Why Forward-Thinking Product Development Teams are Making the Switch from SOLIDWORKS to Onshape

Manufacturing companies are constantly evolving to foster innovation, and exploring new tools and technologies is critical for pursuing continuous improvement. Not every CAD system functions the same, and some platforms – particularly cloud-native solutions – work better for certain kinds of engineering teams.

Here’s a look at the specific challenges driving teams away from SOLIDWORKS, and what they're finding on the other side.

Why Teams Are Switching

File-based, on-premise CAD was designed for a different era of product development. It assumes teams are co-located, hardware is standardized, and IT has the bandwidth to manage licenses, servers, and version control. As engineering teams become more distributed and design cycles more demanding, those assumptions are increasingly difficult to maintain.

In short, teams have switched to Onshape from SOLIDWORKS because of…

• Slow Load Times Reduce Engineering Productivity
• Serial Workflows Slow Down Development
• Limited Global Collaboration
• File Management Consuming Too Much Design Time
• Onshape’s Ease-of-Use

Slow Load Times Reduce Engineering Productivity

For Kyle Gerber, VP of Engineering at Custom Truck One Source, the limitations of SOLIDWORKS became impossible to ignore as the company grew into a $2 billion manufacturer of industrial utility vehicles.

His team was waiting up to 45 minutes just to open a large crane assembly, and engineers were spending upwards of 40 hours modifying drawings that should have taken six to eight hours. With 70 engineers on the extended team, Custom Truck estimates that as much as $500,000 was being lost annually due to protracted system downtime.

“The efficiency of our engineers was just becoming very, very low,” said Gerber. “When working in one of our large hydraulic installation models, if I have to wait five or ten seconds every time I click my mouse, it's not a workable solution. It's a quality of life issue.”

After transitioning to Onshape, the results were measurable. Basic CAD operations are projected to drop by at least 15%, the team has swapped expensive high-end workstations for standard laptops, and up to four servers have been decommissioned.

“There are lots of ways Onshape adds value to our company,” Gerber noted. “The cloud-native nature of Onshape makes it easier to work with overseas team members and eliminates the need for expensive servers and heavy IT overhead.”

Serial Workflows Slow Down Development

One of the more overlooked limitations of file-based CAD is that it forces engineers to work sequentially. One person checks out a file, makes their changes, and checks it back in before anyone else can proceed. For smaller teams with straightforward projects, this is manageable.

For growing teams working on complex assemblies, it becomes a compounding problem.

nDraft Adaptiv, a Polish engineering firm specializing in industrial automation, found that traditional CAD tools couldn’t keep up with the pace and collaborative nature of their work. After moving to Onshape, engineers were able to co-develop interrelated components simultaneously and make design changes from the field in real time.

“Real-time collaboration is a game changer,” said co-founder and Vice President Przemyslaw Krupiarz. “I can be onsite commissioning a machine, hop on a call, look at the design, make changes live, and then get back to the work in front of me. We don’t waste time exporting, waiting, or dealing with file issues.”

Design cycles dropped by 50% to 70%, and the company saved an estimated $60,000 to $100,000 over five years by eliminating servers, hardware, and IT support costs.

Limited Global Collaboration

For engineering teams that span multiple countries or time zones, file-based CAD introduces a layer of friction that compounds with every additional location.

Saga Robotics, a Norwegian company developing autonomous farming robots, experienced this firsthand with engineers working across Norway, the UK, and California.

Each license was locked to a country or computer, file syncing required manual exports, and hardware requirements meant the team had to purchase expensive workstations just to keep pace. Engineers regularly overwrote each other’s work or lost unsaved progress to crashes.

“For a small company working across three time zones, hardware costs and heavy, admin-intensive tools just didn't fit our agile way of working,” said Damian Flynn, Chief Product Officer at Saga Robotics. After transitioning to Onshape, the experience changed considerably.

“For me, Onshape was a revelation,” Flynn added. “I don't need a super-powered design computer to be part of the process. My team can share a link, and I can instantly view the latest model, see how things fit, evaluate cost and materials, and provide feedback on the fly.”

Design cycles dropped by an estimated 30% to 40%, accelerating concepts from idea to release in weeks rather than months, and design scalability increased three times over.

File Management Consuming Too Much Design Time

XING Mobility, a Taiwanese manufacturer of modular electric battery systems for industrial vehicles, faces a significant design volume challenge – the company produces thousands of custom battery configurations per year, each shaped to fit a specific vehicle chassis. On their previous CAD system, building each configuration from scratch took approximately an hour.

Beyond the modeling time, the team identified a more pervasive problem. Roughly 50% of design time was being spent on file management – finding the right version, exporting it, and ensuring all teams were working from the same model.

“In our previous CAD system, it was very easy to select the wrong version of the CAD files for analysis, design, and manufacturing,” said Azizi Tucker, co-founder and CTO of XING Mobility. “We used to spend about 50% of our design time on file management. With Onshape, that's history.”

Using Onshape’s FeatureScript programming language, XING built a custom Automatic Pack Builder that generates a complete battery configuration in under a minute. That single automation saved 400 engineering hours in its first year.

Onshape’s Ease-of-Use

For many teams, the concern that slows down the decision to switch isn’t cost or capability, but the anticipated disruption of retraining an entire engineering team. The assumption is that productivity will dip significantly during the transition and take months to recover. Based on the experiences of engineers who have made the switch, that concern tends to be overstated.

Philip Taber, VP of Hardware Engineering at Silverside Detectors, observed that familiarity with other CAD platforms meaningfully shortens the learning curve.

“If you know SOLIDWORKS, if you know Inventor, you’ll pick up Onshape very quickly,” he said. “Onshape does a lot of little things really, really well. And as you start to get familiar with this, you go, ‘Wow, this is really working great!’”

Matt Kibler, Mechanical Designer at FHE, found the transition similarly approachable.

“Watching some of the videos in the Onshape Learning Center, going through the boot camp, and picking up those tricks and tips are very useful to make you more productive,” he said, estimating the basics can be absorbed in a “day or two.”

The more significant adjustment, both engineers note, is the paradigm shift from managing files to working within a single, always-current database – a change that, once internalized, tends to reframe how engineers think about the tools they use.

Moving Forward

For engineering teams evaluating whether a transition makes sense, the experiences of companies like Custom Truck One Source, Saga Robotics, XING Mobility, and others offer a useful reference point.

The challenges they faced – slow performance, version conflicts, collaboration limitations, and IT overhead – are common to file-based CAD systems broadly, and the improvements they reported reflect what cloud-native architecture makes possible when those constraints are removed.

(This blog was originally published July 28, 2021. Original content by Brandon Moore was used in the update.)