Onshape was born to eliminate the headaches of desktop-installed CAD.

Last month, we shared the top pains of hundreds of professional CAD users sick of having to jump over software hurdles while doing their jobs. In order of annoyance, the six most common complaints are:

  • “The fees I’m paying for CAD & PDM licenses, maintenance and hardware.”
  • “Dealing with license codes and registration hassles.”
  • “I cannot edit on the road.”
  • “Not everyone on the team and suppliers are on the same version of CAD software.”
  • “It takes a long time to configure a computer and install CAD software on it.”
  • “I’ve lost data due to crashes.”

How common are these problems? Are they persistent enough to drive engineers away from the familiar but frustrating world of traditional CAD? To find out, we surveyed more than 200 Onshape Professional customers. Before they moved to full-cloud CAD, here are the percentages of those fed up by the following pain points:

Marketing departments quickly fall in love with their own words. Companies all have their talking points, but if you ask a customer why they bought, what the company thinks is important may not always be the same answer.

It’s the difference between what we think we’re selling and what we’re actually selling.

As confident as we are in our founder’s vision, it’s important to keep pressure testing our reasons for being in business.

It’s just been a few weeks since Onshape launched its commercial release, following a highly successful beta test that included 400,000 user hours in more than 150 countries. As people are moving to full-cloud CAD, we want to understand why.

Every business, CAD included, must figure out what their customers want and how to best deliver it to them. It would be presumptuous (and foolish) for us to assume what you’re looking for the most in a new CAD system.

So Why Are CAD Users Moving to the Cloud?

There are no shortcuts to getting these answers. We’re lucky enough to chat with some of you by email and phone. We also recently reached out to hundreds of you with a simple open-ended question: Why did YOU purchase Onshape?

Here are a few selected responses:

  • “To have my own professional CAD capability no matter where I work.”
  • “Being able to collaborate with someone offsite.”
  • “I like the ease of use and revision retention.”
  • “Flexibility of the work environment is important to us.”
  • “Affordable solution that provides the level of functionality and reliability that I need without the initial sticker shock that goes along with most CAD software packages.”
  • “I believe it’s the future.”
  • “Curiosity about what the founders of SolidWorks have come up with.”
  • “It makes my work easier.”
  • “It’s cool.”

Special thanks to the customer who left that last compliment. But beyond being cool or affordable, we’re pleased to see many comments affirming our reasons for existence.

We’re here to make your job easier 1. Helping you build better products faster in the cloud; 2. Empowering you to work from anywhere on any computer; and 3. Getting rid of the hassles of IT, installation, upgrades and licensing.

Please keep letting us know how we’re doing – and what else we might be able to do for you in the future!

(P.S. That’s Onshape customer Lukas Pilat, founder of Luke Roberts lighting, in the photograph at the top of this post. To learn how Luke Roberts used full-cloud CAD to speed up the design of their FLUXO smart lamp, visit our Customer Stories page.)