SOLIDWORKS PROFESSIONAL

3D Product Design & Data Management Software

SOLIDWORKS Standard vs Professional

The question of whether to upgrade SOLIDWORKS Standard to Professional is one we get quite often.  Building upon an already robust SOLIDWORKS Standard CAD package, SOLIDWORKS Professional provides excellent value with a large assortment of powerful tools. Here are a few of the many advanced features included when you upgrade to Professional:

 

SOLIDWORKS Standard Toolbox Toolbox
Accelerate through the design process with a full library where you can drag and drop industry-standard hardware into your SOLIDWORKS assemblies.

SOLIDWORKS Professional PDM Standard PDM Standard
Store and organize all of your CAD files and non-CAD files, new or old, in an ‘all-inclusive’ data management utility.

SOLIDWORKS Profesional Costing Tool Costing Tool
Make side-by-side cost comparisons based on materials, features, vendors, labor, and more to control production costs and improve ROI.

SOLIDWORKS Professional Visualize Standard Visualize Standard
Open the gate for your product to make a firm digital footprint in an era leaning heavily toward eCommerce with fully rendered images.

SOLIDWORKS Standard vs. Professional

"….tremendous technical support and quality customer service, …an extremely valuable resource and we are grateful for the exceptional help that allowed the upgrade to be accomplished.”

-  James Totten
Learn How GoEngineer is helping companies like CALPIA with SOLIDWORKS Professional

SOLIDWORKS Professional

All the features of SOLIDWORKS Standard but with more robust design tools and data management utilities.

SOLIDWORKS Professional Offers Visualize standard with software purchase

HARDWARE LIBRARY

Hardware is usually small, intricate, and numerous in a typical assembly. That’s why it’s easy to justify using the Toolbox Library where you can drag-and-drop industry-standard components, without the need to build these components from scratch and/or import non-native data.

Data Management

Organize and secure your files as your product portfolio grows. The PDM Standard tool stores more than just CAD data and tracks history and revisions. Build in a paperless workflow for releasing new products, and have the confidence that only one person will have write access to a file, unlike a Windows storage environment.

Advanced Photo Rendering

Open your 3D CAD models in a proven, world-class SOLIDWORKS Visualize Standard rendering package stocked with libraries of materials, environments, and lighting schemes to produce life-like images. Whether you use these in print catalogs or your website, you’ll be making connections with your prospects and customers in a way that your competitors aren’t.

Work with ECAD data and Scan data

Build PCBs and mechanical designs starting with ECAD files or build a solid model from scan data, starting with a point cloud or mesh file.

Batch Functions

Enable and schedule batch tasks such as printing drawings from folders or exporting and importing files. The Task Scheduler can perform 15 different functions…while you are out having lunch!

Tolerance Check

SOLIDWORKS will always be exact and precise. Manufacturing will not. That’s why we need our TolAnalyst tool to explore the best-case and worst-case scenarios of our dimensions in order for our designs to be a success. Get it right the first time.

Drawing Checks

Design Checker can check all of your drawings against your organization’s standards for fonts sizes, units, dimension positioning, arrow styles, and much more. Design Checker automates a process that would normally be a bottleneck to formally release a drawing.

Costing

What seems like a small design change might result in a big cost difference. Understand the financial implications of your design decisions by enabling the Costing tool for Sheet Metal, Machined, Plastic, and 3D printed components.

Assembly Structural Analysis (FEA)

Compress your development time…
UPGRADE TO PREMIUM →

Piping and Tubing

Create your route paths…
UPGRADE TO PREMIUM →

Motion Analysis

Evaluate the effects of gravity…
UPGRADE TO PREMIUM →

Electrical Routing

Assemblies that require cables, harnesses, conduits…
UPGRADE TO PREMIUM →

 

