Best open-source alternatives to AutoCAD

FreeCAD is an open-source parametric 3D CAD application aimed at designing real-life objects of many sizes. It is intended for a broad audience, including product designers, mechanical engineers, architects, hobbyists, students, teachers, and programmers who need a flexible modeling tool. The project supports a workflow that starts with constrained 2D sketches and extends them into 3D models, with the ability to revise designs by changing parameters in the model history. It runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux, and its functionality is built around OpenCASCADE, Coin3D, Python, and Qt. The README also points users to precompiled downloads, Linux software centers, and source compilation instructions.

OpenSCAD is a free, cross-platform CAD application for creating solid 3D objects from scripts rather than through direct interactive modeling. It is aimed at users who want precise control over geometry, especially for machine parts, parametric designs, and other technical models where editable, code-driven workflows are useful. The project supports constructive solid geometry and extrusion-based workflows, and it can read or generate common formats such as DXF, STL, and OFF. The README also documents how to build the software from source on multiple platforms, including macOS, Linux/BSD, Windows cross-compilation, Nix, and WebAssembly, which suggests it is intended both for end users downloading binaries and for contributors or packagers working from source.

LibreCAD is a free, open-source 2D CAD application aimed at users who need a lightweight tool for drafting and editing technical drawings. It is built on Qt and is designed to run on most operating systems, with translated user interfaces available in many languages. The project focuses on core CAD workflows and also includes a command-line DXF converter that can produce PDF, PNG, or SVG output from DXF files. Its README points users to release downloads, user documentation, forum support, and source code build instructions, indicating that it serves both end users and contributors who want to build from source or work on the codebase.

GenCAD is a research codebase for generating computer-aided design outputs from images. It is aimed at machine learning and CAD researchers who want to train or evaluate models for sketch-to-CAD or image-conditioned CAD generation tasks. The project provides pretrained checkpoints, dataset download links, and scripts for training multiple model variants, including CSR, CCIP, and a diffusion prior. It can be run either in Docker or in a manual conda-based environment, and it also includes headless inference workflows plus a utility for converting STL files into PNG images for visualization.