I tested every text-to-CAD tool. Here's what actually works.

I gave up a Saturday afternoon for this. Sat down at the desk around noon with a thermos of coffee, a quiet house, and a list of every text-to-CAD tool I could find. I had three test prompts written out on a sticky note next to the monitor: a flanged bracket with four M5 mounting holes, a simple electronics enclosure with a lid, and a shaft collar with a set screw. Nothing exotic. The kind of parts I've modeled hundreds of times in Fusion 360 and SolidWorks, parts where I'd know immediately if the AI produced something real or something that was just cosplaying as engineering geometry.

By 5 PM, I had seven browser tabs open, three downloaded add-ins, a folder full of STEP files of varying quality, one genuinely impressive result, and the growing suspicion that most "text-to-CAD" tools are using the term more loosely than I'd like. If you've read the text-to-CAD guide, you know the distinction between actual B-Rep geometry and mesh blobs wearing a disguise. That distinction got tested hard. Here's what I found, tool by tool, with the same honesty I'd give a coworker asking "which one should I try first."

Zoo.dev#

Zoo is the tool I keep coming back to, which is about the highest compliment I give software. It runs on a GPU-native geometric kernel called KittyCAD, and the output is real B-Rep geometry. When I typed my flanged bracket prompt, what came back was a STEP file I could import into Fusion 360 and actually edit. Select a face, add a chamfer, adjust a hole diameter. The feature tree wasn't there (it's not generated inside a parametric history environment), but the geometry itself behaved like geometry a human modeled.

The shaft collar came out well too. Correct topology, clean edges, reasonable proportions. The set screw hole was in the right place. The electronics enclosure was where things got shakier: the lid existed, but the fit between the two halves was more conceptual than precise. I wouldn't hand it to a machinist, but I also wouldn't throw it away. The starting point saved me twenty minutes of sketching, which on a prototype is real time.

Zoo outputs in STEP, glTF, OBJ, STL, and several other formats. The free tier is usable enough to actually evaluate the tool, which is more than I can say for a lot of SaaS products that gate everything behind a sales call. The API is well-documented and there's a Python SDK if you want to script batch generations. Pricing scales with usage, and for hobbyist or early-stage prototyping the free tier covers a surprising amount.

The weaknesses are real, though. Complex prompts produce unreliable results. Ask for a part with specific GD&T requirements and the tool doesn't know what to do with that information. Internal faces sometimes appear where they shouldn't. Fillets occasionally fail in ways that remind me of SolidWorks on a bad day, except you can't go back and tweak the sketch that caused it. And there's no sense of manufacturing process. Zoo will happily generate a wall thickness that no injection mold on earth could fill.

I've written more about it in the Zoo text-to-CAD review, but the short version: it's the one I'd recommend trying first. If you want to understand how to get better results, the text-to-CAD prompt engineering post covers what works.

AdamCAD#

AdamCAD takes a different approach. Instead of generating a STEP file and calling it done, it gives you a parametric model with adjustable dimension sliders. Type your prompt, get an STL, then use sliders to tweak dimensions after the fact. It's like getting a rough parametric sketch that you can nudge into shape.

For my flanged bracket, this worked surprisingly well. The base geometry appeared fast, faster than Zoo, and the sliders let me adjust the flange width and hole spacing without regenerating from scratch. The shaft collar was decent too. The enclosure was a mess, which seems to be the universal failure mode for all these tools. Enclosures require too many interrelated constraints for current AI to manage.

Pricing starts at $5.99 a month, which is cheap enough that you don't feel robbed if it only saves you time occasionally. The limitation is that the parametric controls are surface-level compared to a real feature tree. You can change a width, but you can't suppress a feature, mirror a pattern, or add a relationship between two dimensions. It's parametric in the way an online box generator is parametric, not in the way SolidWorks is parametric. For quick-iteration prototyping or 3D printing rough-outs, that might be exactly enough. For production parts, you'll still end up rebuilding in proper CAD.

CADGPT#

I have a small grudge against CADGPT for the name, because it implies something it doesn't do. CADGPT doesn't generate CAD models. It generates automation scripts. Feed it a description and it writes AutoLISP for AutoCAD or Python scripts for other tools. That's a fundamentally different job than producing geometry.

To be fair, if you're an AutoCAD user who writes AutoLISP regularly, having an AI that can draft scripts from natural language descriptions is genuinely useful. I tested it with my bracket prompt and got back a reasonable AutoLISP script that would have produced roughly the right shape if I'd run it in AutoCAD. I didn't have AutoCAD open that afternoon (one of the perks of a Saturday is not launching AutoCAD), so I can't speak to the exact output. But the script itself looked competent.

The issue is category confusion. If you're searching for a text-to-CAD tool expecting to type a sentence and get a part, CADGPT isn't that. It's a code assistant that happens to know CAD scripting languages. It belongs more in the "AI coding assistant" bucket than the "text-to-CAD" bucket. Useful for the right person, misleading for everyone else.

