I don't have much inventor experience, but i have experience with CAD software that does NOT allow you to customize anything. there are very few limits on what you can and can't customize as far as commands go in solidworks. you can create a completely custom toolbar. you can duplicate a tool and put it on multiple toolbars. you can add or remove tools from individual toolbars. you can assign a mouse gesture to any tool. you can assign any keyboard shortcut to any tool in the software. Solidworks is my absolutely preferred software to use because of the customization available. It would be great to have both on your resume but most skill transfer from one to the other so it's not super important to keep up with both. Really, at the end of the day they are both very similar. I feel like the Sheet Metal design capabilities are slightly better with Inventor, but Solidworks is still pretty strong in this area. If most of what I did was design 3D models and assemblies, I would prefer Solidworks.but not by a huge margin. If most of what I did was create drawings, I would absolutely prefer Inventor. Probably because they have decades of AutoCAD experience on their side (and I have decades of experience using AutoCAD) The one thing that I really loved (and now miss) about Inventor, is that their drawing environment is much easier to work with than Solidworks. With Inventor, at least I knew why it was crashing when it did. However, I find that Solidworks is less stable and I have more crashes and issues that are just plain weird. Overall, I find that Solidworks is a more powerful tool for the industrial design stuff that I do.
I still have both on my machine and still use Inventor for some projects.Īs mentioned, they both have their pros and cons. My office switched from Inventor to Solidworks, partially because it's more universally used in industry, but also because Autodesk screwed us over with our subscription plan.