The most ambitious of the four and the least ready. It is a genuine 2D drafting environment for drawings you author inside it, and a poor choice for opening someone else's DWG and saving it back. Both statements come from the project itself.
The numbers, because there are a lot of them
CADCraft's roadmap is the most granular self-audit in this family, measured against AutoCAD for Mac's menu structure. Feature breadth is 50% — 245 of 491 menu items have a live command behind them — and close to 65% if you count 2D menus only. Ready for real work is ≈38%. For a mainstream 2D drafter it drops to ≈28%, because file exchange, stability and interaction each apply a discount on top. For an essentials user, ≈46%.
It then breaks that down by dimension, and the distribution is the useful part:
| Dimension | Ready | Dimension | Ready |
|---|---|---|---|
| Platforms | 75% | Stability | 35% |
| Performance | 60% | File formats | 30% |
| UI/UX fidelity | 43% | Ecosystem & automation | 10% |
| Features (depth) | 41% | 3D modelling | 2% |
| Hardware | 45% | Localisation | 5% |
Read that table twice: platforms and performance are ahead of file formats and stability, and 3D is essentially absent. The roadmap estimates ~1,150–1,850 agent-hours to 95%, with the 3D kernel alone taking 300–450.
What actually works
- The draw and modify sets — LINE, PLINE with arcs, CIRCLE by centre/2P/3P, ARC, RECTANG with fillet, POLYGON, ELLIPSE, SPLINE, plus TRIM, EXTEND, FILLET, CHAMFER, STRETCH, OVERKILL and polar arrays.
- Object snaps — endpoint through nearest, polar tracking, ortho, grid snap, with deferred tangent and perpendicular snapping for the first point of a line.
- Dimensions — the DIM* family with DIMSTYLE variables and overrides, associative dimensions that follow geometry, MLEADER, tables.
- Layers and properties — the Layer Properties Manager, isolation and match tools, per-object property editing, linetypes, lineweights, true colour.
- Layouts and plotting — paper space, viewports with scale and per-viewport layer freezing, page setups, PLOT and EXPORTPDF.
- Parametric constraints — geometric and dimensional, PARAMETERS with expressions, conflict detection, re-solve after every edit.
- Thirteen interface languages, and a command line with autocomplete, aliases, direct distance entry and script files.
The sentence that should decide your decision
From the file-format row of the README: "Entities CADCraft doesn't model yet are not kept on save."
This is the only one of the four repositories that says out loud that saving can lose data, and it is worth more than any feature list. DWG is read through a third-party library (acadrust) and written to R2000; DXF is read across R12–2018 and written to R2000. If a file contains an entity type CADCraft has not implemented, the write path has nowhere to put it.
Practical consequence: open a colleague's drawing to look, not to save. Author your own drawings, export PDF or DXF, and keep the DWG master untouched until the file-format dimension is well above 30%.
What doesn't work yet
Confirmed working
- 2D draw and modify commands, osnaps
- Dimensions, tables, mtext, hatch, blocks
- Paper space, viewports, plotting to PDF
- Parametric constraints
- MCP server, JSON control channel, CLI
Documented gaps
- Unmodelled entities lost on save
- 3D modelling and rendering: 2%
- AutoLISP and ecosystem: 10%
- File formats: 30% — no lossless DWG path
- Stability 35%; localisation 5%
The project calls its next milestone the alpha gate, and describes four core workflows still failing it. That is honest scheduling, not marketing: this is pre-alpha and the roadmap says so before the README does.
Should you install it?
Try it if you draft 2D in a browser or on Linux, you want a scriptable CAD engine an agent can drive, or you are curious how much of AutoCAD is really the command line (answer: a lot — and it is well done here).
Wait if your work is opening and re-saving other people's DWGs. That is precisely the workflow the file-format score, and the save caveat, rule out for now.
Sources: github.com/storytold/cadcraft (README, ROADMAP.md, docs/file-format-parity.md, docs/gaps.md), read 18 October 2026.