Fusion 360 VS Siemens NX 9,10,11

[Anonymous]

Hellow 

I'm using fusion 360 for more than a year and i love it, but there aren't a lot of companies using it in Belgium and fusion can't handle large files.

Maybe I want to transfer to siemens NX but I don't have the experience with siemens nx.

Can Somebody help me, Pro's and Con's of fusion VS Siemens.

THANKS!!!

[Beyondforce]

Hi @Anonymous

In regards to Fusion's performance, could you please attach your computer specs? In regards to Siemese, I can't help you.

Cheers / Ben
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[Anonymous]

Macbook pro early 2011:

- intel core I7 2.0ghz quadcore

- 16gb 1333mhz drr3 ram

-Grafix card: AMD Radeon HD 6490M 256 MB

27" 5K retina iMac:

- intel core i7 4.0ghz quadcore

- 8gb ram 1600mhz

- Grafix card: AMD Radeon R9 M295X (4gb GDDR5 ram)

[Anonymous]

I'm waiting for @TrippyLighting 's reply to this post 🙂

[TrippyLighting]

Siemens NX is very powerful mature software. It carries a steep price tag factor 8-10 above the Fusion 360 Ulimate annual  subscription.

So the question is, do you need all that power and maturity and if so, does you business support paying for it ?

Another question is if you have the skills to drive such a software to utilize what you're paying for.

Once you have answered the questions above one can dive into detail if there are features and limitations in each of the softwares that would be a deal maker or breaker and where would you be willing to compromise.

[fredsi]

Tom,

To add something to Peter's (TrippyLighting) remarks...

The initial expense of NX runs about 6-8 times that of a yearly subscription of Fusion Ultimate. That will get you initial functionality for CAD and CAM. Getting into the more advanced functions 

will really push the price up. And Siemens is not particularly charitable when it comes to maintenance payments.**

NX is not a trivial learning exercise given its complexity. You can certainly hasten the learning experience if you are willing to spend for instruction, but not something that will happen overnight if you are looking at both design and manufacture.

And should you decide to demo NX, make sure it is done on a Mac (you seem partial to Apple ); my understanding is the Mac version does not perform at the same level as on Windows. 

Fred

** Based on numbers obtained in US during our extensive evaluation of NX.

[O.Tan]

NX and Catia is like the grandparents of CAD softwares, feature wise, NX has a much mature toolset then Fusion, though there's a possibility that in some operations, Fusion is easier and faster to use, mainly cause it's a new software.

A closer comparison to Fusion would be SolidEdge, also from Siemens, it's cheaper then NX but more expensive then Fusion (SolidEdge is similar price bracket to SolidWorks)

Again, SolidEdge is a much more powerful software than Fusion and will require time to understand its operation but once you do, it's a much powerful CAD then Fusion is right now. However, it's PC only, there's a "cloud" solution for it, but it'll require a always-online connection.

Also, how large is your files? and since you have 2 Macs, is it slow on the iMac as well?

[Anonymous]

okey on Friday i have a demo of siemens NX.

I'm asking myself why not stay complete with autodesk because they have inventor also. So I want to know do fusion and inventor work seamlessly together?

Can I begin a design in fusion and end it in inventor, can i use the better simulation environment of inventor for my fusion parts, can i work together with company's who work with inventor while i work with fusion,...

greetings

[cekuhnen]

@Anonymous

To my understanding Fusion to Inventor works well. I am not sure how the sketches for example are adjusted since both apps use a different sketch solver.

Maybe somebody from AD can explain this better - I would also love to know more about it.

[Anonymous]

Hi folks,

I'll like to meet that rep who's giving NX for 10x the price of F360. We are a Solid Edge customer and have a 3 year subscription that has cost us on a very very special offer more than 10x of Fusion. NX if I am right, will cost you 50x of F360. We don't make any money, we're a startup in development, but Siemens PLM, does not acknowledge that type of an animal. Fusion360 does!!

The other thing is that at the price I've paid there is NO CAM, no sculpting, although there are other things and the stability of the software is higher, but on the whole, all the features that F360 has are so excessively exciting that there is no comparison.

Try to lighten your designs, break them down in different parts and you'll be able to handle it in F360.

Naresh

[cekuhnen]

@Anonymous

From my experience working with NX there are just two elements that stand out.

The ability to have 2D and real 3D sketches and that you can make a 3D spline and just tell it to flow tangent or smooth onto a surface.

From a working and specifically for me teaching aspect Fusion 360 however is a lot more comfortable to work with.

And I have to agree with the opinion that what Autodesk offers here with Fusion 360 as a package is very very generous price wise!

At my university the SW and NX licenses now will collect of dust - since also students on PC and Mac can load it.

Even the woodlab techs jumped to Fusion instantly while being SW veterans once they saw how easy the design to CAM is.

