Here’s a vote for VCarve Desktop. I’ve used Carbide Create Pro (free until recently) and Fusion 360 (dabbling mostly–designed a couple of things).
My vote for VCarve Desktop is because it is designed for the hobby CNC machine first and foremost. And they’ve been doing it a while. It will take you a while to learn all of VCarve’s capabilities, but a lot of it is pretty intuitive, and there’s videos for every function.
Another mark in favor of Vcarve/Vectric is their pricing model–leaving aside for the moment whether the price is too high or not, Vectric does allow you buy in at one level, and simply pay the difference to level up in the future. They do charge for full version upgrades (v9 to v10, you pay, but v10 to 10.5, you don’t), but not exorbitantly. And you don’t have to upgrade if you don’t want.
Carbide Create Pro has some nice features, but it not quite as full featured as VCarve. In time they may close the gap, but now we’re talking about now. If I used my CNC more often (it’s hobby–don’t always get the time I want) I could justify subscription pricing, but the thought of paying for something all the time while using it some of the time rubs me the wrong way. And it’s almost at the same price level as VCarve Desktop.
Fusion is free, and very capable. Probably the most capable of all the options under discussion. Many have mentioned the learning curve, or as I put it, why is it necessary to watch a tutorial video to learn how to do every single thing in Fusion? And again, as a hobbyist, I may come back to Fusion after having been away for a month (on a good month!) to find I have to re-learn it all again.
And there’s a few other things out there you may find yourself toying with from time to time–Inventable’s Easel has some nice widgets to auto-generate patterns and gears and such that I’ve used from time to time, for example. There are others.