AutoCAD at $2,095 and ANSYS near $5,000 face paid rivals from $299 and credible open-source tools at $0

Asked:

“What are the current per-user annual subscription prices for Autodesk AutoCAD, Dassault SolidWorks, Altium Designer, MathWorks MATLAB, ANSYS, and Bentley Systems software, and which cheaper competitors or clones undercut them?”

Six headline products are compared on per-user annual USD prices gathered as of 7 October 2026 from vendor pages, authorized resellers and independent pricing sources, alongside a deduplicated shortlist of cheaper paid and free/open-source substitutes. The ANSYS figure is a third-party estimate and Altium’s packaging is not apples-to-apples; both are flagged below.

incumbent, public priceincumbent, third-party estimate (not an official list price)cheapest paid alternativefree / open-source substitute at $0 (partial feature overlap)

DraftSight Professional covers core 2D DWG work at $299/year — about 14% of AutoCAD’s $2,095 list price (solidworks.com).

Altium’s entry package is Altium Develop at $1,990/year including one Designer author; an additional author is $995/year, while some listings quote $4,235/year for a Designer Standard seat (checkthat.ai).

SOLIDWORKS Design Standard’s current authorized-reseller 1-year term starts at $3,240.94 for an individual license; lower figures in circulation reflect older or less clearly scoped listings (hawkridgesys.com).

ANSYS prices mainly by quote; the ~$5,000/year figure for basic Mechanical is a third-party estimate, with open-source FEA solvers CalculiX and Code_Aster free at $0 (simscale.com).

Prices and alternatives, with sources

Product	USD/year	Confidence / scope	Cheaper alternatives in the shortlist	Source

Pricing snapshot as of 2026-10-07. Built from a 10-row shaped incumbent table (6 headline products used; AutoCAD LT, AutoCAD mobile, MySolidWorks and Bentley Civil WorkSuite rows set aside as ancillary), a 15-row alternative shortlist (KiCad and Scilab versions deduplicated; an obsolete page calling DraftSight free excluded), plus 351 incumbent-evidence and 561 alternative-evidence rows. Each number is a per-user annual USD price before tax unless noted; the ANSYS figure is a third-party estimate and Altium packaging is not seat-for-seat comparable. Incumbent rows span 10 hosts (no URL over 10% of rows); the shortlist spans 8 hosts (no URL over 13.4%). Evidence quotes and ancillary editions were cut for space.

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