BRL-CAD is a cross-platform open source CAD program that works on Windows, Linux, macOS, Solaris and other BSD systems. Written in C/C and uses TK for its user interface. While not a very beautiful and modern option for a user interface, TK is quite practical and stable, so users can expect few changes to land on their workflow in the future. BRL-CAD is a powerful open source cross-platform solid modelling system that includes interactive geometry editing, high-performance ray-tracing for rendering and geometric analysis, a system performance analysis benchmark suite, geometry libraries for application developers, and more than 30 years of active development. BRL-CAD is another free open source 3D CAD software for Windows, BSD, macOS, Solaris, and Linux. It is a powerful solid modeling software that offers one of the best ray tracing rendering feature to create realistic looking 3D models. Its raytracing rendering also adds shadows across a. FreeCAD is an open-source free CAD Software. The main use of this software is for mechanical engineering. This software can also satisfy architectural or other engineering purposes. The software is highly customizable and you can add very advanced extension.
Sometimes we need free Architecture or CAD software to redesign our own apartment's interior or want to decorate. Or just for learning purpose, here are some free and open source software for interior or house Architecture designers.
FreeCAD is a free and open-source (under the LGPLv 2+ license) general-purpose parametric 3D computer-aided design (CAD) modeler and a building information modeling (BIM) software with finite element method (FEM) support.
Archimedes: An architecture open CAD
Archimedes is a free and open source CAD (Computer Aided Design) software built Eclipse's Rich Client Platform. It works on Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows but before installing it, you have need to install Java Virtual Machine. The software and its plugins are under the Eclipse Public License which means anyone can modify its source code to develop its own application without the permission of Archimedes team. It develops as an alternate option to AutoCAD.
SweetHome 3D
SweetHome 3D is an open-source software. It helps people to design the interior of their home in a very intuitive way. You can redesign your home and can see a 3-D version of how everything looks. It allows you to draw walls, rooms, windows, furniture, etc. You can create photorealistic images and videos with various light sources.
ArchiFacile
ArchiFacile is a free floor or house planner software which allows you to design them in two dimensional. This tool is very beneficial for architects as it allows to export design in PDF format. It can be used to plan floor, house, garage, wooden house, a garden shed or pool.
3D Home Design
3D Home Design has a free version of its powerful software which enables users to create 2D/3D professional plans for indoor and outdoor views. Graphics are pretty realistic and make working with this software very enjoyable.
Simple 2d Drawing Software Free
Google SketchUp Make
Google SketchUp is a free software which allows you to create 3D models in just a few minutes. There are lots of video tutorials available online which helps newbies. You can build your own house sketch design. Also, the sketch of your living room, a piece of furniture, model your city for Google Earth and more.
BRL-CAD
BRL-CAD is an open source modeling system and cross-platform CAD software. It has ray-tracing for rendering and geometric analysis, interactive geometry editor, analysis benchmark suite, image & signal processing tools, libraries for robust geometric representation, network distributed framebuffer support and more.
LibreCAD
Libre CAD is 2D CAD application that can read DWG files. It writes DXF files and can export files to other formats also such as PNG, JPG etc. It available in 20 languages and supports all major operating systems. (Windows, Linux, Mac OSX and others). It provides you layers, blocks, splines, polylines, ellipse tools, advanced tangent line & circle tools, transformation tools, an advanced snapping system and more.
FreeCAD
FreeCAD is a powerful parametric 3D modeler for CAD, CAD, MCAD, CAx, CAE, and PLM. It extremely modular Architecture software that allows customization and use of extensions. It features Open Inventor-compliant 3D scene representation model provided by the Coin 3D library and a broad Python API. It uses the interface which built with Qt. It supports Windows, MAC OSX, and Linux platforms.
nanoCAD
It is a free a Computer Aided Design (CAD) tool for Architectures. It has a user-friendly interface, drafting and design tools, native DWG compatibility, and an open API.
Blender
Blender is the free open source 3D suite for beautiful content creation. It supports all major OS platform. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. The built-in Cycles rendering engine offers GPU & CPU rendering, Real-time viewport preview, HDR lighting support and Permissive License for linking with external software.
GenoCAD
GenoCAD is a CAD software for synthetic biology. This application provides a web-based tool to design plasmids, artificial gene networks, and other synthetic genetic systems composed of standard genetic parts. It includes a parts management system, a rule-based design tool, and a simulation engine.
TinkerCell -CAD for Synthetic Biology
TinkerCell is a software for synthetic biology. The visual interface allows users to design networks using various biological 'parts'. Models can include modules and multiple cells. Users can program new functions using C or Python.
Sailcut CAD
It is a sail design and plotting software for Architectures. It allows you to design and visualize your own sail and compute the accurate development of all panels in flat sheets.
QCAD – 2D
It is easy to use, complete 2D CAD system for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It offers a complete set of general purpose CAD tools and uses the DXF format as its native file format. Additional power-user tools including DWG support and enhanced DXF support are available as QCAD Professional for Architecture through proprietary add-ons.
Also See:
Blog
SourceForge
Open Source 2D-CAD
LibreCAD is a free Open Source CAD application for Windows, Apple and Linux. Support and documentation are free from our large, dedicated community of users, contributors and developers.
You, too, can also get involved!
How it started
LibreCAD started as a project to build CAM capabilities into the community version of QCad for use with a Mechmate CNC router.
