Cosa rende straordinario il Supporto CAD di Onshape?

Imagine if within a day of requesting a new part in Onshape’s standard content library, the part just showed up, simplifying your design process forever.

Although it seems like an impossible feat, this is a true story. Onshape is known for making sure customers always receive a high level of technical support so they can focus entirely on their work.

This commitment helped Onshape earn a 2026 G2 Best Software Award in Best CAD & PLM Software Products. That recognition was driven entirely by customer reviews, which feels fitting for a team that takes every piece of user feedback to heart.

But what exactly makes the Onshape support team so special?

Support That Works as Hard as You Do

Most 3D CAD software requires you to contact your Value-Added Reseller (VAR) if you run into a problem.

Once you get hold of them, you have to explain everything that happened before the problem occurred in detail and what you think caused the problem.

Meanwhile, Onshape’s cloud-native platform offers a brand new solution to an old problem. Users can simply open the built-in feedback menu and submit a request or a link with their design, usage data, and all of its problems to the support team right away with no added charge.

Once the support team receives a technical service request with approved share access from the user, they can explore your document to see what issues are occurring, understand if this is a user problem or a software problem, then implement a solution where they see fit as fast as they can. Users can revoke access at any time.

All that work for one team seems like a lot, but the Onshape support team is unique in unexpected ways that propel them toward their ultimate goal of making a great experience for you.

The team.

Real-Time Help, Right Where You Work

What changes when your CAD software lives in the cloud? For Onshape’s support team, it changes almost everything.

Product Definition Engineer Dustin Johnson explains the difference succinctly: “Instead of screen sharing, I can be in the document at the same time as the user. This allows me to be working on a solution to their question or problem without disrupting their work.”

Johnson knows first-hand what the alternative looks like. Coming from working in the automotive industry, he spent years working in traditional CAD environments where no two designers could be in the same file at once.

“We had to take turns. If we wanted to work on something at the same time, we had to screen share and only one person could ‘drive’ while the other was just riding passenger.”

Now, when supporting a customer, he may find two, three, or even four people from the same company all working simultaneously. And he can join right alongside them.

Support manager Lauren Little echoes that point from a customer service perspective. “As someone who has done technical support for other file-based CAD systems, trying to help a user or reproduce their issue is typically a cumbersome process, usually involving screensharing, or downloading ZIP files of their assemblies.”

With Onshape, users can simply “opt in” to share access to their document whenever they need help and revoke that access at any time. The result is that solving a problem that might once have taken hours or days now takes just a few minutes.

A Focus on Support to Achieve Success

The Onshape Support team is combined with the User Experience (UX) team, and is almost entirely made up of people with a background in mechanical engineering. The multi-faceted team is able to prioritize tickets that can be resolved quickly and keep track of common themes that are limiting the user experience. As mechanical engineers, they can understand the problems users face as actual CAD users because of their personal experience.

Matt Lo is the Senior Product Manager of UX and Support at Onshape. He devotes his time to providing technical support to users and designing new features. When you submit a problem or a request in Onshape, Lo will receive it, analyze it, and design a solution with the help of the development team.

Lo comes from a background in biomedical engineering, where he started his own venture, Koi Prosthetics, which makes affordable prosthetic limbs for third-world countries. His experience as an engineer drives his desire to assist innovators like himself in creating new products.

“Support is the primary goal,” he said. “We want all of our users to be able to use our software successfully and having that understanding across our teams makes it very easy for us to see if there’s something that can be solved right away.”

Empathy and Efficiency in CAD Support

Among most teams of engineers, CAD support and user experience isn’t usually the goal. Most engineers work with inputs and outputs to solve problems instead of focusing on user feedback. However, the time spent with users has created an empathetic team that truly understands what engineers need in a CAD platform.

Product Definition Engineer Dalaney Robert spent over 10 years in automotive and aerospace manufacturing before joining Onshape, and she brings a perspective that is rare on a support team: She knows exactly what it costs when collaboration breaks down.

In aerospace, internal design reviews are exhaustive by necessity.

“Every aspect of the model must be examined,” she explains. “With traditional CAD, this required mechanical engineers at my former company to create large slide deck presentations with screenshots from the 3D model to try to capture every detail for the group to analyze. It also meant finding a single day when subject matter experts from every department could sit in for a 2- to 3-hour meeting.”

The preparation alone, she notes, usually meant neglecting other projects entirely.

“Onshape’s entire infrastructure helps mitigate and streamline the necessary evil of an internal design review,” she says, noting that with cloud-native CAD, teams can view, markup and comment on designs in real-time, or experiment by using branching and merging.

“This wealth of information keeps the entire team well informed, so even though you may still need to host a formal design review, all participants can enter the meeting better prepared, and the risk of surprises is much less.”

She’s also seen what happens when proprietary information limits visibility between teams.

Late in one aerospace project, a customer realized the data they’d shared was wrong, a costly discovery that came far too late in the design process.

“If the customer or I had been using Onshape,” she reflects, “a lot of miscommunications could have been avoided.”

The ability to share documents with different levels of visibility, and to see the full evolution of a design in real time, would have given both sides the clarity they needed from the very start.

“Onshape provides the opportunity to include suppliers at the conception level of the design, inherently expediting and evolving it in such a way that the final product is extremely robust.”

That kind of deep, experiential empathy is what the UX and Support team believes creates energy that feels contagious amongst the group and inspires more improvements in the user experience.

“It is really cool to see users use stuff that we’ve helped design and develop and then get their feedback,” Lo said. “We take everything they say to heart, so I think it’s really cool that we’re able to make the users have a say in how their product is going to be whenever the next release is.”

Not a VAR (and That’s the Point)

One of the most underappreciated differences in Onshape’s support model is who you’re actually talking to. With traditional CAD software, support typically flows through a Value-Added Reseller, a third party who then interprets your problem and relays it back to the software company. The risk of miscommunication is built into the process.

Onshape eliminates that entirely.

“You are directly contacting Onshape employees that are also involved in the UX of the product, and have influence on the prioritisation of fixes and new features,” Product Definition Engineer Luis Herranz says. “We are not a VAR, and the chances of a ‘broken telephone’ communication are much lower. We have direct access to developers if we need further feedback or guidance.”

That direct line means the person responding to your ticket isn’t just resolving a one-off issue – they’re actively shaping the product based on what they learn. The feedback loop is tight by design.

Building Something Better, Together

Looking forward, Lo hopes to grow the UX and Support team while maintaining the collaborative environment that makes the team great. Amongst the group, the goal of helping the user create a great product runs through the team more than egos or pride. If something can help the user, that is the most important thing.

Johnson captures that spirit well. For him, one of the proudest moments isn’t fixing a bug or closing a ticket but seeing the “What’s New” notification go out with an improvement he personally worked on, and then watching the forum posts roll in from users excited to try it.

“Getting the message back that they are happy and sending praise to the support team makes it worth it,” he said.

Ultimately, the UX and Support team’s focus on collaboration, empathy, and direct access makes the Onshape platform not just a tool, but a partnership — one that grows more valuable with every ticket, every request, and every new feature shaped by the people who use it.

(This blog was originally published August 10, 2022.)