Mobile App Analytics Tools (2026): Pricing & What They Do

CAD pricing is confusing in India for one structural reason: almost none of the big vendors publish a single Indian rupee number on a page you can read without talking to a salesperson. Some publish in US dollars globally, a few publish INR directly, and at least one blocks automated access to its pricing pages entirely. This guide records only what each vendor publishes on its own site, in the currency the vendor uses, with the pages listed in Sources. Where a vendor publishes nothing, it says so.

What the major CAD tools publish

Two entries deserve a note before you read further. Bentley is the only vendor in this table that publishes rupee prices on its public product pages, which is why STAAD and MicroStation are the only INR figures here. And Autodesk's India pricing pages — AutoCAD, AutoCAD LT, Fusion and Tinkercad — returned HTTP 403 to every request made while researching this piece, so no Autodesk number is quoted. Check autodesk.com/in directly; anything else you read online about "AutoCAD price in India" is somebody's recollection or a reseller's quote, not Autodesk's list price.

Is AutoCAD free?

No. AutoCAD is a paid subscription. Autodesk does run a free trial and a free education plan for verified students and educators, but there is no free commercial tier and no perpetual licence sold today — the perpetual model ended years ago and everything is subscription now. If you want free 2D drafting that opens and writes DWG, that is a different product, and the honest answers are LibreCAD, QCAD's Community Edition and FreeCAD's drafting workbench.

Mechanical design: SOLIDWORKS and the alternatives

SOLIDWORKS does not publish a price list. Its site routes you to "how to buy" and to resellers, which in India means a quote that varies by seat count, term and whether you take Simulation. That opacity is the single biggest reason people search for "solidworks pricing" and find nothing useful.

What SOLIDWORKS does publish clearly is the student offer: SOLIDWORKS Design Standard for Students is now free, giving one year of access, renewable by re-submitting the same form if you are still a qualified student. That is a real change worth knowing about if you are hiring juniors or running a training programme.

If you want a published number instead of a quote, Onshape is the cleanest comparison. It is owned by the same parent (Dassault Systèmes, which also owns CATIA) and it lists prices openly: US$1,500 per user per year for Standard and US$2,500 for Professional, billed annually, with an Enterprise tier priced on request. Its free plan is genuinely usable for learning and personal work, with one hard condition — every document is public and the plan is non-commercial. Do not put client work in it.

FreeCAD is the free parametric modeller people actually finish jobs in. It is not a SOLIDWORKS clone and the workbench-based interface takes real effort, but for parts, sheet metal and print-ready models it is capable and costs nothing. Browse the wider 3D CAD category if you want to compare what else is in this space.

Architecture and BIM

Graphisoft publishes Archicad pricing in US dollars with a caveat printed on the page itself: the prices shown are for information only and the final price depends on your billing country. Archicad Studio starts from US$72 + tax per month with an upfront payment of US$870 + tax for a one-year subscription term per seat. Archicad Collaborate, which adds MEP Designer and BIMcloud SaaS, starts from US$85 + tax per month with an upfront US$1,024 + tax per year.

What are the alternatives to Archicad?

The practical Archicad alternatives are Autodesk Revit for full BIM, SketchUp Pro or Studio for modelling and documentation, and Blender for visualisation. Revit and Archicad are the two that architects treat as interchangeable for BIM deliverables; SketchUp is the cheaper modelling-first route and Blender is free but is not a BIM tool. Which one is right depends less on price than on what your consultants and clients will accept as a model handover.

Trimble vs SketchUp — what is the difference?

There is no difference in the sense the question implies: Trimble owns SketchUp, so "Trimble SketchUp" and "SketchUp" are the same product. Trimble's published plans are Go at US$10.75 per user per month, Pro at US$33.25 and Studio at US$71.58, all billed annually and excluding tax. Go is iPad and web only; Pro adds the desktop modeller and LayOut; Studio is Windows-only and adds the Revit importer, point-cloud work and rendering.

Civil and structural: Bentley, STAAD and MicroStation

What is Bentley MicroStation?

