Microvellum has historically run on AutoCAD. The shift toward BricsCAD as a supported CAD engine is one of the bigger platform changes in years — and it raises real questions about licensing, libraries, and whether your files keep working. Here is the practical picture.
- What is changing
- The underlying CAD engine, not your products
- Why it matters
- Licensing cost and long-term support
- Your library
- Migrates — but should be audited first
What is actually changing
The change is the CAD platform Microvellum runs on top of — moving from a strict AutoCAD dependency toward BricsCAD as a supported engine. Your products, libraries, and the way you model are designed to carry over. What changes underneath is the CAD layer that hosts it, the licensing model, and some of the day-to-day interface behavior.
Why shops are paying attention
The headline reason is cost: BricsCAD licensing is generally less expensive than maintaining AutoCAD subscriptions, and for a shop running several drafting seats that adds up. The second reason is strategic — betting on a platform with a clear long-term support path matters when your entire production pipeline depends on it.
What stays the same
Your parametric approach does not change. Product starters, processing rules, hardware tokens, and the logic that drives geometry to CNC are the value you have built — and they are meant to migrate. The drawing discipline that makes a set CNC-ready is platform-independent. A clean library on AutoCAD is a clean library on BricsCAD.
What to check before you move
Before any transition, audit your library for accumulated cruft — outdated tokens, broken starters, processing rules that no longer match your construction. Confirm your CNC post-processors and machine output behave identically after the move. Validate a few representative jobs end-to-end, from model to nested output, before you commit production work.
How to de-risk the transition
Treat it like any production change: test on contained jobs first, keep your old environment available until the new one is proven, and lean on a partner who has run both. We work across AutoCAD- and BricsCAD-hosted Microvellum and can keep your drafting moving while you transition — see our Microvellum drafting service.