Carbide Create free is a real bargain. The Pro add on is $120.00 a year but if you dont renew it stops working. For $360.00 it works forever but you still have to pay $120.00 a year to get updates. The Vetric SW is as follows as of Jan 25, 2025
Vcarve $350.00
Vcarve Pro $699.00
Aspire $2000.00
The good thing about Vetric is if you buy Vcarve but later decide you want the Pro version you only pay the difference in price which is $199.00 + original $350.00. So to upgrade you dont have to start over just pay for the upgrade. I think the current version is 12 but when they come out with a new version you can stay on your current version but you have to pay some to upgrade to newest version.
Vetric is said to be very intuitive for woodworkers but there is a learning curve with any software and that includes Carbide Create.
Carbide Create has been improved continuously since I started 6 years ago. The software team at C3D has made incredible improvements.
I still use Carbide Create with the Pro upgrade and like it. My advise is to use the free version of Carbide Create until you think you have outgrown it. Then either get the Pro or move up to Vetric at that point. It is your money so you can invest how you want but for me I am frugal and upgrading my Carbide Create was easy because I got the original Pro upgrade for free from C3D for my contributions to the forum. For a long time before getting the Pro I considered Vetric. But so far I am not bumping head on the Carbide Create ceiling.
I decided to start with CCPro, as I quickly ran into the limitations of the free version. I figure I’ll stick with it until I start hitting things I can’t do or are overly hard in CCPro. It’s only been a few months but I haven’t hit anything that was a serious problem. Some frustrations with things that ought to be routine drawing stuff but haven’t been implemented, but I understand the limitations of a small development team that has to set priorities. So far the learning curve has been pretty short and the help given here is fantastic. Played with the free version of Fusion on and off, but decided it had a pretty intense learning curve with no immediate benefit to the kinds of projects I needed to get done. I do end up doing a lot of my design work in Illustrator and then exporting SVGs to use in CC.
Using a 3rd party drawing tool and exporting as an SVG which may then be opened in/imported into Carbide Create is the best option to address the want of a desired feature/interface option.
I’m pretty sure that even if we could easily clone Illustrator (or Affinity Designer, or Freehand, or CorelDraw, or Inkscape) that we would not do so. The guiding principle seems to be the 80/20 rule, that for a given application, 80 percent of the users only use 20 percent of the features/interface — whatever we put into Carbide Create needs to be something which the majority of our users will want and be able to use in their designs/projects. Folks who need to use more than that can import.
That said, if folks have specific requests for Carbide Create, please put them in at: