The most trustworthy project on this site, and the one whose limits are easiest to state precisely: it does simple parts well and says so. What it lacks is not honesty but scope — and, unusually for this group, code-signed installers.
A different kind of claim
The four Crafting Apps estimate their own readiness as a percentage: 60, 50, 55, 38. SolidCraft does not publish a percentage at all. It publishes a test. Seventy-six reference parts are modelled and compared against analytic values or FreeCAD's computed volume, area, centre of mass and bounding box. 75 of 76 match; the remaining one is a tracked bug.
The project is careful about what that proves, in a sentence worth quoting in full: "These checks do not establish complete geometric or workflow equivalence." That is a stronger claim than most commercial software makes about its own test suite, and a much more useful one than a self-assigned grade.
What actually works
- Sketch and constrain, extrude, fillet, shell, pattern, engrave text, and cut ports and vent slots — the pipeline for a printable enclosure.
- A parametric timeline: change a dimension, and the model rebuilds through its history.
- Materials with properties — define PETG, see the mass.
- STEP, IGES and STL import and export, plus DXF export of the current view.
- Desktop and browser from the same codebase, with an MCP server for agents.
The demonstration worth opening is a user project, not a marketing render: SELENE, a scientific rover built entirely through SolidCraft's MCP server — 3,323 editable timeline steps that rebuild with no errors. An agent driving a CAD kernel for three thousand operations is a more meaningful benchmark than any feature count.
What doesn't work yet
Confirmed working
- Sketch → extrude → fillet → shell workflow
- Parametric rebuild from the timeline
- STEP/IGES/STL in and out
- Web app and native builds
- MCP-driven modelling at scale
Documented gaps
- Mesh imports can't drive solid features
- No HDRI, refraction or texture work
- Face attachments need manual repair
- Installers are not code-signed yet
- v0.11–0.14 cannot auto-update to 0.15+
The repository states its own stage without decoration: "early but usable for simple parts."
The unsigned installer is the real warning
Unlike the four ArtCraft applications, which ship signed MSIs and DMGs, SolidCraft's README says plainly that its downloads are not signed yet. On Windows you will meet SmartScreen; on macOS you must right-click and choose Open the first time.
This is not a reason to avoid it — it is a reason to know what you are clicking. Verify from the releases page, and prefer the web app if you only want to evaluate it.
There is also a known upgrade trap: versions 0.11 through 0.14 cannot install 0.15.0 or later through their internal updater, because the releases moved. Download the new build once by hand; after that, in-app updating works again.
Should you install it?
Try it if you design simple mechanical parts — brackets, enclosures, adapters — and want a fast parametric modeller without a licence server. It is the easiest of the five to recommend for a real afternoon of work.
Wait if your workflow depends on surfacing, assemblies at scale, or heavy texture and rendering work. That is not what this build is for, and the README does not pretend otherwise.
Sources: github.com/tangency-labs/solidcraft (README, docs/oracle.md, docs/features.md, ROADMAP.md), solidcraft.io, read 18 October 2026.