Advanced Surface Flattening

Designing complex sheet metal geometries..
UPGRADE TO PREMIUM →

Frequently Asked Questions

It’s pretty easy! SOLIDWORKS needs to install all of the features you previously weren’t entitled to, and if the original download folder hasn’t been moved or renamed, this will take minutes! A typical upgrade is easy with our step by step instructions. You might need administrative permissions to make some of these changes.
SOLIDWORKS Toolbox is more than nuts and bolts. It includes bearings, cams, gears, clips, washers, PEM®nuts, pins, sprockets, and even structural items such as Unistrut®. You can also add custom components to the Toolbox.
Luckily, someone else (who might not be a CAD user) can use your seat of Visualize Standard. Even though this product is included with our Service Agreement, the software is a standalone utility and it has its own serial number. This gives our users the flexibility to collaborate with others who are not necessarily CAD users.
Our PDM Standard runs on Microsoft SQL Server Express and works in conjunction with the SolidNetWork License manager. Each PDM Standard will have unique serial numbers, which can be used to access the CAD Editor client (read-write access). There are other client types available for purchase, such as the Contributor and Viewer. Because the licenses are managed by the SNL, the PDM Standard seat can float among users. For example, if you have a mix of SOLIDWORKS Standard and SOLIDWORKS Professional seats on a network, a SOLIDWORKS Standard user could potentially use one of the PDM Standard CAD Editor seats.
Your vault data stays intact with the same history. There’s no need to migrate data. You’ll need to first upgrade Microsoft SQL Express to Microsoft SQL Standard, which is included in the download. The customer will need to acquire new licenses since the licenses are not transferrable between the tools.
Unfortunately, Workgroup PDM met its end of life in SOLIDWORKS 2017. However, the data in that vault can still be migrated to one of our newer more effective PDM solutions. Contact our PDM team to understand our migration options.

"Going Beyond Design" SOLIDWORKS Whitepaper Cover

SOLIDWORKS WHITEPAPER

Going Beyond Design: Making CAD the Cornerstone of an Integrated Design-to-Manufacturing Process

SOLIDWORKS drives better team and company performance by uniting design, engineering, testing, quality control, tooling, and other disciplines within a single unified ecosystem.  Read this SOLIDWORKS whitepaper to learn more about how SOLIDWORKS Premium offers:

  • Virtual product simulation
  • Design validation
  • CNC tool path generation
  • Tooling development
  • Costing and quoting capabilities
  • Documentation development

Decision and Precision

Make the smartest design decisions using our costing comparison tool, tolerance analysis, and drawing validation.

 

COSTING

Small design changes can take a toll on the cost to make your product. Use our costing tool to help you compare material choices and helps to breakdown your components to the most granular costs, whether it’s labor, material, machine, vendor, or process. Enable discounts and cost breaks for higher order quantities.

MOLD TOOLS

Create cavities and cores based on the most complex plastic part designs. SOLIDWORKS will be smart enough to update the geometry of the mold if the part design changes, allowing a more parallel design process.

Tolerance

Manufacturing is not perfect like an idealistic CAD environment. Forecast manufacturing variances ahead of time. With our TolAnalyst tool, we can assess the upper limit and lower limits of our dimensions and tolerances to see if our assembly will actually work, thus reducing the number of iterations needed to get the design right.

Drawing Checks

Our Drawing Checker verifies whether your drawing complies with company standards. You get to decide the criteria, no matter how rigid or lenient, and the automated design checker evaluates every detail in your drawing against that criteria. Drawing checker will reveal any outliers of arrow styles, font sizes, spacing, units, position, and more. Correct and then submit your drawing for approval with the confidence that the avoidable flaws are filtered and your drawing is much closer to approval than before.

SOLIDWORKS Professional features costing tools to help improve CAD designs manufacturing costs

Learn More About SOLIDWORKS Professional's Scanto3D tools

ADVANCED TRANSLATION

Make the smartest design decisions using our costing comparison tool, tolerance analysis, and drawing validation.

 

SCANTO3D

Bring your mesh files or point cloud files into your SOLIDWORKS arena using our ScanTo3D tools. Advance through our helpful Surface Wizard and Mesh Prep Wizards to achieve a solid model.

CircuitWorks

Collaborate with your electrical team using CircuitWorks and work together in parallel to design PCBs alongside mechanical enclosures. Learn more about CircuitWorks here.

EFFICIENCY

Shorten your product development timeline with some of SOLIDWORKS Professional’s most prized utilities.

 

Data Management

The days of chasing people down to get a drawing released is now behind you with our proven SOLIDWORKS PDM Standard tool. Our PDM Standard data management solution gives all license holders visibility to status, history, and ownership. Eliminate duplicates, preview SOLIDWORKS files without launching the application, and receive taskbar notifications on files pending approval. Interested in inviting others in your organization to participate in your workflow? It’s possible to for others such as Procurement, Quality Control, and Production Management to partake with a Contributor or Viewer license. Just this one tool will have your whole organization speaking the same language and offer transparency between departments.

Toolbox

Build your assemblies fast with the help of Toolbox. With Toolbox accessible within your SOLIDWORKS platform, you can build, manage, and edit on the fly. Need to change hardware sizes? Make individual and/or batch substitutions effortlessly.

Scheduled Tasks

Our Task Scheduler is our best-kept secret opening the doors for more multi-tasking. Use the Task Scheduler to schedule tasks at a certain time, but also execute batch functions. You no longer need to babysit your computer for the sake of printing drawings for your upcoming design review. Batch print them at the end of the day and then you might be able to make that soccer game tonight!

