200 Releases: Cloud-Native CAD and PDM Is the Gift That Keeps On Giving

This month, our team delivered the 200th release of Onshape! A big thank you to the thousands of Onshape customers for all of your support and suggestions that have made Onshape better and better every three weeks. And, of course, a big thank you to our Onshape team and everyone here at PTC for delivering these releases.

We began building Onshape with a clear vision: Improve the world’s product design process by fully realizing the power of cloud-native CAD and PDM. We believed that a fully cloud-native CAD and PDM system could solve so many of the inherent problems of installed and file-based setups – hardware setup, software crashes, files copied all over the place, and many others. We also saw the opportunity to deliver many powerful new features like real-time collaboration, branching and merging for agile workflows, and fresh takes on CAD concepts like custom features, configurations, and many, many others.

The greatest reward for our Onshape team at PTC is not merely the sheer volume and quality of releases, nor that sales have grown. The greatest reward for us is hearing story after story of the great products our customers have designed, and designed better, in Onshape.

We have thousands of Onshape success stories, from Formlabs’ Form 4 3D printer, to Garmin products for golf and motorcycling, to Aura Aero’s next-generation hybrid passenger aircraft.

Our customers see how cloud-native CAD and PDM set the foundation for faster, more efficient ways to work.

Our competitors talk about cloud, but they have only partial-cloud approaches that deliver only partial benefits. Onshape is the only fully cloud-native platform that delivers the full benefits of the cloud.

And these cloud-native benefits keep expanding. The latest proof: AI thrives on our architecture. Massive data, unlimited compute power, and rapid release cycles give us an AI advantage that desktop-bound competitors simply can’t match. AI is a perfect example of why I say cloud-native is the gift that continues to keep on giving.

When we started building a cloud-native CAD and PDM system with no desktop application, no local files, no compromise on cloud-native architecture, industry colleagues said it would never work. Our “risky” bet created advantages competitors are just beginning to understand and may never fully match.

200 Releases: The World’s Fastest-Evolving CAD and PDM System

Two hundred consecutive product releases, delivered every three weeks, without ever disrupting our customers.

Let me be clear about what that has meant: Zero downtime. Zero time wasted downloading and installing updates. Zero meetings about when to deploy the next version. Just a consistent system that evolves in the background while engineering teams stay focused on designing products.

This isn’t marketing spin – it’s how our no-install CAD and PDM system actually works. When we improve performance or add a new feature, every user gets it instantly. Whether you’re modeling a part in Boston or reviewing drawings in Bangkok, you simply log in and the latest improvements are there. Every user in the world is always on the same release of Onshape, and it’s always the latest release. No more hassles for users who are on different releases of CAD – that never happens with Onshape.

And we’ve almost eliminated crashes. Seriously. Just ask an Onshape user.

We’ve not only eliminated so many of the problems of older CAD and PDM, we’ve also introduced new benefits. Real-time CAD collaboration where multiple people, no matter where they are located, can edit the same part or assembly simultaneously – a first for CAD software. Built-in PDM that eliminates the need for copying or locking files. A complete edit history that allows users to go back to any previous state.

We also brought the agile process that the software world enjoys into the world of CAD users. For the first time, product teams can use modern branching and merging workflows for CAD.

We also reinvented CAD features like custom features and configurations into vastly more powerful tools.

And we have shipped AI to every Onshape user with the Onshape AI Advisor, an AI-powered assistant designed to help users navigate and best utilize Onshape. Even power users with thousands of hours using Onshape on commercial projects are finding Onshape AI Advisor valuable. And this is just the beginning. I can’t wait for you to see future versions of Onshape AI Advisor with more and more powerful AI features every 3 weeks.

The Market Has Spoken

Onshape’s commercial success has made us the fastest-growing CAD and PDM system. Thousands of companies worldwide have adopted Onshape, from innovative startups to some of the world’s largest companies. Our growth has accelerated year-over-year, proving that cloud-native CAD and PDM isn’t just technically superior – it’s what the market demands.

This momentum will only intensify as tomorrow’s engineers enter the workforce already trained on Onshape. This academic year alone, over 1.2 million students and teachers used Onshape. I recently attended the FIRST Robotics World Championships where 50,000 students and teachers were competing. Onshape has become more popular in FIRST Robotics than all other CAD systems, combined.

Whether in a large company, a startup, or a school competition, teams using Onshape work faster, are more collaborative, innovate more, and save money.

The future of engineering will be defined by who can work the fastest, be the most agile, be the most innovative, and incorporate new tech – such as AI – the fastest. I see Onshape as the leading CAD and PDM system to support every one of these aspects of engineering leadership.

Once again, a huge thank you to our Onshape customer companies for your support, your ideas, your criticisms, and your input that has helped us make Onshape better and better. And a big thank you to the hundreds of people on the Onshape team and throughout all of PTC.

Everyone, please join us in taking a moment to celebrate the 200th release of Onshape. Then, let’s turn our attention to the exciting future of Onshape, the growing advantages of cloud-native CAD and PDM in the world of AI and beyond, and, most of all, the growing number of products that our customers will deliver better and faster.