Popular Alternatives to EPLAN Electric P8 for. Free and offers a lot of standard eplan features Guest. AutoCAD Electrical design software is electrical. EPLAN Electric P8: Power for electrical planning and engineering. EPLAN Electric P8 offers unlimited possibilities for project planning, documentation.

1. Autocad Vs Autocad Electrical

I wonder if anything like this is available from autodesk. Hi Jos, Today, the updates are delivered in each new release of AutoCAD Electrical. Moving forward, we are investigating the feasibility of delivering incremental updates between the release cycles.

So why concern yourself with AutoCAD Electrical? We made our side-by-side comparisons with the current version of each product when we made the move to AutoCAD Electrical and have never regretted that decision. Our company of over 4,000 employees put together a committee to compare ECAD programs before switching away from the UNIX/DOS Promis-e. The first program we looked at was Promis-e ADS for obvious reasons. We felt that the learning curve would be easier. But in the end, the committee voted unanimously for AutoCAD Electrical. We still purchased two copies of Promis-e ADS to support our customers who prefer it.

Your customer can actually use a standard copy of AutoCAD to view the attributes contained within the components in the DWG file. In fact any viewer that allows the user to see attributes can display things like manufacturer, part number, wire number, etc. Of course ACE adds the horsepower to extract this information into a plethora of different reports. ACE has been functioning this way since the beginning. The database has always been in an open architecture format as well. I can use MS Access to view and edit the database if I wish.

Promis-e has made many adjustments over the years to be more like ACE. I was a Promis-e user since 1991 and ACE user since 1997.

I rate it a 7 out of 10 and EPLAN a 9. AutoCAD Electrical is a miserable excuse for a schematic program. We are a System Integrator and this program has been torturing us for some time. Like some mentioned, you will burn more time setting up this program then it would take to hand draw a set of prints. Nothing seems to be fluid, intuitive, or efficient in this program.

I've been using both programs as trialversions and found them to be very much on the same level as far as the generation of electrical drawings goes. However ACADE has more ' bang for the bug' and seems much more user friendly when it comes to panel design and machine layouts. A plus for EPLAN was its ability to produce PDF files, as well as the vendors collaboration with various manufacturers - Schneider Electric, Siemens,Omron,Weidmueller,Pilz and Phoenix Contact etc. All of them offer their equipment data and ready made custom symbols of their products in 'ready to be imported into the software' formats as free downloads on their websites.

Specifically, what catalogs are you interested in. What country are you in? Regards, Scott wrote in message news:4937016@discussion.autodesk.com. Thanks for your reply. I believe that delivering updates between two releases is a necessity.

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I have watched as ACE took over and Promis-e made the changes necessary to be more like ACE.

Well - you must be getting too old, because ACTRIX was NOT promis-e resold under Autodesk. First, the name was Actrix and it was developed by AutoDesk to compete against Visio when those two were unfriendly to each other. At that time the Visio guys also started the IntelliCAD development. So I assume there was some bad blood there.

Don't get me wrong, I would highly recommend ePlan against AutoCad-e were it not for the price. In these times, it simply cannot be justified. Also, ePlan uses a Dongle instead of activation files.

If you use Eplan P8 then it is compatible with XP, Vista, W7. The latest version (2) has over 1000 new features, but you can run the program in beginner mode so that you don't get swamped. You get what you pay for at the end of the day. You have clicked on the '?' Button for search help.

We made our side-by-side comparisons with the current version of each product when we made the move to AutoCAD Electrical and have never regretted that decision. Our company of over 4,000 employees put together a committee to compare ECAD programs before switching away from the UNIX/DOS Promis-e. The first program we looked at was Promis-e ADS for obvious reasons.

It defeats the purpose of an ECAD tool for me to have to repair the wirelist, risking human error. My friend, an accurate wirelist is a basic requirement of an ECAD program.

But after I finally dug in and learned ACADE there was no turning back. It appears to me that you have already decided against AutoCAD Electrical. So why concern yourself with AutoCAD Electrical? We made our side-by-side comparisons with the current version of each product when we made the move to AutoCAD Electrical and have never regretted that decision. Our company of over 4,000 employees put together a committee to compare ECAD programs before switching away from the UNIX/DOS Promis-e. The first program we looked at was Promis-e ADS for obvious reasons.

Another attempt at getting into a market that they do not understand. Once ACE doesnt fly, just like Actrix, they'll most likely scrap it, when it doesnt make them enough money. Their re-sellers cant domo it, they cant support it, and they just got into another market that they really dont understand.

I've been using both programs as trialversions and found them to be very much on the same level as far as the generation of electrical drawings goes. However ACADE has more ' bang for the bug' and seems much more user friendly when it comes to panel design and machine layouts.

Are your drawings going to be completely new designs (from a blank page), or are you going to be modifying existing drawings (retro-fits)? If you are mainly changing existing drawings, then there isn't a lot of point to using an automated drawing package. The automated packages have their advantage when you are doing a lot of drawings from scratch. The reason why people use AutoCAD is simply to be able to work with the proprietary DWG file format which so many existing drawings are in.

But that was not the point. It defeats the purpose of an ECAD tool for me to have to repair the wirelist, risking human error. My friend, an accurate wirelist is a basic requirement of an ECAD program. Shortly thereafter we bought the program that later became known as AutoCAD Electrical.

