7 Big HIGH LEVEL Differences Between Inventor & Fusion 360

inventor and fusion 360 mate on face value it's kind of like if apple were to make and sell both the galaxy phones and the iphones you've got two very similar products competing in the same market both the 3d card modelers both operate within the mechanical engineering and manufacturing market but one is unignorably cheaper than the other and as much as fusion 360 to some might still feel like it's the new kid on the block well that's a daily reference you might be surprised to hear that it's knocking on 10 years old now yet still this debate rages on which one should it be going for what's the main differences between inventor and fusion 360. is fusion replacing inventor so as much as you might think you wanted you just wouldn't watch a three-hour long video of me splicing out every single technical and functionality difference between the two of them so just going to set expectations here i'm not going to be saying oh guess what inventor's got a dedicated button here for creating a work plane through the mid plane of taurus so fusion doesn't have that button it'll make that would take an actual literal lifetime so i'm just gonna be keeping this to a high level here's the biggest and most relevant differences between the two of them that you need know about starting with number one localization so let's just zip it all out love it on the table right from the off because a lot of what all this comes down to is about this and it all comes back around this fusion 360 is a cloud sensory platform whilst inventor is your traditional local windows desktop application but to be clear fusion 360 still runs through a local desktop client it's got an installer it's got a desktop shortcut runs as a program on your laptop or your workstation but it's all about the files and the data so with inventor any files you create they're still safe to your local pcs ipt's ddbgs iams and so on just like you would do with doc files in microsoft word and then it's kind of up to you where you save and how you manage them with fusion 360 though anything you work on is saved into your personal or team cloud account and then managed via the built-in data panel you don't really get to see your files on your computer to move or copy them around that's a bit of a deal breaker depending on who wants to use fusion 360 because those files are in the cloud where number two product maturity now at this point inventors had over 20 odd years of ongoing internal development put into it by autodesk driven by continuous feedback from commercial industrial engineering customers and more at the point all that time being in intense competition for market share with solidworks and as much as you often hear small pockets of customers complaining that they wish inventor would do specific something to their use case why does it do this why doesn't it do that it's kind of undeniable at this point that inventors peaked with what most engineering companies would need from a design tool fusion 360 on the other hand well it began life almost from scratch back in 2013 after seeing many of the actual same developers who worked on inventor move over to the fusion team to work on it as well as lead designers and product managers it charted a course and set sail towards a very similar direction to where inventor was already at with the ever-growing and active fusion 360 community all that time frequently asking for useful features found in an inventor to be added to fusion 360 as they also jumped across to fusion 360. and this would have presented hoopdog in his team with a bit of a dilemma because on one hand yeah you know sure those features would be useful in fusion 360 but on the other hand at what point do you draw the line on simply reproducing and replicating something that autodesk i've already done and currently offering the same market reinventing the wheel would be the phrase to call upon here but in summary inventors peaked in maturity and at this point year on year is being finely tuned and improved upon whilst fusion you could argue is in a state of rapid fast-paced product development and to be clear both of these situations are the pros and cons number three team collaboration and data management so following said rapid development fusion now has many of the tools required for production output it can generate 2d drawings and parts lists for example things that it just couldn't do back in the early days which made it pretty much a no go for any kind of serious already up and running engineering companies who are thinking about what design to choose so does that mean reap wood cruise liners incorporated can design the next cruise ship using fusion 360 well yes it could but they probably wouldn't because inventor has far better multi-user collaboration capabilities with its integration into autodesk vault for example which i've explained up here and this lets a multi-disciplinary design team collaborate on a single data set using in-card lifecycles and data management controls and this integration with vault allows for downstream team data management user control through permissions api integrations and much more which opens up a high degree of operational flexibility whilst fusion 360 it's got some capability for team collaboration but it's limited at best and even if you go for the fusion team add-on extension you're still somewhat stuck within the parameters and confines of the available feature set of the cloud platform with very little if any scope for a work how you want style of a setup and i think auerdesk i think themselves would concede that fusion team as a platform isn't currently capable of catering for large-scale design teams and the flexible requirements that come along with that and if you're wondering where fusion 360 manage formerly