Powerful. Friendly. Free. Pick all three.
Cadette is free, open-source parametric CAD for makers — Tinkercad's simplicity, Shapr3D's spunk, FreeCAD's kernel, nobody's subscription. Model a part, change any step later, and export a clean STL for your printer.
More at cadette.org.
- macOS (Apple silicon): cadette-macos-arm64.dmg — the app is ad-hoc signed, so the first launch needs right-click → Open.
- Windows / Linux: coming soon.
- Direct modeling — select a face and push/pull it, resize with handles, snap to a grid, group bodies and move them together.
- A real B-rep kernel — OpenCASCADE, the engine behind FreeCAD: exact solids, fillets, booleans, sweeps and revolves. Real geometry, not meshes.
- Everything parametric — every action lives in the Build Graph: re-open, tweak, re-order or roll back any step and the model rebuilds.
- A constraint sketcher — pen and Bézier tools with dimensions and constraints, driven by a pure-Rust Levenberg–Marquardt solver.
- Print-ready output — STL export, plus
.cdtproject files that keep the full parametric history.
You need Rust (1.85+) and OpenCASCADE 7.7 or newer.
# macOS
brew install opencascade
cargo run -p cdt-appOn other platforms (or a non-Homebrew OCCT), point the build at your install:
export CDT_OCCT_PREFIX=/path/to/occt-prefix # contains include/opencascade and lib/
cargo run -p cdt-appOn Windows, vcpkg install opencascade --triplet x64-windows and use
%VCPKG_ROOT%\installed\x64-windows as the prefix.
| Crate | What it owns |
|---|---|
crates/core |
Document model: features, history, regeneration, sketches |
crates/kernel |
OpenCASCADE FFI (cxx) — solids, booleans, tessellation |
crates/solver |
Levenberg–Marquardt sketch-constraint solver |
crates/render |
wgpu viewport: scene, picking, gizmo, window shell |
crates/interaction |
Selection model |
crates/ui |
egui chrome: Build Graph panel, command bar, theming |
app |
The Cadette application |
cargo test --workspace runs the whole suite (the kernel tests exercise real
OCCT; the render tests create a real GPU device).
MPL-2.0. Release bundles include OpenCASCADE and its dependencies, which are licensed under LGPL-2.1 with the OCCT exception.