CADScribe#

CADScribe generates both STL and STEP files, which puts it in the same general territory as Zoo. It's been reviewed by Xometry and All3DP, which gives it some credibility that not every tool in this space has earned. I went in with moderate expectations.

My flanged bracket came back looking reasonable in the preview. Four holes, a flange, approximately correct proportions. When I imported the STEP file into Fusion 360, the geometry was valid but rough. Edge quality was inconsistent, and a couple of surfaces had that slightly-off-normal look that tells you the kernel struggled. The shaft collar was fine. Simple enough geometry that the tool handled it without drama. The enclosure, again, was the weak link. The walls were uneven, the lid was decorative at best, and there was a mystery internal surface that made the solid body count wrong.

For basic mechanical parts that you're going to rebuild in proper CAD anyway, CADScribe gives you a starting point. For anything you'd want to send directly to manufacturing, you'll be doing enough cleanup that the time savings get questionable. It sits in that awkward middle ground where it's too limited for professionals but too technical for beginners.

CADAgent#

This is the one that made me sit up straighter. CADAgent is an open-source Fusion 360 add-in released in March 2026 that generates models directly inside Fusion 360. You bring your own Anthropic API key, install the add-in, and type a prompt. The AI then generates actual Fusion 360 modeling commands: sketch, extrude, fillet, the works. The model builds itself in front of you, with a real timeline you can roll back and edit.

I tested my flanged bracket and watched Fusion 360 create a sketch, extrude it, add holes, and apply fillets. The whole thing took about thirty seconds and produced a model with actual parametric history. I could click on the sketch in the timeline, change a dimension, and the rest of the model updated. That's the thing that separates CADAgent from everything else in this list. The output isn't an orphaned solid sitting in the browser tree. It's a fully parametric model you can work with the way you'd work with anything you modeled yourself.

The catches: it's early. Complex prompts sometimes produce operations that fail partway through, leaving you with a half-built model and a red flag in the timeline. The AI occasionally picks strange construction approaches that a human wouldn't choose, like extruding in an awkward direction and then cutting away material to get the right shape instead of just sketching the right profile. And it requires an Anthropic API key, which means API costs on top of your Fusion 360 subscription. For the shaft collar, the result was clean. For the enclosure, it got about 70% of the way there before one of the shell operations failed and the timeline went red.

If you're already living in Fusion 360, this is worth trying. The parametric output alone puts it in a different category from tools that dump STEP files into your downloads folder and wish you luck.

Vondy AI CAD Generator#

Vondy outputs DXF files and is aimed squarely at beginners. I tested it mostly out of completeness. The bracket prompt produced a flat 2D profile that was recognizably bracket-shaped, which is about what you'd expect from a DXF generator. No 3D. No B-Rep. No parametric anything. If you need a quick 2D outline for laser cutting and you don't want to open a CAD program, Vondy does that. If you need anything resembling a 3D part, look elsewhere.

HP AI Text to 3D#

HP's tool is tied to their 3D printing ecosystem. It's browser-based, manufacturing-focused, and clearly built with HP's Multi Jet Fusion printers in mind. The geometry it produces is print-oriented STL, not editable CAD. For someone working entirely within HP's ecosystem who wants to go from a text description to a print-ready file without opening CAD software, there's a use case. For anyone else, it's a sideshow. I tested it, got back an STL of my bracket that was technically printable but not editable, and moved on. If you're interested in that workflow specifically, the text-to-CAD for 3D printing post covers the printing angle in more detail.

What I actually learned#

After six hours, a cold thermos, and a folder of mixed-quality geometry files, here's where I landed.

Zoo.dev is the best general-purpose text-to-CAD tool right now. It produces real B-Rep geometry, supports useful output formats, and the results for simple to moderate parts are genuinely helpful. It's not replacing a CAD engineer, but it's a useful first-draft machine.

CADAgent is the most promising approach, because generating geometry inside a real parametric CAD environment solves problems that standalone tools can't. The parametric history alone changes the equation. It's early, it fails on complex parts, and it requires Fusion 360, but the direction is right.

AdamCAD is fast and cheap for simple parts, especially if you want quick dimensional iteration. CADGPT is a scripting assistant, not a geometry generator, and should be evaluated as such. CADScribe is in the middle of the pack. Vondy and HP's tool are niche.

None of these tools are production-ready for real engineering work. Every single output I generated needed some level of cleanup, from minor dimensional adjustments to complete rebuilds. But the gap between "useless novelty" and "saves me twenty minutes on a prototype" is real, and a few of these tools have crossed it. For a deeper side-by-side breakdown, the text-to-CAD tools comparison has more detail.

The honest verdict: if you model parts for a living, try Zoo and CADAgent. Give them your easiest part first, not your hardest. See if the output saves you time or just creates a different kind of work. That's the only test that matters, and no demo will answer it for you. I learned that on a Saturday, and my coffee was ice cold by the time I did.