A pragmatic introduction to FreeCAD – part 1 : the last missing piece from the puzzle

For years now, we have been lucky to have at our disposal a plethora of incredibly capable free and open-source software for a wide range of creative and technical activities. Whether it is LibreOffice for documents and spreadsheets (yes, that can be creative), The Gimp and Inkscape for images, Blender for mesh-based 3D modeling, Kicad for circuit boards, or lots of others… With all of them running on a Linux system, it could be argued that the only limit to what one can create entirely from FOSS tools is one’s imagination.

One last domain where things have been a bit more complicated, though, is the 3D parametric CAD world — i.e. tools used to design technical parts and assemblies (something that complements Kicad very well, to create casings for your PCBs for instance). Among probably many reasons, the first one is obvious : these kinds of tools are insanely complicated to develop, as shown by the price of the licenses for commercial packages that easily run into the thousands of dollars per year. Judging by the DIY community on Youtube, in the hobby space, many users seem to still rely on the free tier of Autodesk Fusion which — while admittedly an extremely well-made software both accessible and powerful — has been less and less compatible with the hacker ethos over the years.

The main FOSS option in this world has been FreeCAD, which has been in development for more than 20 years now. However, while powerful (and even more powerful than proprietary tools in some aspects), a sometimes clunky UI/UX, models stability issues, and inconsistent implementation of basic features, have prevented it from becoming mainstream for a long time, with some popular Youtubers mostly labeling it along the lines of “promising but not ready for serious work yet”.

A new hope

But that situation is starting to change. The FreeCAD Project Association (FPA) was created in November 2021 in order to help move things forward and since then, development seems to have picked up at an exponential pace. Donations have quadrupled between 2022 and 2024 (up to around 200.000€ in 2024 — the financial results of 2025 are not yet available as of this writing). These resources have allowed the FPA to set up a bug bounty and to give out grants to developers to reward polishing up core features. FreeCAD 1.0 was released a little over a year ago and brought, among other things, official support for assemblies (which is arguably a mandatory feature for a tool like this), and significant improvements to models stability (thanks to new algorithms to mitigate the infamous Topological Naming Problem). Youtube channels such as MangoJelly and Deltahedra have been publishing a steady stream of quality video tutorials covering a wide range of features and use-cases. As of this writing, v1.1 is in Release Candidate and seems to be close to stable, bringing lots of improvements — and everyone can already use the v1.2 development branch for the latest features and improvements. FreeCAD feels like what Kicad was around version 5 or 6 about ten years ago : a gem that only needs a bit more polishing before becoming mainstream.

Does that mean that FreeCAD is finally ready for prime time? I would argue that it is (or at least that it will be soon) and, if you have tried it and be disappointed by the experience a few years ago, that it is time to give it a second shot. If you’ll allow me, in this series of posts, I will try to convince you that this mildly-intimidating software is well worth learning, and that if you come from another CAD package such as Fusion, SolidWorks or Onshape and you are already familiar with CAD concepts, that the learning curve of FreeCAD is actually far less steep nowadays than its reputation may still suggest.

Interested to learn more? See you tomorrow in part 2 where we’ll install and setup FreeCAD !

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