Simple Mac Pro Drawing App

The latest version of MacDraft Professional is the 2D CAD app that makes floor & garden plan design, architectural drawing and technical illustration easy on Mac. Create precise and professional 2D CAD drawings in moments, with this easy-to-use, powerful and affordable drafting application. With its precise vector tools, smart units and fully-featured scaled environment MacDraft is designed to deliver an easy to use solution, without having to spend hours and hours learning how to use more complicated software.

What’s New in MacDraft 7.0?

The latest version of MacDraft Professional includes some impressive improvements and features, that makes version 7.0 far more intuitive, powerful and easy-to-use than ever before. Boasting a range of additions to not only make using MacDraft easier, but to speed up your design process.
See What’s New in MacDraft 7.0 ⟩

Apple Pencil sets the standard for how drawing, note‑taking, and marking up documents should feel — intuitive, precise, and magical. All with imperceptible lag, pixel‑perfect precision, tilt and pressure sensitivity, and support for palm rejection. Incredibly easy to use and ready when inspiration strikes.

Sep 15, 2019 I need a simple MAC CAD app to design an outdoor kitchen and the A-frame structure that protects it from the weather. I need to be able to make scale drawings and specify angle cuts in the roof trusses and support beams. SketchBook drawing and painting software lets designers, architects, and concept artists sketch ideas quickly and create stunning illustrations. Professional drawing tools with a beautiful interface, ideal for those on the go Designed for both stylus and touch input.

New User Interface

New Text System

Full Screen Mode

File Formats

Tool Improvements

Share & Collaborate

Vecorized Text

Swatches Panel

Calculate Perimeter

Improved Patterns

Align To page

More Templates

Improved Welcome

Power & Speed

Floor Plan Design
Quick and easy floor plan design for all building types

Whether you’re a novice or a seasoned draftsmen, floor plan design is quick and easy in MacDraft Professional. Combining powerful and precise drawing tools with thousands of pre-drawn symbols and graphics, you’ll be creating your floor plans in a matter of minutes. Add walls, windows and doors. Next you can drag and drop furniture, appliances and fixtures from a large library of floor plan symbols or create your own symbols. Once finished you can print your floor plan, export it and share it with others. Create traditional line work floor plans or full color vibrant floor plan designs, it’s up to you!
See all MacDraft Features ⟩

Garden Plan Design
Quick, vibrant and stylish garden & landscape designs

MacDraft Pro makes it easy to design and layout beautiful and vibrant landscape and garden plan designs. Combine ease of use with thousands of pre-drawn symbols and graphics, and start creating your landscape and garden plans in a matter of minutes. Add shapes, lines and sections. Next you can drag and drop plants, trees and structures from a large library of garden plan symbols or create your own symbols. Once finished you can print your designs, export them and share them with others. Create traditional line work garden and landscape designs or full color vibrant layouts, it’s up to you!
See all MacDraft Features ⟩

Technical Illustrations
Precise technical drawing with pinpoint accuracy

MacDraft Professional allows you to create incredibly detailed technical illustrations in minutes with the use of its powerful vector tools. Combine line styles, scale, graphics and dimensions to show case your designs to colleagues and clients. MacDraft Pro also boasts export to DWG allowing you to share your creations with other CAD applications and printer services! The level of detail you can gain with the layer system makes it so simple to produce high quality, professional results and turn a quick idea into a beautiful, crisp, informative, technical illustration. What are you waiting for?
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Site Plan Design
Towns, Maps? Whatever the size, MacDraft can do it

Draw precise and intricate topographical maps, charts and more on your Mac with MacDraft Pro. Layout street maps, land formations and intricate plans with MacDraft Pro’s precise and easy to use vector drawing tools. Combine the power of a fully-scaled drawing environment with the familiarity of a vector based drawing app to map out your ideas and create professional results. MacDraft Pro is the app that makes detailed drawing simple and inspires you to create professional looking designs in minutes with the use of its powerful vector tools.
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Engineering Drawing
Electrical to mechanical, MacDraft has you covered

