Why Move from AutoCAD to nanoCAD?

The world of drafting has been dominated by AutoCAD since its inception in the 1980s, but that hasn’t stopped competitors from releasing their own takes on DWG-supported CAD. Though AutoCAD retains the biggest slice of the user pie, these alternatives have earned their own loyal users. One such application is nanoCAD, a CAD platform from Russian-based Nanosoft. Not only does nanoCAD claim to best alternatives like BricsCAD and ZWCAD, it also claims to offer some functionality beyond even that of AutoCAD.

In this review, we’ll take a look at nanoCAD to see what it can offer CAD users.

Spanning Verticals

Since it’s inception in 2008, Nanosoft has had a very friendly strategy to acquire new users: offer nanoCAD for free. While there are paid tiers of the product, the entry level of nanoCAD is a full, powerful, DWG-compatible drafting platform available at no cost. “We’re the first full-scale DWG CAD available for free,” said Nanosoft CTO Dmitry Popov.

What’s the catch? There isn’t one—Nanosoft isn’t aiming for philanthropy by releasing nanoCAD for free. Rather, they see it as a strategic way to capture users of pirated CAD software (read: pirated AutoCAD). If they could offer these users a competitive, legal alternative to their illicit tools, Nanosoft and its users would benefit alike.

Where the company makes its money then is in the verticals. It’s been Nanosoft’s opinion from the beginning that vertical add-ons to nanoCAD would be the best route to garner customer dollars. Today, Nanosoft offers over 20 different vertical add-ons covering BIM, GIS, MEP, and more. However, the majority of these are currently only available to Russian customers—in the English market, there are four available add-ons: Mechanica, Construction, Construction Site, and 3DScan.

Nanosoft has also introduced paid tiers of nanoCAD to cater to professional users. nanoCAD Plus and nanoCAD Pro offer increasing CAD capabilities, respectively, yet both fall well under the price of AutoCAD and clones like BricsCAD and ZWCAD.

The nanoCAD Tour

In this review we’ll focus on features available in nanoCAD Plus. For more insight into the exact differences between nanoCAD, nanoCAD Plus, and nanoCAD Pro, Nanosoft offers a comparison checklist here.

The user interface should feel familiar to users of AutoCAD or other DWG-based drafting software. nanoCAD offers a full set of 2D drawing objects, a command line interface, canvas workspace, properties and explorer window, and everything else users would expect from a professional-grade CAD platform. And then some: nanoCAD offers raster and point cloud editing, which the company claims most competitors lack. More on those later.

One nifty feature of nanoCAD is the ability to quickly hone in on individual features in the Drawing Explorer. Users can expand the hierarchy of objects—say, circles—and double click on a specific entity to zoom in on it in the workspace.

“It can be very useful if you need to find specific objects inside a drawing,” commented Nanosoft’s Seva Maiskii.

Now to one of nanoCAD’s most distinguishing features: its raster image capabilities. From the Raster menu, users can import images in a variety of formats: TIF, TIFF, JPG, JPEG, PNG, BMP, and PCX. Once picking a file, users can specify an on-screen insertion point with cartesian coordinates and apply a rotation and scale.

The best thing about working with raster images in nanoCAD is its snapping features. Because of nanoCAD’s built-in vectorization engine, the software recognizes raster objects like lines, arcs, and points, and provides easy snapping as it would for a vector object. This capability makes working with scanned drawings much easier, and isn’t found in competitors like AutoCAD, BricsCAD, and ZWCAD.

For example, we can start drawing a random line on top of our raster image to see the snapping options we’re presented with:

nanoCAD also offers several options to crop and align raster images. For example, if we imported a skewed raster, nanoCAD offers both auto and manual deskew functions. 

The same ability to snap to raster images is available for PDF underlays, which are easily inserted in nanoCAD with a similar window for setting the insertion point, scale, and rotation.

One of nanoCAD’s other major distinguishing features is its ability to import and work with point clouds. nanoCAD supports several point cloud formats including LAS, BIN, PTX, PTS, PCD, and XYZ. The import window shows a preview of the cloud along with statistics and unit options:

Importing this point cloud, which consists of over 1.2 million points, took less than a second.

Statistics are also available from the point cloud menu. Users can review point count, node count, tree levels, and more.

“We have one of the best point cloud engines available for developers,” said Popov.

Another appealing aspect of nanoCAD is its ability to import Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) file formats, rife with Building Modeling Information (BIM). This is an area where nanoCAD exceeds its predecessor AutoCAD, which only supports IFC in certain specialized toolsets. 

Finally, nanoCAD offers an open API for developers to write custom applications in COM, LISP, .NET, or C++. Not only will these applications run in nanoCAD, they’ll also be able to run in other DWG compatible CAD systems—including AutoCAD. Like nanoCAD itself, the nanoCAD API and other development tools are free to access.

A Worthy CAD Contender

With it’s free-to-enter approach, complete drafting functionality, advanced raster and point cloud capabilities, and appealing prices, the nanoCAD platform is well worth the attention of CAD users. At the very least, consider downloading nanoCAD (did we mention it’s free?) to check out some of its features firsthand. nanoCAD Plus and Pro also offer free 30-day trials if you find the free version falling short of your requirements.

To learn more about nanoCAD and download the software, visit nanoCAD.com.

Nanosoft has sponsored this post. They have no editorial input to this post. Unless otherwise stated, all opinions are mine. —Michael Alba