The renewal quote arrives as a PDF in the same week as two other renewals and asks for a decision in fourteen days. For a four-seat drafting shop that is close to $8,000 a year to keep opening the drawings you opened last year. Cancel first, shop afterwards, and you inherit a compatibility problem nobody can bill for.
This is about that decision, not about which CAD program is “best”. As of October 2026 it depends on four things, and only one is the interface.
The four things that actually separate these tools
The first is whether the tool can write DWG, not just read it. Almost everything opens a .dwg now. Far fewer save one that a client or permit office will accept without a phone call. QCAD Professional ships DWG read and write up to the 2018–2026 format family through the Open Design Alliance libraries; LibreCAD, the long-running free option, opens DWG but writes DXF, PDF and SVG, so anything you send back needs a conversion step.
The second is 2D versus 3D. For plans, sections and shop drawings a 2D tool is not a downgrade — it is the correct shape of tool, and it loads faster because it carries less. Parametric parts and assemblies are a different category, where DWG becomes secondary.
The third is the automation you already own. Years of AutoLISP routines and in-house plugins are real capital and they do not travel. BricsCAD runs AutoLISP and most AutoCAD-style commands, which is why firms with a decade of scripts land there. QCAD has its own ECMAScript API — powerful, but a rewrite. LibreCAD and FreeCAD will not run your .lsp files at all.
The fourth is the licence. Autodesk sells subscriptions only: full AutoCAD sits close to $2,000 per seat per year at US list, AutoCAD LT around $500, both billed annually with no perpetual option. BricsCAD still sells a perpetual licence alongside subscription, which matters to firms that capitalise software. DraftSight, once the free darling of the category, has been subscription-only since Dassault retired the free edition, with paid tiers in the low hundreds per seat per year. “Free” here usually means open source with no support contract — price that difference honestly instead of pretending it is zero.
Official image from gimp.org. The pattern is familiar: an open-source tool covers the common 80% of a paid creative standard, and the last 20% is where the arguments start.
Picking by situation
2D output that must come back as DWG. QCAD Professional: a one-off licence of roughly €40 per seat, less than three weeks of an AutoCAD subscription, current DWG write, and a command set close enough that a drafter is productive in a day. It is not pretty and its 3D is nonexistent, but for electrical plans, furniture layouts and detail sheets it works without a meter running. Many firms keep QCAD on the seats that only produce and one AutoCAD seat for drawings that go out under a client’s template.
A genuinely zero budget. Start with LibreCAD for 2D and treat DXF as the exchange format. It is stable, GPL, runs on Linux and handles large 2D files better than its reputation suggests. Be honest about the trade: no DWG write, weaker support for newer entities, a UI that has barely changed in a decade. The usual compromise is LibreCAD drafting plus one QCAD or AutoCAD seat to produce the final DWG.
3D or parametric work. FreeCAD is the only serious open-source answer and it has grown up in the last two years. It does not read DWG natively; it calls an external converter, either the free ODA File Converter or QCAD Pro’s dwg2dwg tool. The FreeCAD wiki is blunt that the open-source LibreDWG library “lacks support for several DWG entities, and may not always give faithful results.” So you convert to DXF on import, model in FreeCAD, and convert back if a DWG is demanded. That is a workflow, not a drop-in replacement.
Support, near-identical commands, someone to phone. BricsCAD Lite (2D, now version 27) or DraftSight. Both open and save DWG natively, both keep the command line AutoCAD users reach for from habit, both cost meaningfully less than full AutoCAD. BricsCAD’s perpetual option is why many small firms choose it over DraftSight’s subscription. Neither saves money if you only draw twice a month — then the answer is one AutoCAD LT seat and no migration at all.
Deep in the Autodesk stack anyway. With Revit, Civil 3D or Construction Cloud sheets in play, do not migrate; the subscription is the cheap part of that arrangement. Downgrade the seats that only view and mark up — AutoCAD web and mobile access is included with the desktop subscription — and keep full seats for people producing models.
| Your situation | Sensible pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 2D production, DWG required back | QCAD Professional | One-off ~€40, writes current DWG |
| Zero budget, 2D, DXF acceptable | LibreCAD | Free, stable, no DWG write |
| 3D parts, parametric design | FreeCAD + ODA converter | Only mature open-source 3D option |
| Scripts, templates, client familiarity | BricsCAD Lite / DraftSight | AutoLISP and AutoCAD-style commands |
| Mostly viewing and marking up | AutoCAD LT, or free DWG TrueView | You are not the bottleneck |
| Revit / Civil 3D in the same workflow | Stay, downgrade viewer seats | Interoperability is the product |
Where people actually get hurt
The file round-trip is the trap that costs money. A DWG saved by a non-Autodesk program can lose proxy objects (anything from a vertical product like AutoCAD Architecture or Civil 3D), flatten dynamic blocks into static ones, drop annotative scaling and substitute missing SHX fonts, which silently changes text widths and therefore layouts. None of it shows up until a contractor measures off the drawing. Before cancelling, push a real project through the new tool: three drawings, including one ugly 2014 legacy file, saved back and reopened in AutoCAD. Compare the plot, not model space.
The licence trap is quieter. “Perpetual” does not mean “runs forever without asking permission” — most perpetual CAD licences still need periodic activation or a licence server. If offline work matters, such as a site office or an air-gapped machine, confirm activation behaviour in writing.
The third trap is treating the switch as an IT project. It is a training project: two of these tools will feel wrong for a fortnight, and that fortnight costs real hours. Budget it, or the migration quietly dies and the renewal gets signed anyway.
None of this is unique to CAD. Teams leave MATLAB over the same mix of licence cost and toolbox lock-in, and finance teams left Power BI when per-seat pricing turned every viewer into a line item. All three migrations succeed when they start from files and workflows, and fail when they start from a price comparison.
Questions that come up every time
Can LibreCAD open DWG files? Yes, for reading, with limits on newer entity types. It cannot save DWG, so plan on DXF or a conversion step for anything you send out.
Is FreeCAD a real AutoCAD replacement? For 3D modelling and parametric parts, increasingly yes. For 2D drafting to a client’s CAD standard, no — the sheet tools are serviceable, but the DWG path runs through a converter.
Will my AutoLISP routines work? In BricsCAD, largely. In QCAD, no — it uses its own scripting API. In LibreCAD and FreeCAD, no. If your routines encode company standards, this alone may decide it.
What to do this week
Take the three drawings you know best, install QCAD Professional’s trial or LibreCAD, and redraw one detail sheet end to end. Time it, then open the result in AutoCAD and plot it at the scale you normally deliver. That afternoon tells you more than any feature comparison. If the plot matches and the time is within 15% of your current pace, you have the answer for production seats: keep one AutoCAD subscription for a quarter as insurance and let it expire on your terms, not the renewal date’s.
Written from vendor documentation, published pricing and Open Design Alliance and FreeCAD documentation as of October 2026. Pricing varies by region and changes often — verify on official sites before committing.