the m360 only fusion lifecycle fits into all of this it kind of doesn't that's more of a metadata management tool and doesn't really help with the multi-user collaboration at a physical file or a data management level so does that set it then is inventor just outright for large teams in fusion 360 for small teams right is that selling unfortunately not it's just not that black and white anymore but that does apply in a lot of cases number four blue versus white collar this is where things really do begin to fork off and awk off into different directions with inventor and fusion 360. now you be forgiven for assuming that given inventor is the more matured platform caters for the bigger design teams arguably in more professional larger scale settings and i would have the bigger tool set when it comes to computer-aided manufacturing or cam and cae computer-aided engineering let's start with fusion 360. it's got a well-respected powerful cnc machine 2-path generator supporting 2.5 and 3-axis milling going up to 5-axis with the machining extension it's got printed circuit board design integration excellent 3d printing support cloud compute powered nastron simulate solvers and the renowned generative design ai driven solver which expose multiple manufacturing ready design outcomes to spec based on your inputs inventor on the other hand inventor kinda has none of that it's got it's got no integrated cnc milling for machine support no machine libraries no pcb design support no generative design a far weaker 3d printing workspace so what gives well this is where we have to make the massive differentiation between a manufacturing tool and an engineer's tool fusion 360 is primarily a manufacturing aid used by those who operate machinery arguably the blue collar folk on the shop floor doing the real work design and manufacture whereas inventor is more of a white collar engineers tool used typically by mechanical engineers or product designers sat in a cozy office generating designs and builds materials print or export which then get manufactured by i don't know maybe their shop floor staff or a third-party supplier fabricator possibly a third party using something like fusion 360 perhaps of course inventor does have an absolute arsenal of capabilities that fusion 360 doesn't have inventor's got ilogic for example for design automation it's got ipods and i7s it's got the content center tube and pipe routing dynamic simulation it's got the vault integration that i mentioned and tons more but as with anything here this blanket rule is of course not always the case and i'd be remiss if it didn't point out the fact that inventor can interface with cnc machines if you go for the invented cam it's kind of an add-on completely separate program to the core inventor application that you only get as part of the collection but generally white collar engineering currently leans towards inventor whereas blue collar manufacturing makers fabricators small solo shops doing their own internal design and builds fusion 360 would be right up their street number five system requirements often the biggest misconception when it comes to 3d card is that you absolutely have to have a mega thunderous expensive workstation just by default just because you've got 3d card you use it you can install it and you do some design work categorical bollocks but that's not to say there aren't rules and guidance though as i mean this is it has been entire videos on my channel but both inventor and fusion 360 actually share the same graphics engine known as the autodesk ogs or the one graphic system but contrary to much uninformed and inaccurate advice and guidance out there the graphics isn't actually the bottleneck when it comes to working with 3d cad people just assume or think it is because 3d card looks complicated had in actual fact is exceptionally computationally expensive on the cpu and this goes for both inventor and fusion 360 and providing that you don't have less ram that's what's installed in my fridge you're going to be fine mate generally speaking fusion 360 will be more forgiving on older and lesser powered hardware than inventor would be that's purely due to the fact that generally speaking most people will work on smaller data sets in fusion 360 than what would be typically worked on in inventor but you might be surprised to see the amount of ram when opened up and just running in idle mode but from that point onwards there's there's no software requirements from autodesk for the presence of a professional graphics card to be there or for 32 gigs of ram to be there from this point onwards it's basically entirely down to what you're about to do in design how many parts you're about to generate how well optimized you make them and like i say an inventor that could be the start of a subsea vehicle with a hundred thousand parts infusion you might just be simply designing a bike frame or a small part to be crafted of the 3d print or cnc so a reasonably light speck laptop could easily handle those designs in fusion 360 as it could do with inventor as well but that's sub c vehicle well that would need something more appropriate for the job and substantial and just anecdotally rumor has it there's this one guy who's basically solved all of that mystery with what workstation you need for inventor and what's the best one to go for because he designed some benchmarking performance tool with an online leaderboard that just tells you what the best one is i'll link the leaderboard in the description you might want to go check that out if you're looking for a good workstation for inventor excuse me at number six community granted the community doesn't directly affect the application per se but it can have a significant impact on your overall user experience with the product the support you get as well as potentially