Manual:All workbenches at a glance

One of the biggest difficulty for new users of FreeCAD, is to know in which workbench to find a specific tool. The table below will give you an overview of the most important workbenches and their tools. Refer to each workbench page in the FreeCAD documentation for a more complete list.

Four workbenches are also designed to work in pairs, and one of them is fully included into the other: Arch contains all the Draft tools, and PartDesign all the Sketcher tools. However, for clarity, they are separated below.

Part
The Part Workbench provides basic tools for working with solid parts: primitives, such as cube and sphere, and simple geometric operations and boolean operations. Being the main anchor point with OpenCasCade, the Part workbench provides the foundation of FreeCAD's geometry system, and almost all other workbenches produce Part-based geometry.

Draft
The Draft Workbench provides tools to do basic 2D CAD drafting tasks: lines, circles, etc... and a series of generic handy tools such as move, rotate or scale. It also provides several drawing aids, such as grid and snapping. It is principally meant to draw the guidelines for Arch objects, but also serves as FreeCAD's "swiss knife".

Sketcher
The Sketcher Workbench contains tools to build and edit complex 2D objects, called sketches. The geometry inside these sketches can be precisely positioned and relationed by the use of constraints. They are meant primarily to be the building blocks of PartDesign geometry, but are useful everywhere in FreeCAD.

Part Design
The Part Design Workbench contains advanced tools to build solid parts. It also contains all the tools from the sketcher. Since it can only produces solid shapes (the rule number one of Part Design), it is the main workbench to use when designing pieces (parts) to be manufactured or 3D-printed, as you will always obtain a printable object.

Arch
The Arch Workbench contains tools to work with BIM projects (civil engineering and architecture). It also contains all the tools from the Draft workbench. The main use of the Arch Workbench is to create BIM objects or give BIM attributes to objects built with other workbenches, in order to export them to IFC.

Drawing
The Drawing Workbench handles the creation and manipulation of 2D drawing sheets, used for displaying views of your 3D work in 2D. These sheets can then be exported to 2D applications in SVG or DXF formats, to a PDF file or printed.

Other built-in workbenches
Although the above summarizes the most important tools of FreeCAD, many more workbenches are available, among them:


 * The Mesh Workbench allows to work with polygon meshes. Although meshes are not the preferred type of geometry to work with in FreeCAD, because of their lack of precision and support for curves, meshes still have a lot of uses, and are fully supported in FreeCAD. The Mesh Workbench also offers a number of Part-to-Mesh and Mesh-to-Part tools.
 * The Raytracing Workbench offers tools to interface with external renderers such as povray or luxrender. Right from inside FreeCAD, this workbench allows you to produce high-quality renderings from your models.
 * The Spreadsheet Workbench permits the creation and manipulation of spreadsheet data, that can be extracted from FreeCAD models. Spreadsheet cells can also be referenced in many areas of FreeCAD, allowing to use them as master data structures.
 * The FEM Workbench deals with Finite Elements Analysis, and permits the performing of pre- and post-processing FEM calculations and to display the results graphically.

External workbenches
A number of other very useful workbenches produced by FreeCAD community members also exist. Although they are not included in a standard FreeCAD installation,they are easy to install as plug-ins. They are all referenced in the FreeCAD-addons repository. Among the most developed are:


 * The Drawing Dimensioning Workbench offers many new tools to work directly on Drawing Sheets and allow you to add dimensions, annotations and other technical symbols with great control over their aspect.
 * The Fasteners Workbench offers a wide range of ready-to-insert fasteners objects like screws, bolts, rods, washers and nuts. Many options and settings are available.
 * The Assembly2 Workbench offers a series of tools to mount and work with assemblies.

Read more


 * The complete list of workbenches
 * The Part Workbench
 * The Draft Workbench
 * The Sketcher and Part Design Workbench
 * The Arch Workbench
 * The Drawing Workbench
 * The FEM Workbench
 * The FreeCAD-addons repository