MacDraft gives you the ability to generate Engineering Drawings and Layouts with ease. With templates and libraries available to get you started coupled with a myriad of precise and powerful vector tools, MacDraft really is the perfect tool for any engineers toolbox. A fully scaled environment with different scales allowed on different layers gives you the license to showcase all aspects of your design on a single sheet then go the extra step and give your drawings that much needed finishing touch with our intuitive and precise dimension tools.
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Page Layout
Dynamic tools and features for any layout project

Whether its a leaflet, business card or magazine, MacDraft provides both the vector and text tools needed to get you designing with confidence. Snapping gives you the ability to precisely place your content and create the perfect page layout in minutes. All of this coupled with the dynamic text editing offered in MacDraft creates an environment for you to produce amazing creations with a few clicks of your mouse. All finished? Well share and collaboarte with others either on the PC or the Mac.
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Graphic Design & Illustration
Let your imagination run wild, MacDraft will do the rest

Combine curves, gradients and opacities to create beautiful, cool and vibrant vector graphics in MacDraft. Whether its a logo, poster, brand or just a fun idea you’ve had, MacDraft gives you the chance to put pen to paper (or cursor to document layout) and let your skill and creativity take over. Getting stuck? We have thousands of breathtaking graphics available to you in the form of our graphics library add ons, simply drag and drop objects into your designs or create your own library of regularly used graphics for a future project! Your only limitation is your own imagination.
See all MacDraft Features ⟩

Drawing Tools
A complete set of tools for all your drawing needs

Powerful vector tools combined with precision dimensioning allows you to take your designs from a simple idea to a beautiful creation. MacDraft puts the power in your hands and allows you to draw, join, break, chamfer, duplicate, fillet, mirror, rotate, snap, trim and much more all in a single package. Add complex shapes together or create accurate walls with the powerful parallel lines tool. Whatever your project, rest assured that MacDraft has a tool to help you along your journey. Why wait? Take control and get designing today with the help of MacDraft’s intuitive and dynamic vector tools!
See all MacDraft Tools ⟩

Technology
Built for MacOS - Harnessing the power

MacDraft 7 has undergone a complete rewrite and as part of this has been modernised and upgraded to use all the latest technologies to give you the most modern, fast and efficient version of MacDraft yet.

Simple Mac Pro Drawing App For Pc

Color Sync
A platform-independent color management system provided by the Apple system.

Core Image
An image processing and analysis technology that provides high-performance processing.

Core Animation
Provides high frame rates and smooth animations without slowing down an app.

Core Graphics
Based on the Quartz advanced engine, providing low-level, lightweight 2D rendering.

Image I/O
Bandwidth usage mac. Programming framework that allows applications to read and write most image formats.

Quartz
A framework that allows users to browse, edit, and save images, using Core Image filters.

Core Text
A framework that provides modern, low-level programming for laying out and handling text.

QuickLook
A quick preview feature that allows you to view the content of a document without opening.

Auto Save
Automatically saving open documents to preserve user data and protect against data loss.

Auto Layout
Technology for automatically adapting to different screen sizes and orientations.

64-Bit Application
Gives the full power of your machine and is fully compatible with future operating systems.

Then you can enable 'require password immediately after sleep or screen saver begins.' Why is my mac book closing all apps when sleep.

Block GCD
A technology used to optimize application support for systems with multi-coreprocessors.

Dark/Light Mode
Integrating MacDraft with the System for changing between a light and dark interface layout.

Swift UI
The application UI has been written on latest Swift v4 code for use of modern technologies.

MacDraft Pro 7.0

System requirements:
Machines running MacOS 10.11 (El Capitan) or later.
Includes full Support for MacOS 10.14 (Mojave).
Available through our web-store from $399.00£339.00€379.00
You can also upgrade from previous versions

If you’re looking for CAD software for Mac, you’re not without options. We’ve found some standout Mac and cloud-based CAD platforms for you.

