Onshape vs. SOLIDWORKS Cost in 2026: Subscription Price and Total Cost of Ownership

When SOLIDWORKS users start shopping for alternatives, there’s a long list of things to weigh: features, support, training, migration effort, and, of course, price.

It all comes down to business value. Is your current CAD system giving you the best return for your business? And if you don’t have one yet, which option will you choose?

While comparing prices can be easy enough, is it really telling the full story? A clearly stated license fee is one line in a much longer bill, and the rest doesn’t appear on any pricing page.

Let’s break total cost of ownership into three layers, so you can build a comparison for your own team:

• Layer 1, Software: Subscription pricing and how to compare tiers by capability instead of by name.
• Layer 2, Infrastructure: The workstations, servers, IT time, and viewer licenses behind each deployment model.
• Layer 3, Engineering Time: The hours spent on crashes, file management, and upgrades, with a real customer example

Two scenarios follow, switching from SOLIDWORKS and starting fresh, to show how the layers play out.

Layer 1: What the Software Costs

Start with the easy layer. Here is Onshape’s published U.S. annual subscription pricing, single user, excluding tax, as of November 2026:

SOLIDWORKS now publishes its own subscription pricing, so you can check the numbers directly on solidworks.com. But the tiers don’t line up one-to-one, so compare the capabilities your team actually uses, not the names on the boxes. For a full feature-by-feature breakdown, see our complete comparison.

Done? Good. Now for the part that doesn't fit in a table.

Layer 2: What it Costs to Run and Manage

Software doesn’t run on enthusiasm. Depending on the system and how you deploy it, you are likely also paying for:

• CAD workstations, and replacing them every few years
• Servers for data management, plus backups
• Deployment, version upgrades, and the IT hours that go with them
• Licenses for the people who only need to look at design data, not create it

How big is this layer? It depends entirely on your deployment model. A SOLIDWORKS team using cloud-based data management has a very different infrastructure profile from one running an on-premises PDM server with a SQL backend. Price out the setup you’d actually run, not the worst case.

Cloud-native systems like Onshape run in a browser and store data centrally, shifting most of this layer onto the vendor’s balance sheet instead of yours. Not all of it, though. You still need reliable network access, sensible device standards, and someone to manage users and permissions.

Layer 3: What it Costs When Engineers Aren’t Engineering

This is the layer nobody budgets for, and it’s usually the biggest.

Think about where the hours actually go: moving files around, hunting for the right version, recovering from a crash, waiting on a large assembly to load, checking files in and out, installing an upgrade, or untangling what happened when two people edited the same part. None of that advances a design. All of it costs you the fully loaded hourly rate of an engineer.

How much? BOA Technology, maker of the BOA Fit System, moved from SOLIDWORKS CAD and PDM to Onshape and reports at least a 25% increase in engineering productivity from eliminating crashes, IT overhead, and manual file management.

Director of Engineering Clay Corbett put the old reality plainly: “We’d lose hours in a week just dealing with crashes, file management, and the limitations of PDM.”

Multiply that by your team size and your loaded rate. The number tends to get people's attention.

Another Consideration: The Cost of the Move Itself

If you’re switching, be honest about the transition. Training, data migration, templates and standards, and a few weeks where output dips while everyone finds their footing. These are one-time costs, but they belong in any multi-year comparison. Leave them out and your proposal isn’t a proposal, but a sales pitch.

Scénario 1 : passage de SOLIDWORKS à Onshape

Renewing your current seats may seem like the low-cost option, largely because renewal is the only line item in the budget. But what is the status quo actually costing you?

Custom Truck One Source, a manufacturer of specialty utility vehicles, moved its engineering team from SOLIDWORKS to Onshape. Before the move, engineers were dealing with long assembly load times, frequent crashes, and version control headaches — the kind of week that makes anyone eye their monitor with hostility.

Custom Truck estimates that up to $500,000 per year was lost to system downtime across its 70-engineer extended team. Early design work also showed a reduction of at least 15% in the time needed for critical design tasks. On the hardware side, the team swapped $5,000-plus workstations for less expensive laptops and expects to eliminate up to four servers, cutting IT infrastructure costs by approximately $17,000 a year. Branching and merging also let engineers compare design options side by side without having to wonder which file was the real one.

Scenario 2: Starting Fresh

Picking the right CAD system matters even more at a young company, where you’re stretched thin, and every tool has to earn its keep. With no existing infrastructure to amortize and no library of legacy files to protect, layers 2 and 3 carry even more weight relative to the subscription.

Take Zenblen, a startup building automated smoothie kiosks — machines that have to be reliable, easy to use, and genuinely fun to stand in front of. The team evaluated SOLIDWORKS since their contractors already used it, but concluded that the licenses, hardware, and data management setup exceeded the budget and that keeping a distributed team in sync would require additional tooling on top.

They went with Onshape through the Onshape Startup Program, which provides Onshape Professional for free to qualifying teams.

Making Your Decision

Subscription pricing is published on both sides now, and at list price Onshape costs less per seat. But that’s the smallest of the three arguments. The bigger ones are architectural: how much infrastructure each system asks you to own, and how many engineering hours each one quietly consumes.

Run all three layers against your own team size, deployment model, and workflows.

SOLIDWORKS may well be the right answer if native file compatibility with your customers and suppliers matters, or if you’ve already invested heavily in training and templates. If what you want is centralized data, browser-based access, and a team that can work on the same design simultaneously, Onshape is worth comparing.

Either way, do the math on all three layers. The sticker price is just the beginning of the conversation.