I use Alibre Pro. And I've used a lot of the "competition". I've used Creo ("Elements Direct" - Creo is actually a whole suite of products that used to change their names annually to avoid building any market share...), Solidworks, AutoCAD, FreeCAD, OpenSCAD, and VariCAD. I've not used Fusion 360, <the solidworks copy that's also cloud-based - can't remember the name>, or any other cloud-based software, because I've been doing this long enough to know that if you don't have a perpetual license, you don't even own your own drawings.
F360 (in spite of what I just said) might be a good place to start. I certainly wouldn't stick with it under any circumstances, but it has excellent documentation and is as good a place to learn as any (for free).
OpenSCAD is pretty cool, but, in spite of many years of python programming it's very hard to be productive with it, and many people are just going to hate it right out of the gate.
Creo Elements Direct, Solidworks, and to a lesser extend VariCAD* are damned expensive, so you'd better have a need.
FreeCAD is free (as the name implies), but it has its own paradigm (as does VariCAD!). I'm really hoping that it gets great some day, to free me from the tyranny of having to own a Windoze machine, but it's not yet really refined enough for my liking.
VariCAD is strange - a very different paradigm - and fairly expensive (~$800USD, IIRC), BUT it runs on Linux, which was worth a lot to me.
Alibre is my nearly perfect solution. It still runs on the world's crappiest operating system (Windoze), but it's like a better version of Solidworks. Not better in terms of capability (SW has that sewn up), but a better interface and all the features I care about, since I know I'm not going to be doing FEA or CFD - and if you don't know what those TLA's are, then you aren't either... Still, if a comparable linux-compatible package comes along, or FreeCAD gets where I want it, I'll jump ship in a minute.
GsT