[Anonymous]

when i can safe my inventor drawings in the same folder on A360 ( now named fusion, not fusion360) i could automatically se my files in the FUSION 360 program, but now how can i do it 😛

When somebody knows how i can safe my inventor files in the cloud ( the same Fusion 360 uses (https://myhub.autodesk360.com)) please say it 🙂

And how i can acces my files of Fusion 360 with inventor.

When this would be possible I can use both program's and acces my files on all places

[O.Tan]

So I want to know do fusion and inventor work seamlessly together?
Can I begin a design in fusion and end it in inventor, can i use the better simulation environment of inventor for my fusion parts, can i work together with company's who work with inventor while i work with fusion,...

the short answer is once you convert your inventor files to Fusion and Fusion to Inventor you'll lose out all the existing model intelligence as each time you "switch" softwares, the converter will just retain the model geometry and not its features (steps taken to build the feature, smart parameters, iProperties and etc.)

[Beyondforce]

Hi @Anonymous,

None of us knows exactly what kind of models you are working on and what tools/environments (Parametric, Free Form etc.) you are using to build them with.

You have only one option, and it is to build business cases and to test them.

Don't forget to take into account the service that comes with software. I moved to Fusion 360, because of the software and stayed because of the service.

Anything you need, we are here to help.

Good luck with the testing.

Cheers / Ben
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[Anonymous]

oke thanks for the info!!

But I think it would be a boost for fusion 360 when it could work together without losing it's intelligence. Correct me when i'm wrong.

grtz

[Anonymous]

@cekuhnen  I wouldn't say that there are just two features that stand out w.r.t. NX, nor will it be correct to give that impression.

NX and Catia are two that can do extremely high end collaborative work in large team and the platforms do the entire cycle, from ideation to manufacturing. If you're a large business, and have just NX seats clubbed with SAP or some high end ERP system, you don't need anything else, provided you know how to run everything. Its like being given a bugatti veyron to go to shopping for vegetables, but if your foot lands hard on the accelerator, you'll most likely have an expensive crash.

That said, for a mid sized company that costs of going that way will be prohibitive, both in monetary and in human resources. To get productive if you were to make that choice will be excruciatingly painful. I would love to have NX  in our environment, but its prohibitively expensive with all that I'd like with it, meaning, simulation tools (FEA-CFD-Motion-Experimentation-Testing), manufacturing tools etc. But how many companies will use 100% of the feature set that will come with a price tag of a few hundred thousand $$s? 

I've worked with CAD systems from 1982 when there were products like Autotrol AD380 and times have moved ahead. To advice anyone to go the direction, one must first know whats their requirement (the requirements analysis), then resource capability (what they can pay for the software today, tomorrow and the day after, how much can they spend for training in time and resources, what do they already know and how would they like to fill the lacuna they have), then look at the minimum usable solution with gives them the best bang for the buck.

I would say that Fusion 360 leads the pack in the "best bang for buck" category it does 80% of what you need very well, and the remaining 19% you need you can do with a bit of effort the remaining 1% you think you need, you usually do not. That's the reason that I had chosen to demo it yesterday live in a large event organized by the municipality of the town where I live. The demo went off exceeding well. At the end I showed that a calculation done by F360 simulation gives almost the same result compare to one done by Solid Edge simulation. Although for my work, I don't use Solid Edge simulation. I use FEMAP (Siemens PLM) and NEiNASTRAN (which is now an autodesk acquisition). The impressive thing with F360 is collaboration with a team of people to enable quick development of "things".

I hope that this helps the initial inquiry and it clarifies my position.

Naresh

[cekuhnen]

@Anonymous

You you brought up a good point considering what people want vs need.

The splines along command for example is great in NX but it can be done in Fusion with a different workflow.

It is great to hear that the sim results are similar - I do not use them but knowing about them and what they can deliver is good to know for me

soecifically when talking to and advising local design start-ups which we try to fund through a university project.

[cekuhnen]

@Anonymous

Thats very true and that would be a dream come true. Work in SW send to Inventor continue working there send to Fusion and always keeping the design history.

But this would mean that all apps have to use somewhat the same code to create surfaces, the design history has to be the same, and so on.

Thats why some companies own the software clients run and use then the software for a project that is needed and not the software the designer wants to work with.

I think this is a technical limitation that is too hard to solve or standardize - which could also be a limitation. With this possible we would probably not have the timeline for example.

[Anonymous]

within autodesk I think it could be possible. you can't expect an other company like SW could work together.

[O.Tan]

within autodesk I think it could be possible. you can't expect an other company like SW could work together.

Unless all the CAD vendors for some reason decided to come together to create a common standard, this will never happen. Partly cause each vendor has their own modelling kernel; Parasolid and etc.

As for within AD product, I guess if it's possible they would've done it as Fusion 360 is based on Inventor Fusion which was originally meant to be a Direct Modelling add-on to Inventor, but one of its main criticism is that it loses any sort of model info done in IV when imported to IF, and this will also require AD to open Fusion filesystem which isn't based on a traditional file based system and I don't think they'll want to do.