Two years ago, I posted a comment regarding how much better I thought Solidworks is over Inventor. That comment stirred up quite a few responses, as you can imagine. Two yars later, I am now fully convinced that Solidworks is the better package and I've finally convinced the owner of my company to consider switching. Before cutting the check though, I wanted to perform some head to head tests of the two packages. One of these tests revealed a huge performance difference between the two packages and I was wondering if anyone else has seen similar results.

I took an assembly of approximately 240 pcs that had all been created in Inventor. The assembly had about 100 iParts and other solids in it, that were, again, all created in Inventor. I launched Inventor 2012 and had it open this assembly. It took Inventor 4m51sec to open the file and be ready for editing.

I then opened Solidworks and asked it to open that same Inventor .iam assembly file and walked away. The next morning, I found that Solidworks had opened the assembly and created Solidworks copies of each component in the assembly. I then saved the newly created sldasm file and closed Solidworks. Finally, I launched Solidworks and asked it to open the sldasm file. Solidworks had the file open and ready to edit in 9 sec!

Has anyone else seen this same level of performance difference or was there a flaw in my testing procedure? I performed this same test using a smaller assembly and a single part, with similar results.

Cheers!