It's not just about choosing the right tool from the beginning. The open-source options are often not adequate at all.

I'm more comfortable talking about mechanical CAD, and in that space FreeCAD (while amazing for a free tool) doesn't come close to professional tools like Solidworks or Catia. Even for personal 3d printing projects it's really lacking, let alone for professional work.

I’m much more familiar with electrical stuff personally and my experience with that is that a lot of the commercial stuff is overdone without any useful thing to show for it (AutoCAD electrical vs XCircuit is my favorite example.) I use OpensCAD for drawing 3D stuff because it’s more intuitive to me and haven’t used either FreeCAD or Solidworks for more than a few minutes each. Is it basic drawing stuff that FreeCAD lacks? Or all the other extra features.

My understanding (which may be wrong) is that FreeCAD just does drawing, if you want FEM then you go get some FEM software. That’s not FreeCAD being incomplete that’s good software design, kind of like the Visual studio vs vim/gcc/gdb/make/git/valgrind/cscope debate.

> Or does FreeCAD lack basic drawing features?

Yes, basically.

FreeCAD only does 3d modelling and 2d drawings, that's right. That's not what I "complain" about, this is normal, that's a CAD package. FEA is another software category.

But it's really lacking in modelling compared to professional tools like Solidworks.