REL 2024.3 / BUILD 18922

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One Windows CAD application, modelling at 1e-6 mm, files you can read in 2034.

This is the 3D CAD software itself, minus the marketing: the kernel underneath, how it handles units, which Windows builds it runs on and what lands on your disk when you install it. Sold as a perpetual seat from $2,490 to mechanical engineers and product teams across the United States.

Windows 10 22H2+ Windows 11 x64 only

Build / 189222024-11-14

Linear tolerance
1e-6 mm
Angular tolerance
1e-10 rad
Model space
±1,000 m
Standard seat
$2,490
Professional seat
$3,890

01Kernel

An ACIS-adjacent B-rep kernel we can fix ourselves.

Licensed core, our own healing, blending and history layers on top.

The geometry engine is a boundary-representation kernel in the ACIS family. We license the topology core and NURBS evaluators, and wrote everything above them in-house: the feature history manager, the fillet and chamfer blending, the face-healing pass that runs on every import, and the persistent naming that keeps a downstream feature attached when an upstream face splits. That split matters. When a customer sends a model where a variable fillet fails at a three-edge vertex, our own engineers own the code that failed. We do not file a ticket with a kernel vendor and wait a quarter.

Why not Parasolid, which SolidWorks and NX use? Two reasons. The licensing terms would have made a perpetual seat at our price impossible, and SAT-family geometry round-trips into ACIS readers that many CAM and inspection packages still embed. We read and write Parasolid X_T anyway, v10 through v36, so a SolidWorks alternative that cannot talk to SolidWorks shops is not what you are buying.

Persistent naming is where most history-based modellers break. Ours tags every face with its generating feature and a topological signature, then re-matches after a rebuild by signature first and by geometry second. On our internal regression set of 11,400 customer-supplied models, 99.2% rebuild without a single dangling reference after a 10% change to a driving dimension. The remaining 0.8% flag the broken reference in yellow in the tree rather than guessing.

02Tolerance

Modelling tolerance is 1e-6 mm, and that is a choice.

Tight enough for precision work, loose enough that imported STEP still closes.

Two vertices closer than one nanometre are the same vertex. Two edges whose curves stay within that band along their length are the same edge. Every Boolean, shell and blend is evaluated against that number. It is fixed per document, not per feature, so there is no "this sketch is in loose mode" trap that bites three features later.

Imported geometry is the hard case. A STEP file from a modeller running at 1e-5 mm will have gaps our kernel sees as open shells. The healer runs on import, closes gaps up to 1e-4 mm by default, and logs every repair it made so you can see which faces it touched. Raise that ceiling to 1e-2 mm in Options if a supplier sends you something rough, but read the log after. The failure we see most is a user cranking healing to maximum and then wondering why a hole moved 8 microns.

Tolerances / per documentFixed at creation

QuantityValueEditableNote
Linear resolution1e-6 mmNoCoincidence test for vertices and edges
Angular resolution1e-10 radNoTangency and parallel tests
Import healing gap1e-4 mmYesUp to 1e-2 mm, every repair logged
Model extent±1,000 mNoLarger scenes lose resolution, so we refuse them
Smallest feature1e-4 mmNoBelow this, features are rejected with a message
Display chord0.01–2 mmYesScreen only; geometry is exact

03Units

Millimetre first. Inches are a view, not a conversion.

Every length in a .swsx file is stored in millimetres as a 64-bit float. When a drawing or a sketch shows inches, the value is converted at display time and at entry time, never written back as inches. Type 1.25in into a millimetre part and the stored value is exactly 31.75. Switch the document to inches and back fifty times and nothing drifts, because nothing was ever rewritten.

Mixed-unit expressions work in any field: 25.4mm + 0.5in, 2*thk + 3/16in. Mass, density and stress follow the same rule with SI as the stored base, so a simulation study set up in psi on Tuesday by one engineer reads in MPa on Wednesday for another without a single value changing. Angles store in radians and show in degrees by default.

We will not add a "convert document units" command that rewrites geometry. Other packages have one, and it is where rounding errors are born in shops that work across US and European suppliers.

Session / assembly review A 32-inch monitor showing a dark-themed CAD window on an empty desk at dusk
Fig. 01The dark theme is the default because most of our users work long sessions on 32-inch panels. A light theme ships too.

04PlatformTested every build

CAD for Windows 11 and Windows 10. Nothing else.

One platform, tested hard, beats three platforms tested lightly. Every nightly build runs our regression suite on the six configurations in the matrix. A Mac port would cost us roughly a third of the engineering team for two years, and the Metal driver path would split the graphics code we have spent a decade tuning. We said no and will keep saying it.

