Questions about SolidWorks licensing and technical support - opinions needed

[Colonel Monk]

Hello everyone:

I'm a probably 13 year user of Solidworks, who is currently employed where we use Inventor.

Besides the fact that I have a preference for Solidworks because it's a better tool in many ways, There are things that Autodesk is up to right now that just make me want to run away.

Licensing:

Inventor is changing how they do licensing. As of today, I'm told, any new seats of Inventor will be what they call "subscription based". This means that you will have to pay a monthly fee to use the software, you cannot buy it.

How is Solidworks doing this currently? is it still traditional, where you buy your license and pay yearly maintenance? Is it still pretty pain-free as far as registration goes?

Tech Support:

When I was using Solidworks, we always had local tech support from reseller as part of the yearly maintenance. With Inventor, you have to pay your yearly maintenance, but this does not entitle you to tech support thru your VAR. We don't pay for that either, so we only have telephone support thru Autodesk and they may as well call it email support. You get transferred to some country where english is a second language, and they never have the answer. They don't understand you well, so they ask you to do all manner of things, screen caps and all this for even simple issues. I rarely need support, with Autodesk it has been primarily with licensing and registration problems.

Is Solidworks still doing their tech support thru VARs in the states? Or ???? Is the support still excellent? And prompt?

Thanks. I really need to make sure that the change will make things better, we are small company and they are extremely leery of changing but I'm sick of Autodesk, they have lost me as a customer.

Thanks

CM

 

[Shane Kozlowski]

Solidworks just switched to full backdating. Meaning you have to purchace each years new upgrade and if you don't meet the deadline you will be charged a fee up to the full price of the seat. say you had 2014, if you skip a year and wait to buy 2016 you have to pay for 2015 and 2016 before you can get the latest and greatest. Or some such bs.... Its a real pain in the ass but you do still get support from your VAR and access to service packs + SW Forums.

 

[Shane Kozlowski]

they're doing full backdating now. You have to renew your subscription once a year and if you wait two or three years they back charge you for it. You still get access to SW forums and VAR support which is nice if you have a good VAR. I know some people would rather hit their head against a wall than talk to those guys but personaly my VAR is a Solidworks genius. A lot of people are having issues with 2016. I am not one of them. Its working great for me. I hate the backdating policy though.

 

[ClouserCAD]

I hate Autodesk as well. They screwed me really bad in the late '90's and I swore that I'd never use them again. Needless to say, that's when I moved to SolidWorks.

Flash forward 15 years and they (Autodesk) purchased NEI Nastran for in CAD. I've been running this in SolidWorks because it's almost as easy to use as Simulation, cost less to purchase, I get nonlinear analysis included, and maintenance was like 800 bucks a year.

Now that Autodesk bought them out, I'm stuck as their customer again! They have increased the annual maintenance to $1600!!! There goes one of the primary advantages over Sim. They also decided to only use network licenses so I have to run a license server on my laptop, which requires tech support to figure out. And then to top it off, what you said, they are switching things around regarding the subscription.

IF I MISS A PAYMENT ON MAINTENANCE, I LOSE THE SOFTWARE THAT I ALREADY BOUGHT FOR THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS. THIS IS EXTORTION. THE ONLY WAY THEY DON'T GET A CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT IS THAT THE SOFTWARE WILL CONTINUE TO WORK (FOR A TIME).

So as everybody has mentioned, SolidWorks hates their customers. If you are running a business, you know that there may be lean years. Those years, you often skip paying thousands and thousands of dollars for maintenance so that you can cover more critical expenses. Then when business is back to normal, you renew your maintenance.

So, for a period of time, you did not use any of their resources. You did not have the "advantage" of the upgrades and you did not use any time of the VAR personnel for tech support.

YET YOU ARE REQUIRED TO PURCHASE THESE SERVICES IN RETROSPECT!

IS THIS LEGAL??

And then there is another problem with maintenance as we are seeing with 2016, you don't always get what you pay for. Many users don't upgrade until long after the new release comes out. YET YOU ARE PAYING IMMEDIATELY FOR THAT RELEASE!

They really have become too big for their britches and have lost sight of those of us who got them there.

SHAME ON YOU SOILEDWORKS (yes I spelled that right).

 

[ClouserCAD]

BTW, I did post this at the SW forums:

https://forum.solidworks.com/message/549255#549255

regarding the same topic. There's a link there to some explanation of Autodesks new policies, but they are somewhat confusing. Even more confusing with NEI (Nastran) mentioned above as it doesn't follow the same path as their other products.