MicroStation is Bentley Systems' 2D and 3D CAD platform for infrastructure, built around the DGN file format, and it is the product most often compared with AutoCAD in civil work. Bentley describes it as CAD with built-in BIM capability: drafting, annotation and 3D modelling, plus geospatial context and the data structures used across its OpenRoads and OpenBuildings products. On Bentley's own page it starts at ₹127,946 INR for a 12-month Virtuoso subscription that includes one licence and two "Keys" — service and training credits, not extra seats.

How much does STAAD.Pro cost?

Bentley lists STAAD.Pro from ₹97,887 INR for a 12-month Virtuoso subscription with one licence and one Key. STAAD.Pro Advanced, which adds nonlinear geometric and cable analysis, floor spectrum analysis and concrete detailing, starts at ₹173,563 INR. The STAAD and RAM bundle starts at ₹184,684 INR with one licence and three Keys. These are published starting prices for the Virtuoso route; enterprise agreements are negotiated separately, and Bentley also sells through local partners in India.

For structural teams, the decision is rarely STAAD versus a free tool — there is no credible free replacement for a code-checking analysis engine. The decision is which Bentley tier, and whether the Keys are worth anything to you. If nobody on the team will redeem training credits, compare the tiers on analysis capability alone.

2D drafting on a smaller budget

DraftSight is the most direct paid answer to "I just need DWG drafting without an AutoCAD subscription". Dassault Systèmes publishes it openly: Professional US$299 per year, Premium US$599 per year, and network licensing from US$399 per year, with AutoLISP support in Professional and BIM and Sheet Set Manager features higher up. Its own FAQ confirms these figures.

Below that, the free options are real but narrower. LibreCAD is GPLv2 2D CAD, available for Windows, macOS and Linux in more than 30 languages. QCAD ships a free trial of QCAD Professional that runs 15 minutes at a time and restarts, and its open-source Community Edition can be obtained by removing the Professional add-on from the trial build. FreeCAD covers 2D drafting alongside 3D. None of these are drop-in AutoCAD replacements for a team that lives in DWG exchange with consultants, but for internal drawings and small studios they hold up.

What can I use instead of Tinkercad?

For simple browser-based 3D modelling, the closest free substitutes are Onshape's free plan for parametric CAD, FreeCAD if you can install software, and Blender for mesh modelling and 3D printing prep. Onshape's free tier is the nearest in spirit — browser-native, nothing to install — but remember its documents are public and it is non-commercial use only.

What does Rhino cost, and is it a subscription?

Rhino 8 is a perpetual licence, not a subscription, and Rhino's published North American price list shows US$995 for a single concurrent commercial user, US$9,950 for ten and US$49,750 for fifty. Upgrading from an older version is US$595 for a single user. Educational pricing is US$195 for a full single-user licence and US$95 to upgrade. Rhino's page states that international prices may vary, that taxes are excluded, and that purchased licences are permanent and do not expire. For Indian studios that dislike annual renewals, that permanence is Rhino's real selling point, not its headline number.

InDesign and the design side

Adobe's Indian pricing pages did not return readable content to automated requests during this research, so no InDesign figure is quoted here. Adobe does publish India-specific monthly and annual pricing for single apps and for the full Creative Cloud plan on adobe.com/in, and that page — not a third-party blog — is the one to check. If you are choosing between a single-app subscription and the all-apps plan, the break-even is usually two apps. See the wider design tools and graphic design categories for what else competes at that price point.

How to choose

For architecture, the real choice is Archicad versus Revit, with SketchUp Pro as the lighter alternative when your deliverable is drawings and visuals rather than a coordinated model. Price is a secondary input; interoperability with your consultants decides it.

For mechanical design, if you need a published, predictable number, Onshape gives you one. If your supply chain sends you SOLIDWORKS files, get a reseller quote and negotiate the seat count rather than fighting the format.

For civil and structural, Bentley's rupee list prices make budgeting simpler than most of this market, and STAAD's tiers are worth reading line by line because the Advanced capabilities are specific.

For 2D drafting, DraftSight at US$299 per year is the obvious paid step down, and LibreCAD or QCAD Community Edition are the free ones that genuinely work.

And in every case: get the number from the vendor's page or a written reseller quote on your letterhead terms. In this category, the figures that circulate second-hand go stale within a release cycle.

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