CAD Exchanger

Desktop app and SDK that read, heal and convert over 30 CAD and mesh formats. A translator, not an authoring tool.

Format Conversion 3D Viewers Paid (one-time)

1 / 5

The CAD Exchanger Lab window in BIM viewer mode: a model tree of levels, walls, doors and furniture on the left, a cutaway building in the viewport, and a properties panel showing millimetre dimensions and the assigned material.

Source: CAD Exchanger (cadexchanger.com)

Overview

CAD Exchanger is a data exchange toolkit from CADEX, a company founded in 2014 by Roman Lygin, previously a contributor to the Open CASCADE geometry kernel. It does not create geometry: it reads, repairs and converts CAD data that other software authored. The current line-up is four products, a desktop application called Lab for viewing and converting files by hand, an SDK with C++, C#, Java, JavaScript and Python bindings that embeds the same engine in other software, a Manufacturing Toolkit aimed at automated quoting and design for manufacturability checks, and a custom development service. Its main technical claim is a parallelised translation engine built on Intel Threading Building Blocks, against the single threaded design of older translators. The practical reason teams buy it is narrower than that: it opens SOLIDWORKS, CATIA, NX and Creo files without owning a licence for any of them.

Key features

Reads proprietary CAD without the native licence

Imports SOLIDWORKS, CATIA V5 and V6, Siemens NX, PTC Creo, Solid Edge, Inventor and Revit files directly. Writing back to those extensions is not supported, which is a restriction the format owners impose rather than a gap in the software. The way around it is to write to the kernels underneath instead: ACIS, Parasolid, Open CASCADE and Rhino are all read and write.

Keeps B-Rep as B-Rep

STEP, Parasolid and JT carry exact NURBS geometry, and CAD Exchanger passes that through as mathematics rather than flattening it to triangles. That is what allows a downstream tool to still compute mass, volume and centre of gravity. Tessellation to STL or OBJ is available with control over angular and chordal deflection, but it is a one way door.

Shape healing on import

Damaged IGES and STEP files arrive with gaps between surfaces and inverted normals. The import path reconstructs missing surface boundaries so the result can be exported as a manifold, watertight solid, which is the state 3D printing and CFD both require before they will accept a model.

The same engine as an embeddable SDK

C++, C#, Java, JavaScript and Python bindings, with official Docker images for CI pipelines. This is what most of the revenue actually runs on: quoting platforms and digital twin products embed it so they do not have to write parsers for thirty proprietary formats themselves.

Manufacturing Toolkit for automated quoting

A separate SDK that moves past translation into analysis: feature recognition for holes, pockets and notches, sheet metal unfolding, and CNC cost estimation. It now sits first on the product page, which suggests where the company is heading. Note that its last release was version 3.24.5 in August 2024.

Pros and cons

What users consistently praise

Opens proprietary CAD formats that would otherwise require the original software, which is the single most common reason teams adopt it
Preserves exact B-Rep geometry, assembly hierarchy and PMI through STEP rather than flattening everything to triangles
Shape healing recovers damaged IGES and STEP files into watertight solids suitable for printing or simulation
SDK and containerised deployment run entirely offline, which matters for defence and aerospace work where CAD data cannot go to a public cloud
Genuinely cross platform, including native macOS support for reading Windows-only CAD formats

What users consistently criticise

No pricing is published anywhere; every tier requires contacting sales, and third-party sites quoting figures are not authoritative
The Lab interface is widely described as dated and hard to navigate for occasional users, particularly through BIM hierarchies
The official blog stopped in February 2024, so a prospective buyer checking for signs of life finds a product that looks abandoned
The Manufacturing Toolkit has not had a release since August 2024 despite now leading the product page
Exporting very large meshes to web formats is slow and memory hungry, and aggressive decimation usually has to be applied by hand
The Android app is capped at 25MB per file, which rules out most real industrial assemblies

Recurring themes across third-party user reviews (G2, Capterra, TrustRadius).

