Free AutoCAD: what actually exists
Short answer: no unlimited free version for commercial use. Three legal routes exist, none of them covers a company's day-to-day work.
Is it actually free?
AutoCAD is sold by subscription, monthly or yearly, and Autodesk has never published a free professional edition. What people find under the word "free" covers three different things: the time-limited trial, the education licence reserved for students and teachers, and the web app that comes with a subscription and is mostly good for viewing. Everything else, keygens and cracked builds included, exposes you to an Autodesk licence audit and has no place on a company machine.
What is genuinely free
- The official trial, full-featured but time-limited, downloaded from the Autodesk site with an account.
- The education licence, free for a student or teacher on proof of status, and strictly non-commercial.
- The free viewers, useful for opening a DWG you received, not for producing or editing a drawing.
Where it stops
None of those three routes lets you invoice a client. The trial expires after a few weeks, the education licence forbids commercial use and stamps the files it produces, the viewer draws nothing. And to take off a plan received as a PDF there is an upstream problem anyway: AutoCAD expects a DWG, not an image, and importing a scanned PDF gives you a background you then retrace by hand.
What FloorScan opens up for free
FloorScan takes the problem from the other end: it reads the PDF directly, detects walls, rooms and openings, computes the areas, then writes a layered DXF that AutoCAD opens natively. A free account opens every module for thirty days, no credit card. After that the manual takeoff stays usable and the public calculators ask for no account at all.
Free and immediate, no account: the matching calculator.
Plan scaleFrequently asked questions
Is there a free version of AutoCAD for companies?
No. Autodesk sells AutoCAD by subscription only. The only free licences are the temporary trial and the education licence, which expressly forbids commercial use.
Can I do a takeoff without AutoCAD?
Yes, and it is often faster. Takeoff software works on the PDF or the image of the plan, computes areas and linear metres, then exports a spreadsheet. CAD only becomes necessary if you have to produce or edit a drawing.
How do I get a DWG from a PDF without paying for AutoCAD?
Go through DXF, which every CAD tool reads, AutoCAD included. FloorScan produces a layered DXF from the PDF, which then opens in a free tool such as LibreCAD or in whatever CAD you already run.
Offers and free tiers taken from public sources at the time of writing. A vendor can change them without notice: check their site before deciding.
That settles the price question. For the feature question, the full comparison:
FloorScan vs AutoCADOther tools, same question
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