Best cad for beginner

[Chaz]

Fusion 360 is the same price as OnShape for home/hobby users - that is, free - and doesn't seem to have the same storage limits. That's one reason I use it; the others are that it seems to be a bit more powerful than OnShape and with more fancy features (although that comes at the price of a bit more complexity) and that it has a pretty good built-in CAM package. Although it is 3D, you can in effect use it as a 2D drawing package (and export DXF files if you want). I used to use TurboCAD but now do even simple drawings in F360.

Fusion 360. Most users wont need more. Its free and you can import almost any existing format into it.

[Neale]

You can, of course, mix-and-match CAD packages. One feature lacking in the out-of-the-box F360 is the ability to automatically add dogbone fillets into corners - typical requirement for slot-together designs in wood. It does have an add-in but my experience of this is that it's not too clever and doesn't always work as expected. I've recently been making some simple box dividers cut from thin ply. The design had tapered sides and I didn't want to have to work out the geometry for the tabs so I designed in F360, proper 3D model, easy to do, then exported panel shapes as dxf, imported into vCarve, added fillets and did the CAM there. Sounds really complicated like that, but in practice it was very quick to do.

Two conclusions from this - F360 can be a good way to do even simple designs as it allows that useful feature of 3D visualisation, and as an engineer, look for the easy way to achieve what you want even if it's not the most obvious way at first sight! And vCarve is a pretty good 2D CAD/CAM tool for CNC routing but at a price.