I have been working with ProE and Catia.Both are several times quicker and much more intuitive.For example to swith to sketch mode in assembly context in Catia you need 2 cliks.In Nx more then 15.That is not joke,it is reality.The worst feature of NX is modeling in context of assembly.In all others CADs you can use all edges and faces from all components in assembly to make dimensions or sketch plains or fix on it.In NX you have first to use special command to transfer them into working part.So before sketching yuo have to know what features from others parts you will need and transfer them.So you do twice work.Moreover,after finishing the part you have put those transfered features to hidden layer.If not the will missguide you and even will appear on drawing.So three times more work then in others CADs.That is another very bad feature of NX.The appearance of model and drawing is not the same.After making the view on drawing you have to search what to do to hide datums features,curves sketchs and so on.Many times the views are not correct.There are missing some lines or some hidden are visible. Many commands do not work properly and you have almost always try more times to do somthing. Do not buy NX.Even if the price would be very good.You will lost more then you gain. Martin Pánik mechanical engineer Slovakia

UG or NX does require some learning and practice. After using the programs for several years I have come to appreciate the power of the system. Once you know what you are doing, you can save lots of design and programming time. It is the best CAM system I have used hands down. A real power house.

I work with multiple CAD packages. The bulk of my work is using NX8. If I had to summarize the issues, I would state the code is non-intuitive, labor intensive, and is riddled with features that either don't work properly, are twitchy, or are overly narrow in scope. To make matters worse, many of our upgrades introduce new bugs that take months to correct. A simple demo will make NX appear to be as effective as other CAD packages though perhaps a few more mouse clicks are required. But start to work with it and you quickly become bogged down with unstable work arounds. Constraint systems can have cascading failures with no sense of logic to them and rarely can be easily corrected. Of the 100 or so users I work with, not one of them would come close to meeting the standard of a superuser. This is very telling of the problems with NX. Most exclusively use the rudimentary tools and are afraid to try new features because of the problems they run into. This company switched to NX almost 6 years ago. For simple parts, it's fine. When working with complex assemblies or old files, I find I am 3X more productive with Solidworks.

I've been working with NX for almost 4 years now and the program still annoys me every day. Before this I’ve worked with Solid edge and Inventor which are 10 times more user friendly. But even when you get used to the system and the complicity of the functions it is still far from nice to work with. You need expensive courses to start, otherwise it will take you months to understand things. They say it can handle big assemblies. But I followed a course for that and did all what is possible but it keeps very slow to work with big assy’s. The worst application is Drafting. It looks like they got stuck in the 90’s with developing this part of the software. Nothing works intuitive and it is terribly slow. And I really don’t have a slow work station. If you have the choice, don’t buy it. It is a rip off. Siemens also asks loads of money for the licenses and even then you keep running into features you would like to use for which you need another license. Unfortunately can I not convince my boss that there are many better and much cheaper CAD packages on the market.

I think the hardest aspect of CAD review is to look at features in isolation and NX is a prime case. How can you justify a hefty price tag for 3D CAD software? the answer is to look at it holistically. In this case, although it has a steep learning curve and other mid-ranged software (SolidWorks, Inventor, SolidEdge, etc) can do many of the same tasks, NX is virtually alone in providing (a) multiple ways of accomplishing the same end result, especially with hybrid feature parts/assemblies and (b) providing cradle-to-grave hot links that work with world-class MRP/ERP systems. The only other contenders in this class, that come to mind, are CATIA and Pro/E (I apologize if I missed any here). So, while a metal fab shop, for example, might get by very nicely with CADKey, AutoCAD and the like, high-end OEM's with multiple vendors will likely use high-end products like discusssed above. That's my two cents worth... rjm

Detail modeling is OK, though certainly nothing to write home about. Extrusions are simple though in complex parts you will find at times that the boolean features are buggy at best. The real atrocity of this cad package is the fact that assemblies are at best unreliable. The constraints are not always certain and there is really no intuitive symetry constraint. The drawing package is not very intuitive and is cumbersome. Will leave you longing for a drafting board