Everything, answered.

CADABRA is an AI CAD copilot that installs as a SOLIDWORKS add-in. You describe a change in plain English and CADABRA performs the real SOLIDWORKS feature operations: sketches edited, dimensions refit, parts rebuilt, drawings regenerated. It also produces production drawings and bills of materials on your own title blocks and standards.

An AI CAD copilot is an assistant that lives inside a CAD program and performs real CAD operations from natural-language prompts. Instead of clicking through menus, an engineer types what they want, for example “fillet all sharp edges 2 mm” or “generate a drawing with our title block”, and the copilot executes the feature operations, updates the model, and produces the deliverables.

CADABRA is built for mechanical engineers, product designers, hardware teams, job shops, and manufacturers who use SOLIDWORKS and want to spend less time on repetitive CAD work. Students use it to learn the workflow while finishing coursework faster.

CADABRA installs as a SOLIDWORKS add-in with a single installer. Close SOLIDWORKS, run the installer, enable the add-in, and CADABRA appears in the right-side task pane. There is no migration and no file conversion: it runs on your existing SOLIDWORKS license and your existing files.

Ask Mode is CADABRA’s read-only assistant. It answers questions about the open model, its geometry, dimensions, features, and materials, and it can search the web for component pricing, material properties, and manufacturing processes without leaving SOLIDWORKS. It makes no changes to your model.

Not yet. Design recommendations, analysis and cost estimation are on the roadmap and are not in the product today. Ask Mode can look up material properties and process information on the web, and it can tell you what a feature is, but it does not score a part for manufacturability or estimate what it will cost.

For fasteners, yes: CADABRA inserts them from SOLIDWORKS Toolbox, so you get the standard part your seat is already configured with rather than a modelled lookalike. It can also insert and mirror components you point it at. For anything else, Ask Mode can search the web for supplier and specification data, but nothing places a catalog part into your assembly for you.

No. CADABRA reaches its AI processing environment over the network, and CAD data is encrypted in transit. Model inference requires sending the prompt and the assembled model context, so there is no offline mode. If that rules CADABRA out for your work, contact us before you evaluate it.

Yes. CADABRA is an add-in, not a CAD system. You keep your existing SOLIDWORKS license, files, libraries, and PDM, and CADABRA works inside them.

You do. CADABRA performs real operations on your model and shows exactly what it changed, so every edit is reviewable in the feature tree and revertible.

Text to CAD is turning a written description into real CAD geometry. A generic text-to-CAD tool produces a standalone mesh or a one-off solid. CADABRA does text to CAD inside SOLIDWORKS: the prompt resolves to native feature operations on the feature tree, so the result is a parametric, editable SOLIDWORKS body.

With CADABRA it is editable. Prompts are resolved into native SOLIDWORKS features such as extrudes, cuts, fillets, patterns, and Hole Wizard operations, so every result lands in the feature tree with its sketches and dimensions intact. You can roll back, edit a dimension, or change design intent exactly as you would on geometry you modelled by hand.

Concrete, dimensioned, engineering-language prompts work best. Examples: “make the wall 3 mm thicker”, “fillet all sharp edges on this face at 2 mm”, “add a 6 mm counterbored hole pattern on a 40 mm bolt circle”, “pattern this rib eight times around the axis”, “change the material to 6061-T6 and update the mass properties”. Vague prompts such as “make it better” do not resolve to a single operation.

Point CADABRA at a part or an assembly and ask for drawings. It places named, projected, section, isometric and flat-pattern views chosen from the geometry, imports model dimensions with hole callouts and cosmetic threads, fills the general tolerance block, writes your title block, and on assemblies inserts the BOM and balloons the sheet. Every output follows the drawing standard you configured.

Yes. Batch generation runs the whole assembly in a single pass, producing one sheet per unique component plus the assembly drawing, each on your title block with the scale chosen from the geometry.

Yes, once you have set a standard up. You upload drawings you have already released and CADABRA extracts your title block fields, projection angle, units, text height and standing notes from them. That standard is then applied to every drawing it generates.

For DXF and DWG, yes, with you leading it. CADABRA imports the file as a sketch in a new part, and you then rebuild the solid from it by instruction using native feature operations. There is no PDF or scan reader, and it does not infer a solid from projected views on its own.

Native SOLIDWORKS files open directly. DXF and DWG are imported as a sketch inside a new part, which is the starting point for rebuilding the solid. PDF, images and scans are not supported, so a paper print has to become a DXF or DWG first by whatever route you already use.

Yes. Verify the dimensions that matter before anything downstream uses the part.

Yes. A single prompt such as “make a drawing of this part on our B-size title block with an isometric and a section through the bore” produces the drawing directly. Views, sheet, dimensions and your standard are handled in one pass rather than as separate manual steps.

BOMs, yes. Drawings Mode builds the bill of materials from the assembly structure and balloons the sheet to match it, using the column set and naming conventions in your drawing standard. There is no RFQ packaging feature; that is something teams still assemble from the drawings and BOM themselves.

Not in the way engineers mean by editing. An STL is a triangle mesh: it has no concept of a hole, an axis, a face, or a dimension, so there is nothing to change a value on. You can sculpt or re-mesh it, but you cannot set a bore to Ø12 or apply a tolerance. Parametric CAD carries features and dimensions.

STL is a mesh of triangles approximating a surface, used for 3D printing and rendering. STEP is exact boundary-representation geometry, used for manufacturing, inspection, and CAM. STEP carries the real shape; STL carries an approximation of it. Neither carries a feature history. A native part file does.

