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PowerMill is hands down Autodesk's premier system for milling. It gives the user the most flexibility of the 3 listed above for control and options. Both products cannot touch PowerMill for its editing capabilities and 5 axis options. There are some turning options, but limited to Mill/Turn centers only. This software is built for ultimate control. It also offers open source code for user automation, which is fairly easy to understand. I've seen some pretty crazy macro's and plugins that work inside of PowerMill. In fact, our development team here at SolidCAD is developing one and has just released it......Make Productivity
Fusion 360 has both integrated CAD & CAM, which is real nice since you can go back and for between design and manufacture pretty seamlessly. On the milling side, it has adopted some of FeatureCAM's automation for pocket recognition and I am sure it will add more down the road. It also has some drilling automation that has been influenced by FeatureCAM as well. Fusion has also incorporated some of PowerMill's editing options as well as some of its higher end toolpath strategies. Fusion definitely has better options for turning than PowerMill and it has the best inspection tools from the 3 mentioned (surface inspection, geometry inspection and WCS probing options). Keep in mind, most of the higher end items I mentioned are only available with the Manufacturing extension (about 2k per year). The best thing I like about Fusion is that the software updates constantly with new options and it updates automatically since it is cloud based. The biggest downside of Fusion is that it is in fact cloud based. Your files do not stay local but reside up in the cloud. Some customers just can't get past this part.
As for FeatureCAM. The turning tools it offers are tops with regards to the 3 CAM systems listed. It you program and operate a multi-taking machine tool, FeatureCAM will give you an abundance of tools for these machines. It one of the best CAM tools I've used for controlling these machines.
With regards to the milling side, FeatureCAM's AFR and IFR are nice options, especially if you want to get something done quickly and are not too concerned with runtime. It's also a great tool for newer CAM users, since it does everything automatically for you. Once you gain confidence, that's when the user may want to do things their way instead of how FeatureCAM does it. You can teach the software in the machining attributes, but it is limited to what you can do. You can tap into the open source code and build your own automation, but you do need to have some computer coding skills. I have seen some really amazing automation with FeatureCAM, but the users know coding. Last but not least is the surface milling side. A lot of the 3d surface programming have the same toolpaths that PowerMill offers.....without the control of course. This goes for the 5 axis simultaneous options as well.
Sorry for the long winded message her, but I wanted to give you as much information as possible about the CAM offerings from Autodesk. I didn't even mention InventorCAM or Partmaker here, but I don't think you require this information.
NX is most feature rich/ upto date. Featurecam has the easiest turning workspace I've seen, but suffers from lack of development. The AFR is hit or miss depending on your jobs, 2d work it does great. Wouldn't be surprised to see an announcement that featurecam and powermill will only receive bug/security patches within the next 2 years.
To answer your question about 3/4 axis work, featurecam is beyond capable of handling it. 4 axis rotary is "ok" once you get it dialed. The multifix/tombstone work space is pretty trash however, have to open original files to edit anything and then reload into the workspace.
I wouldn't say they are abandoning FeatureCAM. We always tell customer or potential clients that it is a mature product. Sure, they are some enhancements I'd love to see in there, but if you have a product like Fusion that is growing, it may be much easier to develop these enhancements for this product rather then trying to re-write code for a mature product.
Plus, if you are a maintenance customer for FeatureCAM, you get access to Partmaker and Fusion 360 with the Manufacturing extension as well. I have a lot of customers that have started to use all 3 products in their manufacturing workflow. Even if Fusion 360 is not a fit for you now, you can always keep tabs on it and start looking at it when it does implement some of the higher end tools that you are looking for.
It'll be interesting seeing the path fusion takes as CMMC becomes industry required, the 3rd party required audit is gonna get a lot of people that don't understand how levels of security or data control work.
I mentioned this in an earlier post and I mention this to all of my customers too. As of now, Autodesk does not meet ITAR compliance. I've heard internally that this is something that they are working towards and it a very hot topic for them and their customers. It will be interesting on how this will get done.
So you're using NX, which is a more "professional" grade software. I say that because the customer base that NX sells to expects it to work 100% every single second of the day. So here are the downsides of Fusion:
These are only some of my current gripes with the fusion 360 product. I could go on for hours about why you should never use it, but then again... for 75% of the products we make, it works amazingly. Fusion's being built on the foundation of some of the most impressive software ever to exist in this industry. If Autodesk can get their act together and perfect the issues within it? It's unstoppable. I say that as someone who uses Featurecam, Fusion, Powermill, Esprit, and Mastercam.
Featurecam on the other hand is esprit on steroids in some ways. It's also esprit but about 10 years old in others. Sketching a complex model in featurecam just isn't something you do. Neither is assembling anything with joints or any kind of "normal" 3d modeling tools we all know and love. You can use Fusion for all of that and then dump the file into featurecam. Personally, Featurecam is my favorite software to use. The only downside is the neglect that featurecam and powermill(mainly featurecam) have seen from development due to the fusion 360 initiative of having one software to rule them all. I love featurecam to death, but GOD I wish it would get just a few more updates before they stopped pushing it forward. The actual toolpaths are where the money is, and featurecam knocks that out of the park. Basically, featurecam does 99% of the annoying leg work for toolpaths, and then you can tweak in the fine details. That's my favorite thing about it really, along with the super-efficient toolpaths that are quite different than anything I've used before. That said, it's all fun and games until you need a complex tool boundary or serious control over the 3d surfacing toolpaths. It's a double-edged sword for sure. Powermill will run you 10k for a single seat annually of 5 axis CAM. That's a ton of money, but hands down... powermill is THE god of cam. I've never seen anything like it, and I always find myself smiling while using it. The cost though... that part sucks.
The good thing is that PartMaker comes free with FeatureCAM so you can try both. PartMaker, FeatureCAM, and ESPRIT are very "mature" products and are all very good. ESPRIT is a little more difficult to use.
That being said, Esprit and FC function relatively similarly since they both use features and whatnot. In my opinion, it wouldn't be a huge leap to get into esprit from FC. I would say that Esprit, like any cam software, has its own issues. There are things FC does automatically that I wish esprit would do. However, Hexagon now owns Esprit, and they seem to be putting some serious development into it which is far more promising than what FC is getting from Autodesk. Personally, I just bought a post for a Mazak Integrex for FC, and I plan to stick with FC for as long as possible.
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