A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

CNCCookbook – CAD market share trends 2017 / 2018

CNCCookbook – CAD market share trends 2017 / 2018
Oleg
Oleg
17 March, 2019 | 2 min for reading

CNCCookbook published 2018 CAD survey results. Check them here. I found a few interesting data points: (1) Significant growth of Autodesk Fusion360 and Solidworks; (2) A relatively flat position of others.

Check the following picture of 15 CAD products representing 82% of the market. The picture is also including a comparison of 2017 and 2018 results.

CNCCookbook represents a very specific, but an interesting niche of the market. So far, ~400 people answered on their survey.  Here is the key summary passage:

The two market leaders, Fusion 360 and SolidWorks continue to grow like crazy, although Fusion 360 has taken over the lead position from SolidWorks for the first time. It’s interesting to look at Autodesk’s combined share for Fusion 360, Inventor, and AutoCAD, because the latter two lost considerable share.  The combined share in 2017 was 35.4% and in 2018 it is 36.9%.  In other words, while Autodesk grew over all, most of the Fusion360 growth looks like folks moving off AutoCAD or Inventor and onto Fusion 360. Solidworks, OTOH, while no longer in the lead, grew by much more overall.  Most of the other players were flat to down.  The two leaders are slowly absorbing the market.

Because of a specific type of customers, some CAD systems aren’t represented (eg. CATIA). Also a dominance of Autodesk Fusion360 can be influenced by a rich set of Fusion360 features in manufacturing.

What is my conclusion? The dominance of Solidworks is not a surprise. This software is a de-facto standard for mechanical engineers. It is very interesting to see growing numbers about Autodesk Fusion360. Because this is a good place to watch disruption. CNCCookbook is representing only a specific niche of the market. But it is a place where disruption can be seen in a much better way in my view. What we can learn that you can change dominant positions by aggressive pricing and much broader feature set. Both the characteristics of Autodesk Fusion360. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of OpenBOM developing cloud-based bill of materials and inventory management tool for manufacturing companies, hardware startups and supply chain. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
25 March, 2015

I’m in Warwick today getting prepared for Develop3D Live conference, which will be tomorrow. The full conference agenda is here....

6 June, 2025

I’m still digesting my Share PLM Summit experience. If you missed my previous articles, check them here – What I...

6 November, 2018

I’m attending PI PLMx Chicago these days. The event is organized by MarketKey, a UK based company with a mission...

12 August, 2012

If you follow news these days, you probably paid attention to Outlook.com – newcomers from Microsoft and “Gmail twin brother”....

6 January, 2011

Winter break is a time to make a traditional “lesson learned” or “next year” blog posts. I wanted to come...

19 March, 2023

Working in the PLM industry for many years, I learned that BOM is a foundational piece of information systems used...

8 February, 2020

I’m coming to 3DEXPERIENCE World 2020 next week. It feels unusual, but also interesting and encouraging. For the last few...

19 December, 2016

Last year I’ve made a crazy prediction that your next PLM workflow manager will be a bot. As much as...

4 September, 2018

For the last few years, PLM community and vendors got used to the word “cloud”. You can see that every...

Blogroll

To the top