Most do not. A large share of the tools ranking for “AI CAD generator” and “AI technical drawing generator” are general image models: they return a picture that looks like a drawing, with no geometry, no dimensions you can measure, and no DWG, STEP, or PDF a supplier can quote from.

You write the change in plain English, naming the face or feature and the dimension. CADABRA resolves that against your open model and makes the edit; the model is rebuilt, and the result is checked.

No. Generative design produces shapes algorithmically from loads and constraints, usually organic and topology-optimised. Natural-language CAD performs the operations an engineer describes, in the order they describe them, on the model they already have.

Yes. CADABRA is an AI CAD copilot built for SOLIDWORKS. It installs as a SOLIDWORKS add-in, edits parts and assemblies from natural-language prompts through native feature operations, generates production drawings and bills of materials on your own standards, and answers questions about the open model. Pricing starts free, then $15/month for students and $99/month for professionals.

CADABRA diagnoses rebuild errors, mate failures, dangling sketch relations, and missing references in the context of your open model, and explains what to change. Because it can see the feature tree and the failing feature, the answer is specific to your file.

Not today. There is no PLM or PDM connector. CADABRA works on the files you have open and the drawing standards you upload, and your PDM rules around those files keep applying. If a connector matters to your team, tell us which system.

Not yet. CADABRA runs today as a SOLIDWORKS add-in. Support for other CAD packages is in development and you can join the waitlist for the one you use.

Macros work for a fixed, repeated sequence: they break when the feature tree changes, they need a developer to maintain, and each new variation is a new script. CADABRA resolves intent against the actual model at run time, so one prompt covers cases that would otherwise need a separate macro each.

CAD content is encrypted in transit. Chats, attachments, standards files and feedback are encrypted at rest under keys held in a hardware-backed vault, separate from the data. Indexed content is filtered to the account that wrote it, and only the context a given prompt needs is loaded at runtime. CADABRA does not sell customer data. Enterprise plans support single sign-on and zero-retention handling. On self-serve plans, check the training setting described below.

By default on Free, Student, and Professional, yes: the EULA and privacy policy state that CAD geometry, prompts, and metadata may be used to operate, maintain, and improve CADABRA and its AI models. You can stop it at any time with the data setting in your dashboard, which takes effect from the moment you turn it on rather than retroactively. On Enterprise, zero-retention handling is configured as part of the agreement.

Turn on the data setting in the dashboard under Preferences. It processes your designs, prompts, and files only to answer the request in front of it, keeps none of them on CADABRA’s servers, and excludes them from training. The trade-off is that it also turns off cloud chat history and cross-device recall, because both are stored data. It is included with every plan.

CADABRA has a free plan with no card required. Student is $15/month with a valid .edu address, Professional is $99/month for commercial use by an individual engineer, and Enterprise is custom priced with Drawings Mode, custom standards, SSO, zero-retention handling, and a dedicated engineer.

Yes. The Free plan needs no card and includes baseline monthly usage, Ask Mode against your CAD model, live web search, and read-only model understanding. Every paid plan is a multiple of that baseline usage.

Students with a valid academic email address in a supported region. The plan is $15/month, includes four times the usage of Free plus Plan, Agent and Debug Mode, and is licensed for non-commercial coursework. It is not currently offered in the EU, EEA, United Kingdom, or Switzerland; students there should use the Free plan or Professional. If your institution’s address is academic but is not recognised at sign-up, email us and we will check it.

Yes. Paid plans are month to month and can be cancelled from the dashboard at any time. Checkout and billing run through Stripe.

CADABRA performs CAD operations and produces deliverables; Aura is primarily a conversational assistant. CADABRA is configured with your own drawing standards rather than being generic, and it both modifies the model and produces the documentation from it.

It depends entirely on the work. The gains concentrate where the task is repetitive and well specified: generating drawings across an assembly, applying the same edit to a family of parts, and batch hole or fillet changes. On one-off modelling that needs judgement, expect little. The free plan exists so you can measure it on your own parts before paying.

CADABRA was founded by mechanical engineers with more than twelve years of hands-on SOLIDWORKS experience. The company is CADABRA AI Inc., headquartered in San Diego, California, and is backed by NVIDIA Inception and Berkeley SkyDeck.

Not directly. ChatGPT cannot open your part file, cannot see your feature tree, and cannot execute an operation in SOLIDWORKS. It can write code that might: a VBA macro, an OpenSCAD or CadQuery script, or a formula. You then run that code yourself and check what it did. A CAD-native copilot performs the operation in the open document instead, and can verify that the model rebuilt.

Drafting a SOLIDWORKS macro to start from, writing OpenSCAD or CadQuery for a parametric shape, working through a tolerance stack, explaining an unfamiliar error message, and drafting a DFM or drawing-review checklist. All of these are text tasks with a human checking the output. None of them require access to your model.

A SLDPRT or a STEP file describes boundary-representation geometry: surfaces, edges, and topology produced by a geometric kernel. It is not text, and reading it meaningfully requires a kernel to evaluate. Uploading one to a chat window does not give the model a kernel, so at best it reads metadata.

It removes the repetitive parts of CAD work, modifications, drawings, and BOMs, so projects ship faster and engineers spend their time on design. Teams also get consistency: the same standards applied to every drawing, by every engineer, on every revision.