how autodesk roadmap the products into the future and being frank the two couldn't be any different on this one fusion 360 has a vibrant active engaged user community across a plethora of platforms likely due to the target market and the younger audience that it appeals to this audience are just used to going online as a first point of call for getting their information seeking help and providing it in autodesk have tapped right into that they've done a superb job of feeding off that five in a relatable way regular online blog updates about fusion 360 and all that communications go down really well with the community along with a thriving network of content creators on youtube take nycnc for example or lars christensen laws laws he had to put his youtube creator to one side as he's now climbing the ladder with an autodesk but lars hasn't released a video on his fusion 360 channel within the last 14 months but has still gained in that time over 30 000 subscribers more than i did whilst i was working my ass off putting out 400 invented tutorials over three years on autodesk inventor and he hasn't made a video that's how popular fusion 360 is online there's a buzz around it due to its accessibility it appeals to the young crowd and they're the online generation inventor in stark contrast and contrary to my own personal efforts over the years and many others to drive various community initiatives inventor really does struggle to implement any kind of community in the traditional sense of the word many do try to kick start community events like myself included but tend to struggle to attract any kind of wider interest i take niels who posts a friday's picture on their thread on the inventory forum absolutely no takers my old infusion card challenges was hosted at peak of my tutorial game those videos have a few thousand views at this point after a couple years but at the time less than 100 people ended those challenges out of 30 000 subscribers and those challenges were posted and pinned to the main inventor forum up onto linkedin at the end of the day inventor is a tool for work most people's involvement in it is limited to their employment and that interest expires at 5 p.m very few invent users want to spend their lunch breaks or weekends looking up inventor tips or community activities whereas fusion it's just a different ball game it's a passion project for a lot of people it's a big part of the 3d printing scene it's accessible to everyone that's where community thrives number seven the price now i've intentionally left this one to last whilst trying to avoid weaving it into the discussion point so far but inventory fusion 360 are outrageously opposite different price points i'm going to start with inventor and i'm going to use us dollars as well for reference that's why most people who watch my videos now if you're subscribing to inventor on its own no car add-ons no extras nothing else just the core product inventor is going to set you back 2190 per year you go for the product design collection of which inventor is the headlining act that'll be a cool 2855 fusion 360 on the other hand it's free yeah it's free in some circumstances anyway if you're just a regular joe doing hobbyist personal passion project stuff non-commercial design stuff in your own home that you're not planning on selling and it's completely free to use it's also free to use if you're ineligible financially back to start a business and pass the criteria that would have set out and both inventor and fusion are free to use if you're in qualifying education but once you do need to start paying fusion 360 the core product is only 495 dollars per year a mammoth gap to the cost of inventor however autodesk aren't stupid and they've adopted the dlc model and offer a variety pack of extensions to enhance the fusion experience as well so with fusion initially being free to literally anybody who wants it in event of being behind a two grand a year pay wall you can kind of see how and why uh the two have garnered vastly different online followings and community resources oh that's recently somewhat as well nerfed the free version of fusion 360 and what was and what was a predictable and but unpopular outcome i talked about that up here in a move where they said they never actually intended to make free card even though fusion 360 at its core was kind of promoted as free and but there's this mental project that they've had going for the last 10 years which has seen as much if not more development than any other product in their portfolio absolutely had to start making them some money at some point and factually the free version would have been abused commercially by a lot of people but still the free version should be sufficient for most hobbyists with the transition to invent a large-scale industrial engineering being an easy enough transition to make considering a lot of the features and tools do share a common workflow so there you have it those are the main high level differences between autodesk inventor and fusion 360. if you'd like to subscribe to either of them and help support making more of these videos like this one then do please consider using my autodesk store referral link in the description which won't cost you a darn thing made but it helps keep this channel going and gives me a referral kickback thank you very much in advance if you do that my name is neil cross this has been tech 3d thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Tech3D

Views: 7,567

Keywords: Tech3D, fusion 360, fusion 360 vs inventor, autodesk fusion 360, autodesk inventor, is inventor ending, cad software, fusion 360 for beginners, fusion 360 free, what's the difference between inventor and fusion 360

Id: 2Nt5JSwAnko

Length: 15min 34sec (934 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 11 2022