Videos

3D CAD files conversion in CAD Exchanger · CAD Exchanger

How to set up CAD Exchanger SDK · CAD Exchanger

Pricing

Is CAD Exchanger free?

CAD Exchanger is not free. It is paid software with no free tier, though a time limited trial may be offered.

Paid (one-time).

checked 2026-08-26

Best for

Developers embedding CAD import in their own product

The SDK is the reason this tool exists commercially. If you are building a quoting platform, a digital twin, or anything that ingests customer-uploaded CAD, the alternative is writing and maintaining parsers for thirty proprietary formats yourself.

Teams downstream of engineering who do not own CAD seats

Rendering artists, Unity and Unreal developers, project managers and estimators who receive SLDPRT or CATPart files and need geometry out of them. Buying this is far cheaper than buying the authoring software just to open a file.

Anyone who has to keep assembly structure intact

Converting an assembly through a mesh format usually collapses the part tree. This keeps the hierarchy, and carries PMI such as GD and T through STEP, which matters if the receiving end needs to know tolerances rather than just shape.

Who should look elsewhere

Anyone expecting to edit the model

There is no parametric feature tree and no design history. You cannot change the diameter of a hole here. It converts and inspects, and everything else has to go back to the authoring application.

2D drafting and DWG markup workflows

DXF and DWG import, but this is not a 2D replacement. There is no drafting suite, no dimensioning overrides, no layout generation. The engine is built for 3D topology and the 2D side reflects that.

Anyone hoping to turn an STL back into real CAD

The STL to STEP conversion exists and is heavily searched for, but it wraps the triangle mesh inside a STEP container rather than rebuilding surfaces. The result loads in a CAD application and is still not editable CAD. Nothing recovers the original mathematics once it has been tessellated.

Buyers who need to know the price before talking to sales

Nothing is published. The Lab pricing page is a contact form, the SDK page describes a fee structure without figures, and developer pricing depends on your application's own revenue model. Budget planning requires a sales conversation.

Frequently asked questions

Can CAD Exchanger convert an STL file back into a usable STEP file?

It performs the conversion, but not in the way most people hope. An STL holds a triangle mesh with no information about the surfaces it approximates, so the export writes that mesh into a STEP container. The file will open in a CAD application and it will still be a mesh, not editable solid geometry with a feature tree. Rebuilding true CAD surfaces from a mesh is a separate reverse engineering task that this tool does not perform.

How much does CAD Exchanger cost?

The vendor does not publish prices. The Lab pricing page is a contact form, and the SDK pricing page describes the structure, an initial joining fee followed by lower annual maintenance, plus a per-machine distribution fee, without giving figures. Third-party directories list specific dollar amounts, but those are not sourced from the vendor and should be treated as unverified.

Is there a free version?

No free tier for the desktop or SDK products. There is an evaluation version, available for at least thirty days, restricted to internal evaluation and explicitly not permitted for commercial or for-profit use. The Android app is free to download but caps files at 25MB.

Does it run on macOS and Linux?

Yes, both. macOS 10.14 and later, and Linux distributions compatible with glibc 2.29 including RHEL 9.x, Ubuntu 20.04 and Debian 11. The macOS support is unusual in this category and means proprietary Windows CAD formats can be read natively on Apple hardware. Graphics need OpenGL 2.1 or later.

Is the product still being developed? The blog looks dormant.

It is still being updated, but you have to look in the right place. The blog last posted in February 2024, which makes the product look abandoned. The changelog tells a different story: version 3.24.18 shipped in March 2026, 3.24.19 in May 2026 adding SOLIDWORKS 2026, Parasolid v37 and ACIS R34 support, and 3.24.21 in August 2026. The Manufacturing Toolkit is the part that has genuinely stalled, with no release since August 2024.

Should I use STEP or IGES for exchanging exact geometry?

STEP, in almost every case. IGES carries a single precision value for an entire file, which produces scaling errors and surface gaps in assemblies whose parts differ greatly in size, and it does not carry PMI or material assignments. CAD Exchanger supports IGES, and its own documentation still recommends STEP wherever there is a choice.