You’re likely to hit a wall if you’re searching for computer-aided design (CAD) software designed for Mac. There are plenty of CAD software options for Windows—you’ll see many of them in our list of the top AutoCAD alternatives—but only a handful offer support for Mac.

And, if you think you’ll bypass the issue by using a cloud-based CAD tool, you’ll quickly find that CAD vendors haven’t embraced the cloud as much as other types of software vendors have, so the offerings are still largely on-premise. According to Gartner’s Hype Cycle for IT Evolution (full content available to Gartner clients), cloud-native CAD applications still have five to 10 years before they reach mainstream adoption.

But fear not, Mac users. We’ve done some digging and have put together this list of the top-rated CAD software for Mac. Read more about our methodology at the bottom of this article.

5 Best CAD Software for Mac (presented alphabetically)

Jump to:


  • CorelCAD

  • FreeCAD

  • Fusion 360

  • LibreCAD

  • Onshape

1. CorelCAD

CorelCAD offers 2D drafting and 3D design capabilities, such as the drawing constraints feature for creating different geometric shapes faster and the push and pull feature for 3D direct modeling.

3D modeling in CorelCAD (Source)

Common user feedback trends

Based on analyses of user reviews on Capterra, here’s an overview of the areas of CorelCAD they like best, as well as those they feel could use improvement.

What users like:

  • The short learning curve: Users mention that the tool is easy to use and beginners don’t have to spend a lot of time learning it.
  • Compatibility with multiple file types: Users like the fact that the tool is compatible with DWG, PDF, ACIS, DXF, STL, CDR, and other file formats.

What users think could be improved:

  • Software reliability issues: Some users mention that the software tends to crash at times.
  • Better dimension functionality: Some users would like a better dimensioning feature for more accurate drawings of angles and proportions.

Who can use CorelCAD

CorelCAD can be used by construction businesses for collaborative editing on multiple devices. It offers native iOS applications, which makes it easy for field crews to add annotations in graphics and share files using their iPhones and iPads. Additionally, the tool allows team members to leave recorded messages and instructions for colleagues embedded in the graphics using a voice note tool.

2. FreeCAD

FreeCAD is an open source CAD tool that works on Mac as well as Windows and Linux. It reads many common file formats such as STEP, IGES, STL, SVG, DXF, OBJ, IFC, and DAE.

It offers different modules, including a drawing sheets module that converts 3D models into 2D views, a rendering module that can export 3D objects, and an architecture module for a BIM-like workflow.

3D model of a building in FreeCAD (Source)

Common user feedback trends

Based on analysis of user reviews on Capterra, here’s an overview of the areas of FreeCAD they like best, as well as those they feel could use improvement.

What users like:

  • Feature-richness for a free tool: Users mention that, although it’s free, the tool comes with a full set of features.
  • Reliability: Users mention that the tool does not demand a lot of CPU power and works well on devices with low RAM.

What users think could be improved:

  • Steep learning curve: Users mention that the tool is not the most user-friendly solution and can be difficult for beginners to learn.
  • Dependent on community for updates: Users mention that modules ignored by the community tend to become outdated quickly.

Who can use FreeCAD

FreeCAD appears to be best for hobbyists and home users. It’s also good for users who don’t have a high budget for software but still want to tinker with CAD modeling.

FreeCAD could also be a good choice for businesses on a budget looking for a free and open-source option.

3. Fusion 360

Fusion 360 is a CAD tool from Autodesk with design functionalities such as sketching and 3D modeling. It also supports project management with features such as task management, document management, and collaborative image editing.

Document management in Fusion 360 (Source)

Common user feedback trends

Based on analysis of user reviews on Capterra, here’s an overview of the areas of Fusion 360 they like best, as well as those they feel could use improvement.