Graphics: OpenGL 4.5 core profile. Certified on NVIDIA RTX A-series and Quadro RTX, AMD Radeon Pro W6000 and W7000. Consumer GeForce and Radeon cards work and we take bug reports on them; we do not certify them.

Build matrix / REL 2024.36 configs

WindowsBuildArchStatus
Windows 11 24H226100x64Supported
Windows 11 23H222631x64Supported
Windows 11 22H222621x64Supported
Windows 10 22H219045x64Supported
Windows Server 202220348x64Licence server, sws-cli
Windows 11 on ARM26100arm64Not supported
Windows 10 21H2 and older≤19044x64Not supported

Hardware / three tiersPer seat

TierCPURAMGPU VRAMDiskGood for
Minimum4 cores, AVX216 GB4 GB20 GB SSDParts, assemblies under 2,000 parts
Recommended8 cores, 4.5 GHz boost32 GB8 GBNVMe50,000-part assemblies, 500k-element studies
Simulation16+ cores64–128 GB12 GBNVMe, 200 GB scratch2M-element meshes, modal to 200 modes

05Where files live

Your disk, your share. No cloud tenant.

There is no Solldworkss server holding your geometry. Files save to a local NTFS volume or a Windows SMB share, and the application does not phone home with model data, thumbnails or telemetry of any kind unless you turn on the crash reporter, which is off by default and sends a stack trace, never a file.

The .swsx container is a ZIP archive holding a JSON feature tree, binary B-rep blocks in a published layout and optional tessellation for fast loading. The schema is versioned; the current one is Schema 7. Our promise is narrow and written into the terms: a file saved in release N opens in releases N through N+10. Past that, sws-view still reads it, and the spec on the docs page means your own scripts can too.

Version control goes through what you already run. A documented REST adapter talks to Teamcenter 13, PDM Works and SharePoint, and the JSON layer diffs cleanly under Git-LFS.

06Installer2.1 GB MSI

What the installer puts on your machine.

  • solldworkss.exeThe modeller with all six workbenches. Which ones unlock depends on the licence key, not on a separate download.1.6 GB
  • sws-viewFree read-only viewer. Measures, sections, prints drawings. Needs no licence and keeps working forever.180 MB
  • sws-cliBatch converter for build pipelines: .swsx to STEP AP242, PDF/A-2, STL, DXF. Runs headless on Windows Server 2022.95 MB
  • sws-licFloating licence service for teams of five seats or more. Installs as a Windows service on your own server.12 MB
  • Material library212 engineering materials with density, modulus, Poisson's ratio, yield and thermal conductivity, sourced from published standards.8 MB
  • Templates and standardsISO 128 and ASME Y14.5 drawing templates, sheet-metal gauge and K-factor tables, CAM post-processor definitions.40 MB
  • Offline helpThe full manual as local HTML. Works on air-gapped machines with no network at all.210 MB

Silent install: msiexec /i solldworkss-2024.3.msi /qn LICSERVER=host:27100. Group Policy deployment is documented in the admin guide.

Workstation / board detail A printed-circuit board shown in extreme macro with a QFP chip at centre
Fig. 02Rebuild is single-threaded per feature by nature; meshing and the solver use every core. Buy clock speed for modelling and core count for simulation.

07Licence and price

Two editions, one perpetual seat each.

List prices in USD. A written quote follows every request.

Standard: Part, Assembly, Drawing, Sheet Metal, CAM-Post 3-axis
$2,490
Professional: Standard plus Simulation and CAM-Post 5-axis
$3,890
Maintenance year, optional, per seat
$590
Floating seat, Standard / Professional
$3,290 / $4,890

Who it suits: mechanical shops of 2 to 60 engineers designing machinery, fixtures, enclosures and sheet-metal products, who want files on their own servers. Who it does not: anyone needing a Mac or browser client, CFD, or a CAD tool that doubles as a PLM. That list is short and we would rather say it here than in a refund email.

Proof you can check before you pay: the 30-day trial runs the full Professional build on your own models, the file-format spec is public, and the NAFEMS results are published on Simulation. We have been shipping since 2014 with 38 people in Austin.

Request a trial Full pricing

The workbenches, one page each

  1. 01

    Part

    Sketch solver, 23 features, surfacing.

  2. 02

    Assembly

    Mates and the 50,000-part benchmark.

  3. 03

    Drawing

    GD&T, ISO 128, ASME Y14.5.

  4. 04

    Simulation

    Linear static, modal, thermal.

  5. 05

    Sheet metal

    K-factor tables and flat patterns.

  6. 06

    CAM-Post

    Fanuc, Haas, Heidenhain, Siemens 840D.