Modern DWG CAD Software: From Drawings to Extended Collaboration

DWG was invented in the late 1970s (for the Interact CAD program) and was only later licensed by Autodesk as the file format used in AutoCAD. In the 1990s, Graebert became the first company to release a workalike alternative for 2D/3D CAD with DWG support and an API for developers (FelixCAD), before leading many innovations in DWG for mobile and cloud.

Today, millions of professionals use DWG CAD software. If you are reading this, you are probably one of them, and you realize that these drawings are more than files. They contain your projects and your intellectual property — but they also play another crucial role. They are central to your business because they enable collaboration beyond your design team to bring your projects to life and maintain them afterward.

In other words, enabling, and potentially extending, the access to technical information in DWG format is essential. But if you have been using AutoCAD in the past decade, you have successively experienced the end of perpetual licenses, the end of multiuser network licenses, and little innovation for increasingly high prices. Your colleagues working with Revit have already signed multiple open letters protesting the situation, yet Autodesk continues to make choices that irritate its users.

You deserve better than that. You also deserve better than a future where Autodesk would like to lock up your projects on its servers (via Autodesk Vault, BIM 360, or Autodesk Forma). Besides a better price, and choice between term, perpetual, and network licenses … you deserve innovation.

ARES CAD SOFTWARE, THE NO. 1 ALTERNATIVE TO AUTOCAD

Graebert’s ARES CAD software represents the second-largest installed base for CAD in DWG after