SOLIDWORKS Professional PDM Standard and scheduled tasks improves efficiency

Visualize Standard included with your purchase of SOLIDWORKS Professional

Visualize Standard

Create lifelike, fully rendered images of your CAD models.

 

Repurpose the work you’ve invested in the CAD model, and add lighting conditions, environments, and appearances to create a photo-realistic render. Normally, we would have to wait for our products to be in production before we can even think about marketing or cataloging, but now, we eliminate months of delay, eliminate high studio photography and associated shipping/freight costs and instead, bring that studio into the SOLIDWORKS Professional application. Instantly share any of the common image output file formats to your stakeholders and prospects.

Get Pricing for SOLIDWORKS Standard at GoEngineer.com

Get up to speed quickly with SOLIDWORKS Standard and unlock the benefits of this powerful 3D design solution for the rapid creation of parts, assemblies, and 2D drawings. Application-specific tools for sheet metal, weldments, surfacing, and mold, tool, and die make it easy to deliver best-in-class designs.

SOLIDWORKS STANDARD

 

Upgrade to SOLIDWORKS Premium from Professional

SOLIDWORKS Premium is a comprehensive 3D design solution that adds powerful simulation and design validation to the capabilities of SOLIDWORKS Professional, as well as ECAD/MCAD collaboration, reverse engineering, and advanced wire and pipe routing functionality for all types of industry product and part 3D modeling.

UPGRADE TO SOLIDWORKS PREMIUM

SOLIDWORKS Services:

Utilize GoEngineer’s Award Winning Support & Training for SOLIDWORKS

Award Winning Technical Support

GoEngineer's extensive SOLIDWORKS technical knowledge and world class support can help you succeed with SOLIDWORKS. Our award-winning team is ready to help you with any task you may have. Using state-of-art remote assistant technology software allows our team to solve most issues within one session. Reach out and see why GoEngineer is the #1 reseller of SOLIDWORKS and Stratasys systems in the world!

  • 125+Certified Technical Specialists
  • Email, Phone and Chat Support Available
  • 98% Exceptional Customer Service Rating

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PROFESSIONAL SOLIDWORKS TRAINING

GoEngineer offers online and classroom professional SOLIDWORKS training for organizations and individuals. All our instructors are SOLIDWORKS certified and teach thousands of students each year world wide. The curriculum is very diverse with numerous certified SOLIDWORKS courses to choose from. Each student will receive a Course Completion Certificate and preparation materials for SOLIDWORKS certification.

  • Increase Your Earning Potential
  • Led by Certified SOLIDWORKS Instructors
  • Smaller Classes with Focused Attention

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Additional Resources

Take Advantage of GoEngineer’s Extensive Knowledge Base and Resources

GoEngineer Knowledge Base and website search

Find a Solution

Our robust Knowledge Base contains over 12,000 resources to help answer your product design questions. From basic CAD questions to in-depth guides and tutorials, find your solution here. Find a Solution

Get Certified Professional SOLIDWORKS Training at GoEngineer

PROFESSIONAL TRAINING 

Improve your skills with professional training and certifications in SOLIDWORKS, CAM, 3D Printing, and 3D Scanning offered four ways: self-paced, online, on-site, or in-classroom. Certified Training Courses

GoEngineer blog page

BLOG

#1 Technical Resource Worldwide - Right at your fingertips. Search or browse through hundreds of SOLIDWORKS tips & tricks, additive manufacturing product developments, announcements, how-to guides, and tutorials. Blog

GoEngineer YouTube Channel

YouTube Channel

Our YouTube channel hosts hundreds of educational tutorials, product demonstrations, recorded webinars, and best practices for all of our products and services. GoEngineer's YouTube Channel

Order 3D printing materials and consumables from GoEngineer

ONLINE STORE

Order 3D printing materials and consumables, enroll in SOLIDWORKS training classes, and buy official GoEngineer gear directly from our online store. Online Store

Webinars offered by GoEngineer

WEBINARS

Our engineering webinars are hosted by some of the top experts in the industry. They are always recorded, always free, and always offer a live Q&A. WEBINARS

3D design and part printing services available at GoEngineer

3D Printing Services

Need to 3D print a part? Our Additive Manufacturing experts will 3D print your part and deliver it to you using the latest technology on one of our professional FDM, PolyJet, SL, or Metal 3D printers. 3D Printing Services

3D Scanning Services Available at GoEngineer.

3D Scanning Services

Convert your parts into 3D Print ready CAD files with GoEngineer's professional 3D scanning services and reverse engineering solutions. 3D Scanning Services