solidSF vs Fusion 360

The wedge: no install, real parametric

Fusion 360 is marketed as "cloud" CAD, but the working surface is still a desktop application. You download an installer, the application phones home for licensing, the local installer manages an update channel, and the actual modeling happens against a local file cache that synchronizes to Autodesk's hubs. That is a fine architecture, and Autodesk has invested heavily in keeping it stable, but it is not a browser product. If your engineer is on an M5 Mac, a Linux workstation, a fresh ChromeOS device, or an iPad, the installer experience ranges from inconvenient to impossible.

solidSF runs in a tab. WebGPU handles the GPU surface, WebAssembly hosts the Rust kernel, and there is no installer. The same URL opens the same product on every platform the team uses. A new hire is productive in the time it takes to sign in.

The second piece is parametric stability. Fusion's parametric design history is real, but its "Capture Design History" mode is well known for fragility on long-running projects: features dropping their references, edits cascading unpredictably, and recurring requests in the user forums for cleaner history behavior. The honest read is that Fusion's history works well for short jobs and gets harder to keep alive as parts complexity grows. solidSF's Rust kernel persists topological IDs in a half-edge structure, so downstream features hold their references through upstream sketch edits more cleanly. We are not claiming a magic bullet — feature trees in any CAD system eventually need human attention — but the goal is to keep the median part editable years later, not to push users into "Do Not Capture Design History" as a workaround.

Why browser-native matters for hardware teams

A hardware team is not one engineer at one workstation. It is a designer at a desk, a manufacturing engineer next to a CNC, a contractor on an iPad in a vendor's shop, a CEO opening a part on their laptop in a coffee meeting. Every install-locked tool adds friction at every one of those moments. With Fusion 360, "open this part" turns into "wait, are you on the right version, are you licensed, did the cache sync, do you have admin rights to update."

With solidSF, "open this part" is a link. Click the link, the workspace renders, the geometry is interactive, edits are real. That is not a small UX win — it is the difference between a team that designs together and a team that emails STEP files back and forth.

The browser-native posture also collapses the IT surface area. There is no licensing daemon to manage, no installer to whitelist, no driver to chase. A 200-engineer fleet runs the same product as the founder's iPad in their backpack. Onboarding compresses from days to minutes.

AI agents that actually build

Fusion 360 has added AI features over the past few releases. The most notable is auto-constraining sketch entities and generative design for topology optimization. Both are useful narrow tools. Neither drives the parametric tree from a natural-language prompt.

solidSF's AI agent owns 55 registered CAD and drawing tools. The agent operates the real kernel: it can create a sketch, apply constraints, extrude a body, fillet an edge group, generate a hole pattern, kick off a drawing view, add a hole callout, run a CAM setup, validate the result, and report back. The model is trained on solidSF tool-call trajectories from real sessions. We have 74,964 documented CAD tool-call trajectories on day one. Every session adds more.

The practical difference: instead of "AI suggests you might want to constrain this", the agent "constrains it, extrudes the body, adds the holes from your spec, and produces the drawing." That is the workflow level the rest of the engineering software market is moving toward, and Fusion's add-on-extension architecture makes it slower to converge there than a product that owns the kernel end to end.

Feature comparison

Migration from Fusion 360

Migration off Fusion is usually a deliberate move for a team that has hit the install/parametric/extension ceiling and wants a clean working surface. Here is the practical sequence.

1. Inventory your projects. Use the Fusion 360 hub to identify which projects are active, which are archival reference, and which can be left as read-only history. You almost never need to migrate everything.
2. Export STEP from Fusion. For each active project, export parts and assemblies as STEP AP214. For drawings, export PDF and DXF. For CAM, export the post-processed G-code if you want to keep a clean reference; recreating CAM setups in solidSF is straightforward.
3. Open the solidSF workspace. Sign in at solidsf.com, create an organization, and create a project. Drag your STEP files into the workspace.
4. Let STEP healing run. solidSF runs sliver-face and topology repair on the import path. Imported bodies land as parametric features that can be edited downstream.
5. Re-author driver features. For active parts that need full parametric editing, rebuild the 5 to 20 driver features in solidSF. A team experienced in Fusion can re-author a typical part in 15 to 30 minutes. The agent helps here: ask it to "extrude a 60mm base plate with four M6 holes on a 50mm grid" and the tree builds itself.
6. Rebuild drawings. Use the imported PDFs as visual references and recreate drawing templates inside solidSF. The drawings module handles views, dimensions, hole callouts, centerlines, GD&T, and BOM.
7. Re-establish CAM. Recreate CAM setups in solidSF's manufacturing surface. Post to GRBL, Haas, or Fanuc as appropriate.
8. Cut over project by project. Do not flip the whole team at once. Run the next new project in solidSF, keep Fusion alive for legacy work, retire seats as projects finish.

When Fusion is still the right call

Fusion 360 has a wide and deep portfolio. If your team needs generative topology optimization integrated against Autodesk's solver, additive-manufacturing simulation specifically tied to Netfabb, or the full Inventor-class assembly motion studies that the Fusion ecosystem has cultivated for years, those are real reasons to stay. Fusion's PCB integration with Eagle and the Nesting extension are also genuinely useful for the teams that have built workflow around them. solidSF's roadmap covers many of these surfaces, but if you depend on a specific extension today, do not migrate until you have verified the equivalent capability is available in solidSF for the parts of your work that need it. The honest summary: Fusion makes sense if you have already paid for the full extension stack and your team's identity is built around that stack. For the typical hardware engineer or small team that wants modeling, drawings, and CAM in a tab, solidSF is the move.

FAQ

Open the workspace

Open a tab. Import a Fusion export. Try one parametric edit and one drawing view. The decision will be obvious in fifteen minutes.