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Work · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD

Hello! We’re Kevin and Sohrab from Hestus (https://www.hestus.co). We're working on an AI copilot for CAD. Today we're releasing a simple sketch helper for Fusion 360 and would love your feedback. Here’s a quick demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9n_eY-fM_E. Why we’re doing this: Mechanical engineers excel at generating initial design concepts but get bogged down translating ideas into final designs due to tedious, repetitive tasks. Our goal is to automate these mundane processes, allowing engineers to focus on the creative aspects of design. Having worked at…

Hestus is an AI copilot for Fusion 360 that helps mechanical engineers automate repetitive CAD tasks. The tool includes a sketch helper designed to reduce time spent on tedious, manual design work, freeing engineers to… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Hestus – AI Copilot for CAD launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    AI CAD inside Onshape and Fusion

    Jul 2026 · adam.new · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Remember anything with a real-time, on-device AI assistant

    2024 · pieces.app · its alternatives →

  3. 3
    Hexus AI▲690

    Your AI creator for engaging product demos & docs

    2024 · hexus.ai · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Enable your users to collaborate with AI inside your product

    2025 · liveblocks.io · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Copilot for product development

    2022 · monterey.ai · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Hi HN, I'm Zach, one of the co-founders of Adam (https://adam.new). We've been on HN twice before with text-to-CAD/3D experiments [1][2]. The honest takeaway from those threads: prompt-to-3D model web apps are fun, but serious mechanical engineers don't want a black box that spits out an STL. They want help inside the CAD tool they already use, with full visibility and control over the feature tree. So we built that. Adam is now a harness that integrates directly with your CAD. It reads your parts, understands the existing feature tree, and edits it for you agentically. We are…

    May 2026 · fusion.adam.new · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Discover the power of Flux Copilot, an AI hardware assistant that can wire up your schematic diagrams effortlessly. Harnessing Generative AI for Cutting-Edge Hardware Design: Embrace the Future

    2023 · flux.ai · its alternatives →

  8. 8
    Eraser AI▲768

    The first copilot for technical design

    2024 · eraser.io · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    IT chatbot that simplifies your life

    2025 · fleet.co · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    AI agent that helps, solves, and closes. All day, every day

    2023 · kaily.ai · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Your AI Companion

    2025 · news.microsoft.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Your AI pair programmer

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Copilot for generating 3d assets for Blender/Unity

    2025 · instant3d.ai · its alternatives →

  14. 14
    Figr AI▲503

    Built Figr AI because I got tired of AI builder tools market themselves as design tools and end up skipping the hard part. Every tool I tried would jump straight to screens. But that's not how product design actually works. You don't just design screens. You think through the problem first. The flows, the edge cases, the user journey, where people will get stuck. Then the design comes finally. Figr does that thinking layer first. It parses your existing product via a chrome extension or takes in screen-records, then works through the problem with you before designing. Surfaces edge cases,…

    Feb 2026 · figr.design · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    A new AI model to turn ideas into product design

    2024 · app.figr.design · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Copilot-native dev environment, designed for everyday tasks

    2024 · github.blog · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Hardware prototyping, as simple as vibe-coding

    Jul 2026 · easycircuit.app · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Use AI to design products & packaging and get it made

    2024 · pietrastudio.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Hey HN! I’m Zach one of the co-founders of Adam (https://www.adamcad.com). We're building AI-powered tools for CAD and 3D modeling [1]. We’ve recently been exploring a new way to bring GPT-style image editing directly into 3D model generation and are excited to showcase this in our web-app today. We’re calling it creative mode and are intrigued by the fun use cases this could create by making 3D generation more conversational! For example you can put a prompt in such as “an elephant” then follow it up by “have it ride a skateboard” and it preserves the context, identity and…

    2025 · adamcad.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    The industry’s first AI assistant for clinical workflow

    2025 · microsoft.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21
    agentcad▲110

    A CAD design tool for coding agents (free + open source)

    Jun 2026 · agentcad.dev · its alternatives →

  22. 22
    Whisker▲94

    Create and edit CAD models into production-ready prototypes

    Mar 2026 · whisker.spatialkittens.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23AI

    Hey HN! We’re Will and Jorge, and we’ve built LAD (Language-Aided Design), a SolidWorks add-in that uses LLMs to create sketches, features, assemblies, and macros from conversational inputs (https://www.trylad.com/). We come from software engineering backgrounds where tools like Claude Code and Cursor have come to dominate, but when poking around CAD systems a few months back we realized there's no way to go from a text prompt input to a modeling output in any of the major CAD systems. In our testing, the LLMs aren't as good at making 3D objects as they are are writing code,…

    Jan 2026 · trylad.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24FP

    Hello HN users, This is a CAD by code project I have been working on on my free time for more than year now. I built it with 3 goals in mind: - It should be familiar to CAD designers who have used other programs. Same workflow, same terminology. - Reduce the mental effort required to create models as much as possible. This is achieved by: - Provide live rendering and visual guidance as you type. - Allow the user to reference existing edges/faces on the scene instead of having to calculate everything. - Provide interactive mouse helpers for features that are hard to write by code: Only 3…

    Apr 2026 · fluidcad.io · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →