Online DWG viewer vs. installing BricsCAD

Last week, I was working with a group of people who are not CAD users. One of them received a 6.7MB .DWG file from a partner. I was asked how to view this file.

Rather than downloading and installing any kind of CAD software, my first thought was let’s use the Autodesk online viewer. Pretty simple solution, right? So we googled it, found the link and came to a sign in screen. The person with the drawing did not have an Autodesk account nor did they necessarily need one, so I signed in for them.

Then we uploaded the file and waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. And waited. We did not time it because, well why would we? I figured it might take 20-30 seconds tops, but it was probably in the neighborhood of 3-4 minutes instead. The progress indicator in use is not reflective of the actual progress either. The progress indicator appeared, instantly went to “50%”, where it stayed until the drawing was finally opened for viewing.  As someone who should know the answer to the original inquiry (“How can I view this file?”) – I felt embarrassed to have recommended this online viewer at this point. This wasn’t a 250MB DWG after all, why would it take close to 4 minutes?

Today, we decided to repeat the process and time it. Surely there was some problem last week; slow internet or a sporadic issue with the Autodesk viewer servers perhaps?

We started the timer when the initial web page loaded for the Autodesk online viewer. I signed in and started uploading the same DWG file. The total time was 2 minutes and 53 seconds. All but 37 seconds of that was processing time, about which the progress indicator gave little help once again, since it displayed “50%” the entire time. (This _was_ less time than it took last week, for whatever reason)

For comparison sake, we also started a new timer, and ran the installer for BricsCAD v18.2.04. Including the time for the installer to run, telling the install we wanted to run this as a trial, and opening the drawing, it took 1 minute and 33 seconds. (This time did not include downloading the 270MB installer file from Bricsys.) Since I have the install file for BricsCAD v18.2.04 handy, I think I’ll just install the trial if the same situation ever comes up. Especially if the DWG file is larger and/or there are more than one of them.

If you want to explore the Autodesk online DWG viewer, give it a shot and leave us your comments.

EDIT: Based on some comments on Twitter, I went ahead and downloaded Autodesk DWG Trueview, and BricsCAD Shape to find out how long each of these would take to install and display the same .DWG file. Surprisingly, DWG Trueview came in at almost exactly the same time as BricsCAD. Keep in mind that BricsCAD is a full fledged DWG authoring and editing application, while DWG Trueview is only a viewer, it can’t create, edit or save data. Having said that, BricsCAD Shape wins by a landslide. From the moment I started the install, until the drawing was up and ready for viewing was a lightning fast 33 seconds. Each test includes a human manually responding to the install screen prompts, selecting the file to open, etc. [Does not include time to download the install file(s)]

If download time is not a consideration, and you will not need to edit the DWG file, then DWG Trueview is equally as fast as BricsCAD when it comes to viewing.