Answer Day: Inventor vs Fusion 360?

[Anonymous]

Autodesk Gods,

Can you shed any insights on who uses Autodesk Inventor vs Autodesk Fusion 360?

IMHO...

Seems like Inventor has been the flagship the last decade and a half, but in the three years since it's release Fusion 360 seems to be the new focus for the company.

Autocad & Inventor - current bread & butter products used by industry professionals who need a stable product with infrequent updates or major changes.

Fusion 360 - focused on a complete all in one solution for a new generation of users, focused on displacing Solidworks in Colleges and Makerspaces. The cloud based low/no fee structure makes it easy to release frequent updates. The cloud based structure seems similar to Adobe's Creative Cloud offerings.

I've been using both products, but I've been focused primarily on Fusion 360 since it runs on Mac, but I would love to hear about any unique Inventor only features or workflows that aren't planned for Fusion 360.

thanks,

Stephen

image: josueperez79

[ADSKDJW4]

Hello @Anonymous,

This is somewhat of a difficult question to answer and my perspective is from the support side as I cannot speak for the two development teams in charge of the product road maps for their respective software. As both are similar, both are vastly different. I do not see many customers running Inventor on a MAC using parallels / Boot Camp. Fusion is cloud based and Inventor is a Desktop Application. Both modeling applications would yield similar results. Inventor has module based add ins like Tube and Pipe, Dynamic Sim, FEA, Cable and Harness, where Fusion has some of these capabilities but not as robust as Inventor. If there are specific areas that you are looking for please reply post with those so I can further comment.

Regards,

Don

[JDMather]

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@ADSKDJW4 wrote:

... Dynamic Sim, FEA, Cable and Harness, where Fusion has some of these capabilities but not as robust as Inventor. ...

.

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That seems like a good place to start.

If Fusion 360 doesn't have robust engineering tools like Dynamic Simulation and the Design Accelerators - what place does it have in a professional design curriculum?

[LT.Rusty]

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@Anonymous wrote:

That seems like a good place to start.

If Fusion 360 doesn't have robust engineering tools like Dynamic Simulation and the Design Accelerators - what place does it have in a professional design curriculum?

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To add to the analogy, a pocket multitool may have pliers and a knife and a screwdriver and a saw blade on it, but it will never be able to truly replace a full box of dedicated tools.

[blair]

If Inventor and Sim Mech ran on a Mac I wouldn't need Boot Camp on my home machine and Parallels on my laptop. I can forgo not having Nastran at home and on the road (need to save some work fo the office).

I think the drawing/detailing environment in Fusion is still a long ways from Inventor. Detailing in Fusion, reminds me of the early releases of Inventor (R-4). 

[JDMather]

See Post #8

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/design-validate-document/saving-a-project-locally/td-p/6321579

Sounds to me like Inventor is the new (old) MDT in Autodesk plans for the next 20 yrs.

[ADSKDJW4]

Hello @Anonymous,

Just wanted to say Thank You to @JDMather for that clarification on my vague statement. My apologies.

Regards,

Don