5 Trends in the CAD industry for 2025 and Beyond

The end of the year tends to make us look to the future, and in 3D engineering, staying ahead of the curve is everything. The CAD industry as a whole is constantly changing, and these are 5 of the evolutions we expect to see in the near future. Here are 5 of the most important trends developers, decision-makers, and anyone else in the CAD industry need to know for the next year and beyond.

One File Format Will be Widely Used

Interoperability has been a battle since the early days of CAD, with different organizations and industries creating hundreds of formats. We’ve written about it for Develop3D, and if you work in CAD, you’ve almost certainly struggled with it. We expect to see more consolidation around a single format for the CAD industry.

In other areas, we have seen consolidation around 1 master format. For word processing, the DOC file has dominated. For general document use, PDFs are the most common by far. Even in engineering, 2D CAD has the DWG format. Recent developments by industry leaders support this prediction: Dassault Systèmes and Autodesk have made big pushes for more cloud-based CAD systems, that don’t leverage individual files.

Additive manufacturing is a good example of a technical field seeing this change happening. As new applications are released, they are making use of existing formats (usually STL) instead of trying to create their own or leveraging a preexisting proprietary one tied to a parent organization.

So, which format will reign supreme? There are many options, and we will have to wait and see, but Siemens NX is a promising contender. Siemens provides SDKs for crucial players in the CAD space, including JT and Parasolid. The format supports hybrid modeling (equation surfaces and mesh surfaces), along with both parametric and direct modeling.

For organizations developing both developer and end-user applications, we think it will be crucial to support this format. We encourage you to look into the tools we offer to support NX. HOOPS Exchange can provide your application with the ability to support NX import, and Theorem CAD Translate can support NX export.

Decreased Market Share for CAD Applications Across the Board

This is a scary headline, but it represents a natural evolution in the CAD industry that many others have gone through. As industries develop, the market matures, specialization happens, and companies find themselves with less overall market share and more niche products.

We have seen this happen in the automotive industry – we have 4-door sedans, SUVs, trucks, sports cars, and many more specialized vehicles. Each segment is a smaller part of the whole industry. Another example is tablet computer development. Where there was a single tablet in the past, you can now buy nearly any size or specs to fit your precise needs. The maturity of the market creates this specialization, and thus fragmentation, and we expect to see this happen more and more in CAD.

This touches on another key trend we are seeing: specialization. Sheet metal is a fantastic example of this, where those working in this space have a specific set of CAD needs separate from the wider market. In response to this demand, we see more specialized applications coming out, not to serve the wider CAD market, but sheet metal specifically.

The natural result of this maturity and specialization is fewer clicks for applications. For those creating new applications, the key takeaway is to find your niche, develop in that space, and market specifically to your industry.

Component technology is one tool you can use to help your application have industry-leading features while allowing you to keep your focus on your niche.

No New CAD Applications Will be Made from Scratch

Development is expensive and extremely time-consuming. End users have higher-than-ever expectations around quality, ease of use, and feature breadth. Developing from scratch can take 3 years of paying developers to simply get a proof of concept and half a decade to ship. All these forces lead us to a simple prediction: almost no new CAD applications will be built entirely from scratch.

As SDK providers, we are well-positioned to speak on this topic. Our whole business model is built around creating Strategic Technology Partnerships with application developers and providing key functionality to their products. We know that toolkits can save developers time, money, and help you with a more complete product because we’ve done it with hundreds of companies. Heck, we use them ourselves.

This trend, like the others on this list, is not unique to CAD. Using the automotive industry as an example again, parts and software are used across a wide range of models, year-over-year.

This is not a bad thing or a lack of innovation. Reusing resources allows organizations, from CAD to cars and beyond, to keep from reinventing the wheel every time. Focus on what makes your product unique, on your area of innovation, and use preexisting tools to provide the polish and feature breadth your customers’ demand.

We have a fantastic example of this in action from the early days of CAD. A popular, early CAD system that created their own CAD modeling, 3D visualization and data exchange functionality from scratch. SolidWorks used Parasolid for CAD modeling, and HOOPS toolkits for other key functionality. They were able to offer their product for less than half the price. Today, SolidWorks is an industry titan with the world's largest market share in the CAD market.

If you want to replicate that success rather literally, we are proud resellers of Parasolid. We offer HOOPS Exchange for CAD data translation, HOOPS Communicator and HOOPS Visualize for visualization, and much more.

3D Modeling Will Start From Scanning 3D Objects

The first and simplest reason why 3D scanning is so useful is its speed, ease of use, and cost. This is technology that has been developed for a long time and is hitting a critical mass of ease of availability and utility. It is easier than ever before to get accurate, detailed 3D scans at an affordable price.

Innovations in mesh modeling will further support this trend. Once again, we recommended Parasolid, due to their support for hybrid modeling. Parasolid calls this “Parasolid Convergent Modeling”, and it serves as an extension of the existing BREP. Parasolid is a tried-and-true foundation for applications, including NX and Solid Edge.

Prices of 3D CAD Applications Will Continue to Rise

Many popular CAD applications have seen price increases in the past years, and we expect that this trend is only going to continue. Some of the predictions we have discussed have a strong influence on the cost of these applications. The limited number of users a specialized application can target will lend itself to a higher price per user.

Additionally, there is a pervasive shortage of the resources used in programming. While innovations in AI, gaming, and digital transformations are good for their industries, they put a strain on the finite number of tools available to organizations looking to develop.

Finally, switching CAD products is expensive and time-consuming, with more complex products incurring higher and higher training costs.

Naturally, many people are looking at ways to reduce CAD costs. To start, users can limit the customization they are looking for in the applications they leverage. Improved hardware can reduce issues with software speed, and modifications to your workflow can be done to better suit a tool.

Developers can include users in their development process through beta testing and providing APIs for people to make functionality for themselves. Licensing your product to more customers in an organization is one way to reduce prices for many developers – software is free to copy. The more users you offer your product to for the same price, the lower the per-user cost and the more potentially tolerable the final bill.

The Role of SDKs in CAD

A common theme throughout our predictions is the potential SDKs can offer developers. Used well, the right toolkit can streamline development, reduce costs, and greatly improve your final product.

The best way to find out if toolkits are right for you is to get in touch. We want to learn about your unique needs and challenges and help pair you with the best tools for your industry. No matter your CAD application development needs, we can support you.