We have been playing with the trial edition of Alibre Design. As we have a limited budget on this project, the savings that Alibre offers when compared to Inventor or Solidworks are very attractive, but it has to work.
I have used Inventor a fair amount before, and Josh is more familiar with Solidworks. I have found using Alibre pretty easy, and so far am impressed, however, the graphics rendering speed is much slower than inventor or solidworks. It seems Alibe uses direect X where as the others use Open GL. I upgraded my old dual core Xeon machine with the fastest AGP x8 graphics card I could find, but it hasn't made much difference.
Apparently Alibre V12 will address some of the graphics issues, and we have been offered a pretty good deal on the expert version with one years support, which means we will get the upgrade when it is available.. Alibre it is!