What users like:

  • Comprehensive design features: User mention that the tool offers all the functionalities necessary for 2D and 3D designing.
  • Availability of training resources: Users like the fact that the tool comes with ample documentation and tutorials.

What users think could be improved:

  • System crashes: Users mention that the tool tends to crash, especially when designing and rendering large files.
  • Steep learning curve: Users mention that it can take a lot of time to learn the advanced functionalities of the tool.

Who can use Fusion 360

Fusion 360 is part of the Autodesk ecosystem designed for the AEC industry. This makes the tool suitable for construction businesses that are already using, or intend to use, other Autodesk solutions. Using a software vendor that offers multiple solutions will especially benefit larger businesses that invariably need software that can scale with their growing requirements.

4. LibreCAD

LibreCAD is an open source CAD tool that supports Mac, Windows, and Linux operating systems. The tool comes with 2D drawing features such as a snap tool, dimensioning, and annotations. It also supports multiple file imports and exports.

2D drawing in LibreCAD (Source)

Common user feedback trends

Based on analysis of user reviews on Capterra, here’s an overview of the areas of LibreCAD they like best, as well as those they feel could use improvement.

What users like:

  • Ease of use: Users mention that the tool offers an intuitive and easy-to-use interface.
  • Lots of tutorials: Users like the fact that there are ample video tutorials that help them get started with the tool.

What users think could be improved:

  • Software speed: Users mention that the software tends to lag, especially when trying to print designs.
  • Add support for 3D design: Users would like to see functionalities for creating 3D designs.
Pro

Who can use LibreCAD

LibreCAD is an exclusively 2D CAD tool for drawing and designing blueprints of buildings, layouts of parks, and the like. As a free tool, the solution can be used by small and midsize businesses across different industries, including manufacturing, engineering, architecture, and construction.

5. Onshape

Onshape is a cloud-only CAD solution that comes with features such as document management with version control, collaborative design creation/editing capabilities, and reporting dashboards to understand project status.

Importing documents in Onshape (Source)

Common user feedback trends

Based on analysis of user reviews on Capterra, here’s an overview of the areas of Onshape they like best, as well as those they feel could use improvement.

What users like:

  • Document version control: Users like the document management features of the tool, such as version history.
  • Intuitive interface: Users mention that the tool comes with an intuitive interface for easy image editing.

What users think could be improved:

  • Performance issues: Some users mention that the tool does not function well on non-Chrome browsers and has file loading issues.
  • Lack of features: Users mention that the tool should improve certain features such as 2D drawing and 3D surfacing.

Who can use Onshape

As a fully-cloud based tool, Onshape is ideal for businesses that need to manage design documents collaboratively with multiple stakeholders. The tool’s collaboration functionalities include document sharing, document editing, comments, and file downloads in multiple CAD formats, such as Parasolid, ACIS, STEP, and IGES.

Next steps

This report offers a mix of Mac CAD solutions—from free tools that can help you with basic 2D drawing to advanced solutions offering extensive 3D modeling functionalities.

If these tools don’t meet your needs, expand your search and check out more options. To help you, we’ve created a CAD software comparison page where you can explore products using different filters, such as features offered and pricing options.

If you’re looking to understand the CAD software market better, we also recommend that you read the articles listed below:

Methodology

To be shortlisted, products had to fulfill the following criteria:

  • Products had to be compatible with Mac and offer core CAD software capabilities, such as:
    • 2D drawing or 3D modeling features
    • Collaborative editing of drawings
  • Products needed a minimum of 20 user reviews on Capterra (published in the last two years).
  • Products had to have a high overall rating (an average of at least 4 out of 5 on Capterra).

Note: The content in this piece that provides opinions and points of view expressed by users. It does not represent the views of Capterra.

Looking for Construction Management software? Check out Capterra's list of the best Construction Management software solutions.