Onshape is great. I use it as well for random things.
I do expect them to do a pull-rug on the free license at some point, like fusion did, especially now that they've been bought by PTC. If they do, the commercial license is too expensive IMHO compared to other offerings for what they offer.
I had the option to use the educational license at some point, but we couldn't get to renew it (ironically, we got a dirt-cheap Creo license afterwards).
Just to keep things in mind it can go anyday from free to too-expensive.
I had a few complex designs in fusion360 I essentially lost at some points due to the price hikes. I decided to endure the pain in freecad. It's getting better.
Onshape is wonderful. Free users complained a lot about the changes to the free license years ago when they changed the rules, but I have no issue with it. TBH, I'm grateful they make it available on the terms that they do.
Solvespace is beautiful, but limited.
I spent enough time using FreeCad to get the hang of the user interface, but got enormously frustrated by it more or less randomly crashing and frequently generating bizarre shapes due to numerical issues when trying to do things like complex lofts. I have had no similar problems with OnShape.
I honestly don't know why there was so much noise about 'topological naming' in FreeCad, the stability issues I kept running into were way more frustrating than the clunky UI or counter-intuitiveness.
I did think about digging into FreeCad to fix some of the issues I was having, but once I started playing around with OnShape I totally lost interest. I am a lot more interested in designing parts than in debugging and fixing stability issues in complicated software in my spare time.
I am quite interested in trying out dune3d. It looks like the author has some expertise and interesting ideas about what's wrong with the other free CAD options.
Same boat. Onshape is so intuitive. What many people don’t realize is that onshape is free as long as you don’t mind your designs being public. All of my designs are open source so for me it’s actually a benefit.
