CAD Viewer vs DWGSee

CAD Viewer is a free, open-source browser WebGL runtime for viewing and editing DWG and DXF drawings. It displays model space, layouts, layers, blocks, and external references. Write mode supports creating, editing, and deleting drawing entities with AutoCAD-style commands. Review tools place arrows, text, clouds, rectangles, circles, and callouts over a read-only drawing background. Measurement tools cover distance, area, angle, and arc length, with results exportable as a JSON sidecar file. The product can export a self-contained HTML viewer for offline use with pan, zoom, layers, and distance measurement; exports can be password- and expiry-protected. Full-viewer examples include HTML and PDF export, while the simple viewer offers lazy-loaded HTML, PDF, and SVG plugins. Parsing and rendering occur on the client, and drawings are not uploaded, cached, or mirrored to a server. It can be embedded through iframe or npm, and a Google Drive integration opens drawings from Drive. The responsive interface supports phones, tablets, and desktops, with touch operations documented for mobile. Read-only mode disables markup, drawing, and modification commands.

DWGSee is a viewer and editor for DWG, DXF and DWF drawings, with tools to browse, measure, edit and print them. It also supports BMP, JPG, PNG, GIF and TIF images. Editing includes adding drawing objects and changing text, lines, layers and block attributes. Smart-snap tools measure length, angle, radius and area, while printing handles individual drawings or batches. For review, it can show two drawing versions in split windows, synchronize zoom and pan, and highlight differences. Markup can remain in a separate overlay or be added to a DWG as layers, lines and text. The feature list includes encryption and password protection. Pro exports to PDF and raster images; Standard does not include those exports, while copying a drawing into Word as a vector image is listed for Standard and CAD but not Pro. Platforms listed are Android, macOS, web and Windows. Free access and a trial are offered; paid lifetime licenses start at $69, paid once, with one year of free upgrades for Standard and Pro.