Thats what I like about Cabinetsense is the ability to completely invade cabs and components and I do a massive amount of presentation work in Sketchup so the flow is great. If I were making a much higher percentage of straight boxes even with a high percentage of semi odd stuff I may be looking around but its an environment Im very comfortable in and given I do the vast majority of the drawing that works.

Learning software is fine (or telling your draftsman to) but in my opinion if your the one doing a good bit of the work (CAD CAM) you have to find an environment thats somewhat intuitive to you or you wind up beating your head against the wall constantly.

Just get some trial versions and see what feels the most natural to you. That will likely be the best fit.

Back in the day in order to do custom you had to use Solidworks with no woodworking buttons or Auto Cad with Micro Vellum or Smartlister with a huge learning curve.

I would have killed to have CS back then

Thanks for all the great insight and help. I will be doing everything myself as well, I don’t mind an extra step with the cad and the cam. I like to pay the least amount as possible, but with saying that I still want a decent product. Years ago I did all of the shop drawings for a cabinet shop and used AutoCAD lite. The shop used cabinet vision, the owner hated cabinet vision so it ended up in a drawer somewhere. The price was unbelievable at the time, there was nothing wrong with the program, we just specialized in commercial cabinets with a lot of oddball size and shape reception counters, the cabinet vision took to long according to the owner.

Mark B ,
From your comment about Not paying for Sketchup when they start to charge, what are you going to use?

James,
I live north of the border so our dollar is not worth much, kind of like Monopoly money, that is why I figured about $200 for Mozaik.

Theyve already started charging. I am on the last year of the classic license and have maintenance and support til this fall. At that point I will just stick with whatever the most current version I have at that point moving forward and new features that require latest versions of SU in Cabinetsense just wont be available to me.

Im fine with that as I dont push the boundaries of SU/Cabinetsense as it is and Im 54 so I will likely be fine from that point on. If not I'll deal with it when the time comes.

I abhor the subscription based stuff even though I have a lot of it. I refuse to support it unless I simply have no better option and re-training my brain at this stage is not an option nor a need.

Mozaik, Mozaik, Mozaik

It took me a good year and a half to learn it enough to where I could do most everything I wanted with it .

But once you get good with it it is so so nice. I went from building an average kitchen ( 25k range ) in about three weeks to one week with this software, and I am a onw man shop. This includes dovetail drawer boxes , MDF Doors in any style imaginable, all boxes , custom stuff, closets, all G coded for you and I will tell you it is by far the best money I have ever spent. 125.00 a month and I would say its worth many times that. Try it out, you have nothing to loose as its pay as you go.

I will say that you will not reach peak efficiency with it till you have been using it for a while ...... but that is true with anything .

It is the one thing besides the CNC and the PLC Bander that changed my business and allowed me to quadruple my income based on this piece of software alone.

The help desk is free and responds usually within 24 hours.

We tried mozaik for several months. We do custom cabinets and furniture. Mozaik was unable to draw our kitchen cabinets. Everytime we would use tech support the answer was the same....buy some training. We spent good money with a trainer for over three hours. We were eventually told that Mozaik could not do what we were trying to do but offered us 50 percent off the training which did not help us.
We were able to build the cabinet with one hour of training from Cabinet Sense.

I am really courious to know What you are trying to cab in a Cabinet that CS would do but Moziak would not ?

I would like to know what cabinet sense would do that Mozaik wouldn’t as well.
I have sent a few questions to Mozaik and it’s been 3 days and haven’t heard back, is that normal?

It has been a little while (maybe just over a 1.5 years). We were building several custom cabinets that included some frame less with full inset doors and drawers. At that time (don't know if they have fixed that problem or not) Mozaik could not draw it. After copious sessions with "trainers" we were advised that it could not be done. I still had to pay for the training.
And as to the question about tech support being a 3 day wait...that would be a quick response for Mozaik. Usually the first answer to any support question was, You need to purchase some more training.
Cabinet Sense used to give 1 hour training for free per month. Don't know if that is still standard operating procedures or not. Cabinet Sense is great for us because you can build anything in Sketchup....

Scooter look at post #9

Post # 9