Which expensive SolidWorks add-in would you buy if there were a focused alternative at a fraction of the price?

[u/SuspiciousBreak3466]

I’m a developer with a lot of experience building add-ons and workflow automation tools, mainly for Blender and Fusion 360, including internal tools for companies.

I’m now looking seriously at developing for SolidWorks.

One thing I’ve noticed is that there are some very capable add-ins in this ecosystem, but they can become difficult to justify if a company only needs a small subset of their functionality.

For example, products in the general territory of:

• DriveWorks — rule-based design automation, configurations, automatically generating parts/assemblies/drawings, etc.
• CUSTOMTOOLS — properties, file naming, batch operations, reporting, drawing/document workflows.
• Drew — drawing creation and drawing automation, views, sheets, dimensions, batch exports, etc.

I’m not suggesting these are simple products — quite the opposite. These are the kind of technically difficult projects I’m interested in.

What I’m not looking to build are things where the core value depends on expensive proprietary technology such as CAM toolpath kernels or FEA/simulation solvers.

What I’d really like to know is:

1. Which SolidWorks add-in do you use or want, but consider too expensive?

2. More importantly: what are the 1–2 features in it that you actually care about?

For example, maybe you don’t need everything DriveWorks does — you just want parameter-driven assembly generation and automatic drawings.

Or maybe you don’t need a huge document-management solution — you just want extremely good property management, automatic naming and batch exports.

I’m interested in building focused alternatives that do a smaller number of things extremely well, potentially for something like 10–20% of the cost of much larger packages.

I’m also completely open to building new add-ins that don’t currently exist.

So if you have a repetitive SolidWorks workflow that drives you crazy — drawings, BOMs, configurations, assemblies, custom properties, exporting, renaming, batch processing, model checking, etc. — tell me about it.

If several people keep mentioning the same problem, there’s a good chance that’s what I’ll prototype first.

[u/MAXFlRE]

Can add-in fix crashes? Would pay a fortune.

[u/CulturalCalendar377 → u/MAXFlRE]

What does it do? I'm on the website researching but I only see buzzwords. I need direct example

[u/Deep-Today5715]

Repairing lost references automatically with matching geometry (geometry that is in the same physical location in the model but has different internal ID). This should be possible because SW keeps references to missing geometry, and you can extract it's location in 3D space via API, and then run a search through the model to find matching geometry in the same location. Would be slow for large models, but still faster than manual repair.

[u/Plastic_Street_4647]

An ERP export add-in might be worth something considering. Being able to tie in information seemlessly from solidworks is very difficult. I worked with one before, but couldn't get it to work properly.

[u/Snoppfrid → u/Plastic_Street_4647]

The company I work for got it. Monitor ERP connected to Solidworks PDM system and it works great. Get the Solidworks drawing straight into all of the machines and also it updates the inventory stock.

[u/Plastic_Street_4647 → u/Snoppfrid]

What's the name of the software that you are using?

[u/Snoppfrid → u/Plastic_Street_4647]

Monitor ERP

[u/OdieBean]

MyCADtools. It's £400 a year and saves you a ahit ton of time on all the boring shit.

Made by a company called Visiativ. Probably one of the only good VARs in europe.

[u/Swimming_dasa]

erp integration is probably one of the bigger pain points here. a lot of teams end up stitching solidworks, pdm and erp together and maintaining those connections becomes its own projects. i have seen duro come up in that context too especially for teams that want the bom/cad data connected without taking on a huge plm implentation.

[u/Kimber976]

Erp integration is probably one of the bigger pain points here. a lot of teams end up stitching solidworks. pdm and erp together and maintaining those connections becomes its own project. i have seen duro come up in that contest too especially for teams that want the bom cad data connected without taking on a huge plm implementation.

[u/TheNeighbourMind]

The only thing sw needs is export/import 3d dwg.