Corelcad 2023 Review

[Neomi Bensch]

TheCanadian software company Corel has been around since 1985. Its CorelDRAW software, introduced in 1989, was one of the first graphics programs available for Windows, and at one time, Corel was the biggest software company in Canada. In 1996, it acquired WordPerfect and attempted to compete against Microsoft Word. More recently, Corel has acquired programs in markets such as design, illustration, photo editing and video editing.

With CorelCAD 2019, the program can now open and save drawings in the latest AutoCAD 2018 DWG format, whereas the previous release could open the newer format but saved drawings in the older 2013 format.

CorelCAD 2019 is available for Windows and Mac OS; mobile versions are available for Android and iOS devices. CorelCAD 2019 offers productivity improvements as well as new and enhanced tools for 2D drafting and 3D solid modeling.

Like AutoCAD, each drawing appears in its own window, identified by a file tab across the top of the drawing area. You can use the drawing file tabs to easily switch between drawings or start a new drawing, and use tabs in the lower-left corner of the window to switch between model space and multiple sheets, which is similar to paper space layouts in AutoCAD.

But there are significant differences between CorelCAD and AutoCAD. In AutoCAD, you can open the block editor to define a dynamic block on the fly. In CorelCAD, you must first use the MakeBlock command to define a block based on existing objects and then use the EditCustomBlock command to open that block in the Custom Block Editor.

But CorelCAD lacks the ability to test block behavior while in the custom block editor. You must first save your changes, exit the block editor and then test an instance of the block within the drawing.

Within the drawing, the controls for manipulating blocks are nearly identical to those in AutoCAD. But when working in the Block Editor, tools used to modify custom blocks in CorelCAD are not as intuitive as those in AutoCAD, owing largely to user interface differences between the two programs.

For example, AutoCAD provides a Block Editor contextual ribbon and a block authoring tool palette. But since CorelCAD lacks both context-sensitive ribbons and tool palettes, the tools for editing custom blocks appear in a collection of icon-only toolbars, even when using a ribbon-based CorelCAD workspace.

Working in the other direction, if you define a custom block in CorelCAD and then open that drawing in AutoCAD, the custom block lacks custom capabilities. But if you save the drawing and reopen the DWG file in CorelCAD, the custom block capabilities are once again present.

CorelCAD 2019 also now includes a Polysolid tool for creating 3D solids in the shape of a wall or series of walls. This tool is identical to the Polysolid command in AutoCAD, including the ability to specify the height, width and justification options as well as the ability to convert an existing entity into a polysolid.

A new Chamfer Edge command lets you bevel the edges of 3D solids, including options to specify a face or loop, and the existing Fillet Edge command has been updated to include Face, Chain and Loop options. Plus while you could export STL files from previous versions of CorelCAD, you can now import them into CorelCAD 2019 as well.

Other new features in CorelCAD 2019 include a Layer Manager palette, a Merge Layers tool that displays a dialog box for merging one or more layers to a destination layer, support for 4K monitors and improved preview and selection highlighting.

CorelCAD continues to provide good support for AutoLISP and ARX, and it offers some capabilities not found in AutoCAD. For example, you can insert audio recordings into a drawing and then play them back later. Although AutoCAD does not support these VoiceNotes, it can open drawings containing them.

CorelCAD also supports other industry-standard formats, including SVG, ACIS and SAT, enabling users to import files from other CAD programs. You can also export PDF and include PDF files as underlays, although you cannot import PDF geometry into a CorelCAD drawing. Further, you can import CorelDRAW (CDR) and CorelDESIGNER (DES) files as model space objects and export CorelCAD drawings to both formats, but only in the Windows version.

At $699 for a perpetual license, CorelCAD is much less expensive than AutoCAD or even AutoCAD LT, which are only available by subscription. You can also upgrade from any previous version of CorelCAD for $199. If you prefer a subscription, however, Corel now offers the Mac and Windows versions for $35 per month or $300 per year from the Apple and Windows app stores, respectively.

Although there remain several AutoCAD features that are still not available in CorelCAD, that list continues to get shorter. Its low cost and similarities to AutoCAD continue to make CorelCAD an attractive alternative for those on a budget.

