeatureManager tree, sketch → feature, PropertyManager
Where your files live	On your computer (.cadjson), geometry computed locally	On your computer (Makers can also use the 3DEXPERIENCE cloud)
Selling what you make	Allowed	Makers edition capped at $2,000/year revenue
Simulation, CAM, surfacing, PDM	Not included	Yes (by edition)

The Workflow Carries Over

BasicCAD was built by someone who learned CAD on Autodesk Inventor and designed it to feel like the professional desktop tools. If you know SOLIDWORKS, you already know where things are:

Sketch on a plane or face, then add relations — horizontal, vertical, coincident, tangent, concentric, equal, symmetric — and smart dimensions until the sketch is fully defined.
Boss/Cut-Extrude with blind, through-all, up-to-next, up-to-face and symmetric (mid-plane) conditions, draft and thin features.
Revolve, sweep, loft, fillet, chamfer, shell, mirror and patterns, all stored in a history tree you can edit, reorder, suppress and roll back.
Hole Wizard with real modeled threads in ANSI and metric sizes, plus an involute gear generator.
Assemblies with mates (concentric, coincident/planar, distance), exploded views and a bill of materials, plus 2D drawings with orthographic views and title blocks.

STEP files exported from SOLIDWORKS open in BasicCAD, and many simple parts come back as editable features rather than a dumb solid — see STEP import.

Why People Look for a SOLIDWORKS Alternative

No Windows PC. SOLIDWORKS runs on Windows only. On a Mac or Chromebook that means a virtual machine or nothing at all. BasicCAD runs in the browser you already have.

Licensing after school. Student licences expire. The hobby-priced Makers edition is affordable but limited to personal projects earning under $2,000 a year. BasicCAD is free to design with, and export costs $5 a month or $45 a year with no revenue cap.

Just making parts. For brackets, enclosures, jigs, replacement parts and 3D prints you rarely need simulation or PDM — you need a solid sketcher, reliable fillets and a clean STL. That is exactly what BasicCAD focuses on.

When SOLIDWORKS Is the Right Choice

SOLIDWORKS is the industry standard for professional mechanical design. If your job requires native SLDPRT files, FEA simulation, sheet-metal flat patterns for a fabricator, surfacing for consumer products, CAM toolpaths or a PDM vault shared with a team, use SOLIDWORKS. BasicCAD is the lightweight option for everything else.

Bottom line

BasicCAD gives SOLIDWORKS users a familiar parametric workflow on any computer with a browser, free to design and $5 a month to export. Keep SOLIDWORKS for simulation and enterprise work; use BasicCAD for fast, everyday part design and 3D printing.

Try the SOLIDWORKS-Style Workflow in Your Browser

No download, no licence server. Open BasicCAD and sketch your first part in a minute.

Launch BasicCAD