Shapr3D

Shapr3D is built around direct, gesture-driven 3D sketching — you draw and push geometry with a finger or an Apple Pencil rather than clicking through dialog boxes — but underneath the touch interface it runs Siemens' Parasolid modelling kernel and D-Cubed constraint solver, the same components used inside SolidWorks, Inventor, Solid Edge and NX/Designcenter. That combination is unusual: most touch-first design apps use a lightweight engine of their own, while Shapr3D licenses the professional one.

The free Basic plan gives full access to the modelling tools with a two-project limit and low-resolution exports; the paid Pro plan, billed annually, unlocks unlimited projects, higher-resolution exports and formats that read and write SolidWorks files directly. It is also free for verified students and educators.

Choose Shapr3D if you want to sketch and rough out a part away from a desk — on a train, in a workshop, next to the physical object you are designing around — and finish the precise dimensioning later on the same file, on any of its supported platforms.

Against the desktop parametric tools on this list, Shapr3D trades some of their assembly and drafting depth for a genuinely different input method. Against Onshape, the other platform-agnostic option here, Shapr3D was built touch-first and expanded to desktop, while Onshape was built desktop-first and later added tablet support.