David Cohn is a consultant and technical writer based in Bellingham, WA, and has been benchmarking PCs since 1984. He is a Contributing Editor to Digital Engineering, the former senior content manager at 4D Technologies, and the author of more than a dozen books. Email at [email protected] or visit his website at www.dscohn.com.

CorelCAD 2023 is the last version. It was released in 2022 and updated with a service pack in December 2022, which is the last setup availble. As of January 2024, CorelCAD is discontinued and it is no longer possible to buy new licenses.

CorelCAD users with a valid perpetual license are offered a 50% time-limited discount to buy a 3 Years license of the ARES Trinity of CAD software, including ARES Commander, ARES Kudo and ARES Touch. As the 3 Years Plan is already offering 3 years for the price of 2, the 50% discount is granting CorelCAD users 3 years for the price of 1! More detailed information is found on www.graebert.com/corelcad .

Any perpetual license of CorelCAD for Windows or Mac is valid for the Transition Offer to the ARES CAD software. You can check the validity of your CorelCAD product key on the page www.graebert.com/corelcad.

Graebert reserves the right to interrupt this offer at any time. If you are interested we recommend that you take action now, and start a free 30-day trial of the ARES Trinity of CAD software. In the unlikely event that the offer would expire before the end of your 30-day trial we guarantee that we would extend the offer for you until expiry of your trial.

The decision to discontinue CorelCAD was taken by Alludo. The users of CorelCAD have been informed by Alludo in an emailing in January 2024. You can read their official statement at the top of the page www.graebert.com/corelcad. More generally, you can read more about the new global strategy of Alludo from this press release.

As CorelCAD was mostly distributed as perpetual licenses, the impact on the users is limited. The CorelCAD users are free to keep using their perpetual license. The transition offer from Graebert is mostly aiming at offering a continuity, to get more features and future updates.

Alludo will keep offering online technical support to the CorelCAD users, as previously, until end of 2025. After this date, Alludo may continue to offer support for licenses (re)activation but only on a good will basis.

To benefit from a free technical support from Graebert for 3 months, the CorelCAD users are invited to visit the page www.graebert.com/corelcad and start a free 30-day trial for ARES Commander. Free technical support for CorelCAD will be provided for the 90 days following the start of the trial. It is however not possible to extend the technical support for CorelCAD after these 90 days, neither on a free, nor commercial basis.

Not at all. No matter if you decide to take the transition offer or not, your Perpetual license of CorelCAD will remain untouched. Although you will enter your product key of CorelCAD as coupon code it will NOT disable your license. As a result, if you buy our transition offer, you remain free to use your CorelCAD license in parallel on the same computer (although it will not bring any benefit in terms of features) or another computer.

Most essentially, when your 3 years license of ARES will expire, you will keep the option to return to your older perpetual license of CorelCAD if you are not convinced. But we trust you will like to continue with another ARES license, possibly another 3 years plan but also a perpetual license of ARES Commander if you prefer.

On the page www.graebert.com/corelcad we invite you to discover our video explaining the top 10 benefits and to download our full benchmark table stressing out all the benefits. In short, the latest version of CorelCAD 2023 was based on ARES Commander 2023.

If CorelCAD is still installed on a computer you can find the product key in the About box of CorelCAD. The product key is 27 characters long. It is the part after the underscore in the SERIAL NUMBER you see in the About box.

Each product key of CorelCAD can only be used once for the Transition Offer, and only for one user. If you have multiple users we invite you to follow the steps on the page www.graebert.com/corelcad once for each product key, and to repeat the same process several times if needed.

No, the Transition Offer is only offered from our online E-Store and only via www.graebert.com/corelcad. Other purchase methods can however be used to buy new licenses without the migration discount, if you want for example to increase the number of your users.

Yes of course. CorelCAD and ARES Commander are based on the same ARES CAD technology. They both read and save directly in the same DWG format. Besides, ARES Commander is now able to import/export in CorelDRAW (*.cdr) or Corel DESIGNER (*.des) file formats. Read our comparison table to see all the file formats supported.

Yes, if you take a look at the BIM drawings features of ARES Commander, you will see that, unlike CorelCAD, ARES Commander can import Revit (*.rvt) or IFC files to not only visualize the BIM projects in 3D, but also automate the production in DWG format of floorplans, sections and elevations extracted from the BIM models. Additionally, you may export the DWG files to CorelDRAW or Corel DESIGNER file formats.

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