I have worked with Inventor since release 4, and also Solidworks since release 2004. Both are great packages. As for modeling, I think solidworks can do more and has a better user interface as well as being more intuitive. I will have to say, Inventor wins hands down in the drawing package area. Autodesk was always far superior to anyone else for drafting, and I believe that carried over to Inventor somewhat.

my 2 cents...

 

Came accross this today - as an Inventor user, i'm not sure i quite agree!

 

Typical of most magazines, their biased. Give me the new product, take me to lunch, I will rave about you in return.

 

Inventor 10 has just crashed 3 times in 10 minutes while trying to edit the same feature on the same part. Downloaded the suggested update, installed and its still crashing.

*Vote Changed*: SolidWorks is the best.

 

Had that issue here a few weeks back with Inventor. Found out I had no service packs installed. Also, the assy was huge. I went into the assembly and greated a representation, and then restarted the drawing. fixed...

I have used Autodesk products since Autocad 9.
I have used inventor since release 4. 5 and 7 were pure hell...
I have also used solidworks since 2004.

Just note that Solidworks has been in the the game a lot longer with reference to parametric modeling. Autodesk in my mind is still catching up. Inventor blows solidworks away when it comes to detailing your parts. But solidworks is a much better modeler. I had a fair amout of crashes with solidworks, but they seemed to be confined to hardware issues. Another note, I'm in Massachusetts, solidworks back yard, so a lot of vendors around here use solidworks.... Currently I am working in Inventor.

 

I use the solid edge V19 software in an academic license that i still have from school.

I voted in this way also for solid edge but I realy don't know if this is the best software available.
I just know it's doing an exelent job an a lot more for my projects.

 

I voted for UG now called Siemens NX. It was a hugely popular product in mold/tool and die/autmotive areas in the East side of Canada. I tried CATIA for about 2 years, and as much as many companies swear by it, I found it to be a horrible product. CATIA was a memory hog and crashed when the physically memory was full and couldn't write to the virtual memory. CATIA had some cool solid manipulation tools, but they only worked for a fully enclosed sewn water tight solid. Whereas the UG NX product could perform the same solid functions on surface sheets or solids, it didn't care which.
I attempted to try SolidWorks since it's used a lot out here in Western Canada. Unfortunatley the install crashed repeatedly, and the install comes with a virtual debugger and all these debug tools. Which tells me if your install comes with a virtual link to the parent company to help resolve bugs...Then there are too many bugs! Talking with fellow designers, they all say SolidWorks is great, except when it crashes.
For me time is money. Anytime a software crashes it's lost modelling time.
NEWS for Siemens/UG NX AND SolidEDGE this year was the addition of Syncronous technology. Now you can work with history, or turn history off at any point, you can also model dumb solids and apply the constraints after. This elimates the common headache of parametric modelling where you try to envision how the part is going to be altered in the future so that your parameters/constraints don't conflict. Now you can just go in and drag screw bosses along a face by cursor, or vector and distance, or add parametric constraints after it's fully modelled. I know I am now rambling, but if you see the webinar of how the syncronous technology works it's really an amazing breakthrough.

OK I'm done my Syncronous Technology pitch. But I wanted to mention that UG NX has a great problem resolution service "GTAC". I've rarely used it, but when I did they were prompt and knowledgeable. They even sent out Application Engineers for free to give expert guidance. CATIA on the other hand told me this "you pay maintenance to the parent company IBM, which we don't get any revenue from, so we don't offer you any user support, but for 10,000 grand we'd be happy to come and train you better".

 

I have used Catia, Solidworks, Pro/E, and, most recently, NX in production environments over the past 15 years. The NX6 direct modeling tools (named Synchronous Technology) are mindblowing.

Have a look: KHKL_-3juaQ

 

For 3D models the only ones I use are SolidWorks and 3D StudioMax ... both for modeling and rendering