Since QCad CE was built around the outdated Qt3 library, it had to be ported to Qt4 before additional enhancements. This gave rise to CADuntu.
The project was known as CADuntu only for a couple of months before the community decided that the name was inappropriate. After some discussion within the community and research on existing names, CADuntu was renamed to LibreCAD.
Porting the rendering engine to Qt4 proved to be a large task, so LibreCAD initially still depended on the Qt3 support library. The Qt4 porting was completed eventually during the development of 2.0.0 series, thanks to our master developer Rallaz, and LibreCAD has become Qt3 free except in the 1.0.0 series.
Meanwhile, for LibreCAD 2.2.0 series, Qt5 is mandatory.
LibreCAD is a feature-packed and mature 2D-CAD application with some really great advantages:
Completely and Utterly Free
Network attached storage ssd. No worries about trials, subscriptions, license costs or annual fees.
Open Source and GPLv2
Developed by an experienced team and supported by an awesome community, LibreCAD is also free to hack and copy.
No Language Barriers
It's available in over 30 languages with cross-platform support for macOS, Windows, and Linux. Battleship through imessage.
macOS
Open Source 3d Modeling
Help is needed for macOS deployment. from SourceForge
Find latest stable DMG packages there.
from GitHub
Find latest stable DMG packages there.
Windows
from SourceForge
Find latest stable EXE installer there.
Also automated nightly build installer for bleeding-edge versions.
from GitHub
Find latest stable EXE installer there.
Also special prerelease installer for beta testing versions.
Linux
Check your distributions preferred package manager, if LibreCAD is available there. But the version may be a bit older.
For Debian/Ubuntu distributions, you can use our Launchpad PPAs for stable or daily versions.
Build from source
This is an option for all platforms.
Excel office program. If we don't have the binary installer you are looking for, you can try to build LibreCAD from source code.
How this works for each platform can be read in our Wiki .
Source code could be downloaded from GitHub as ZIP archive.
Or you can clone or fork our repository, which is recommended if you plan to contribute.
The LibreCAD team is a small group of dedicated people. Lots of things have been worked out, but plenty of bugs and features are still waiting to be solved. How can you help? We need all the skills in the community as coders, writers, testers or translators.
An open source community is a dynamic thing; people come and go as their private situation drives or stops them contributing. So, it will always help if you have existing resources we can use, know what other projects do in specific areas, or, most importantly, do what you do best and have fun doing it!
You don't have to sign a lifetime contract to contribute. Whether you can help others in the forum, garden the wiki, or apply one or many patches, our broad user base will appreciate your work.
Come join our community, and contribute in any way you like.
Developing
If you are an outstanding developer in C++ or a beginner we can use your help.
With a bit of determination, the IRC channel, Zulip chat and the Libre-CAD-dev mailing list, we can help you get started and make progress.
All you need is linked in download section and top links above.
Online 2d Cad
Documentation
Developers usually make bad documentation for users, so if you like making documentation, great!
There have been extensive GUI changes in 2.1 series which need to be documented.
Translation
Build from source
This is an option for all platforms.
Excel office program. If we don't have the binary installer you are looking for, you can try to build LibreCAD from source code.
How this works for each platform can be read in our Wiki .
Source code could be downloaded from GitHub as ZIP archive.
Or you can clone or fork our repository, which is recommended if you plan to contribute.
The LibreCAD team is a small group of dedicated people. Lots of things have been worked out, but plenty of bugs and features are still waiting to be solved. How can you help? We need all the skills in the community as coders, writers, testers or translators.
An open source community is a dynamic thing; people come and go as their private situation drives or stops them contributing. So, it will always help if you have existing resources we can use, know what other projects do in specific areas, or, most importantly, do what you do best and have fun doing it!
You don't have to sign a lifetime contract to contribute. Whether you can help others in the forum, garden the wiki, or apply one or many patches, our broad user base will appreciate your work.
Come join our community, and contribute in any way you like.
Developing
If you are an outstanding developer in C++ or a beginner we can use your help.
With a bit of determination, the IRC channel, Zulip chat and the Libre-CAD-dev mailing list, we can help you get started and make progress.
All you need is linked in download section and top links above.
Online 2d Cad
Documentation
Developers usually make bad documentation for users, so if you like making documentation, great!
There have been extensive GUI changes in 2.1 series which need to be documented.
Translation
Help localize LibreCAD, we currently support over 30 languages.
Our translation server is over here: https://translate.librecad.org/ .
You can complete new languages, or request creating translations for a new language in the forum .
As a non-profit, community driven open source project LibreCAD is dependent on having good relationships with friends and sponsors.
Friends
BRL-CAD
BRL-CAD is a powerful open source cross-platform solid modelling system that includes interactive geometry editing, high-performance ray-tracing for rendering and geometric analysis, a system performance analysis benchmark suite, geometry libraries for application developers, and more than 30 years of active development.
Open Source Cad/cam
BRL-CAD and LibreCAD collaborate in Google programs. We participate under the umbrella of BRL-CAD in Google Code-in and Google Summer of Code where we mentor school pupils and students in participating in open source projects.
Sponsors
JetBrains
JetBrains has generously supplied us with CLion licenses for the development of LibreCAD. This powerful IDE helps you develop in C and C++ on Linux, OS X and Windows, enhancing your productivity with a smart editor, code quality assurance, automated refactoring, and deep integration with CMake build system.
