A real CAD system, built from the kernel up.

Why build another CAD system

Most software that calls itself CAD in a browser is a viewer with a measurement tool bolted on. It can show you a model somebody else made, and it stops there. The moment you need a fully defined sketch, a fillet that fails honestly on a short face, a feature you can reorder, or a toolpath tied to the geometry that produced it, you are back on a workstation with a licence dongle.

Chudware exists because that gap is an engineering problem, not a marketing one. Solving it means carrying a genuine solid-geometry kernel all the way through the product — exact B-rep solids, where a fillet is a real surface and not a facet — rather than approximating solids with meshes and hoping nobody asks for a section view.

What that actually means

One document carries the constrained sketches, the ordered features, the assembly mates, the manufacturing plan, the study results, and the project history, instead of the work being handed between disconnected tools and losing a little truth at every boundary. Per-account isolation is enforced at the gateway rather than left to convention. Documents are dimensioned in millimetre-gram-second or inch-pound-second units, but geometry is always stored in millimetres, so the unit system is a display choice and not a conversion you can quietly lose precision to.

The native file format is .step+, which keeps the feature tree, dimensions, materials, studies, and drawings. It is a container with a neutral STEP body stored inside it, so another CAD system can open the geometry even when it cannot read the tree. Coming the other way, Chudware opens STEP, IGES, and BREP solids, STL, OBJ, PLY, and glTF meshes, and DXF for 2D profiles. The editable design is not held hostage inside a proprietary blob you cannot open elsewhere.

How it is delivered

The browser runs the same application as the desktop build, in your tab. Model state and tool calls travel over the wire — never a video stream of a machine in a data centre — so the geometry kernel and the full engineering toolchain stay intact rather than being reduced to whatever a page can do on its own. Signed native builds for Windows, Linux, and macOS run the same product surface on an engineering workstation and are downloaded from your account.

Some of it is open source

Chudware's second meshing backend is a separate BSD-3-licensed project, written by the same author and published on its own: an adaptive polyhedral mesher and the linear-elastostatics solver it was co-designed with. Chudware pins one commit of it and uses it as an independent cross-check on a stress result, and as the size field that error-driven adaptive mesh refinement needs. What is open, and what it is used for.

The posture, honestly

Chudware is built by a small team and is in commercial preview. Preview means the product modes are real and in daily use, and it also means the public rate card is not finished and features still move. Where a page cannot yet state something true, it says so — that is why pricing publishes no numbers it has not ratified and security claims no certification it has not earned.