Let's say you want to add a symbol for a new component. You can do it, but it's very tedious and time consuming. Plus, if you want, say, a central schematic and component database and screen menu so all of your users are referencing the same parts, you have to hack a number of files to get it to work.

Talk about SLOW. Wire references are also unidirectional, which sucks when you want to use PLC addresses for wire numbers and have to reference 'backwards' to previous sheets or else it won't work. As time has gone on, each successive release of AutoCad Electrical has become more bloated, more buggy, and slower.

You get what you pay for at the end of the day. You have clicked on the '?' Button for search help.

I've been using both programs as trialversions and found them to be very much on the same level as far as the generation of electrical drawings goes. However ACADE has more ' bang for the bug' and seems much more user friendly when it comes to panel design and machine layouts.

And this is coming from someone who's no fan of AutoCAD either (I can do pretty much everything that I need to do with a $60 version of QCAD). And I have yet to see any real advantage of treating the entire drawing set as one entity. And as it seems to be the norm with Germanic-based software, they tend to be rather non-intuitive when it comes to the UI (I'm looking at you Siemens, Pactware, Turck.).

Run a project wide update after running the rebuild and all xref, wires and components will be as they should. Also use WDAUDIT. I cannot stress enough you cant use vanilla ACAD commands to manipulate or copy components. You will break the hidden pointers to the components. The software really is a piece of **** if you want to go outside the way it wants you to go. But having vanilla ACAD as part of the install really is a huge plus. I rate it a 7 out of 10 and EPLAN a 9.

Autocad Vs Autocad Electrical

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EPLAN Electric P8 supports global standards such as IEC, NFPA, the Russian GOST standard and the Chinese GB standard with appropriate master data and sample projects. The optional standard conversion ensures that you remain competitive as globalisation increases. Thanks to continuous Unicode capability, EPLAN Electric P8 provides schematics in any language on the basis of your individual translation databases – from Chinese circuit diagrams to Russian part lists, everything is translated online or as soon as the plant is complete. The combination of standard functions and optional extensions in EPLAN Electric P8 allows you to optimise your entire planning process and increase the quality of your automation documentation in the long term.

Things as simple as the angled wire were nearly impossible to achieve and get the wires to show up on the wire list with the correct wiring sequence. I had to create 11 different angled wire symbols to get. Promis-e 'promised' me that the problem would be solved by September 15th the year we purchased the program, 1991. It still was not corrected in 1997 when I switched to the program now known as AutoCAD Electrical.

You may need a refresher in ACE my friend. ACE creates a 'scratchpad' database at the beginning of a project and it updates on the fly as necessary. It references this database to avoid scanning drawings. Having had some Promis-e data files get corrupted and having to use their repair utility I can tell you it is quite comforting to know that everything is stored in the DWG file with ACE.

In the end, AutoCAD electrical offered little to no real advantage to me. Most of the time I just copy the previous drawing set and change what I need, anyway, so schematics really don't eat up much of my time to begin with. You'll spend way more time trying to force ACADe to do what you want it to do than you will just drawing with you want with LT. My favourite command I should never have to use but use many times a day is AEREBUILD.

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Curlyandshemp April 26th, 2013 07:31 PM. ACADE doe have a FEW Quirks, It almost still seems to b a 'work in progress' in development. It is nice it also fully supports AutoCAD. However this also means you have to be very wary about what AutoCAD commands you use in ACADE, you can really screw up ACADE cross-referencing. ACADE is life. If you are responsible for HMI development, logic development and ACADE drawings, you will spend a LOT of time in just getting drawings done. EPlan is just too expensive.

I'm also still debating but it looks like Eplan might be a better choice for us. The E3 demo looked nice and the software seems more intuitive, but Eplan looks like it has a better library especially for Allen Bradley stuff. Also we only need 30-40 pages max, so a compact version would be feasible but E3 compact is not very useful, it only comes with a schematic software. Eplan Compact + mounting panel package is $5k, which is expensive, but I think to get what we want with E3 it would be about $8k for the wireworks package.

It seems like every feature they add breaks 2 or 3. The upgrade from 2012 to 2013 cost me three days of downtime. Finally, it's really easy to break the links for component and wire cross referencing. All you have to do is not do things exactly right and suddenly you'll have wire numbers that won't go over to the next sheet, or you'll have wire number carrying over through a device even though the device is clearly breaking the network and should generate a new number, and component cross references that won't update.

I used AutoCAD Electrical for six years, and honestly, now that I'm back on regular AutoCAD, I see very little advantage to it, especially if you have a block library already built up. If your company has any kind of standard that deviates from what Autodesk has decided everyone should use, you will spend a LOT of time setting up the new system. The main difference between ACADe and E-Plan is that ACADe is AutoCAD with a bunch of hack-and-slash lisp routines on top of it, and E-Plan was built from the ground-up as an electrical schematic drawing package. I've never used E-Plan, but ACADe is a very 'you will do things OUR way' kind of program.

Our company is thinking out purchasing Eplan. I was wondering if members here could good give me the pros or cons on Eplan. Also I had mentioned Autocad Electrical as a possibly alernative but I don't know how it stacks up against Eplan.

We went with this because of the cost of EPlan but I know we made a mistake. AutoCAD is a dinosaur of a program that was patched and cobbled together over the years to do what was required of the old system is based on. I plan on getting a free Educational copy of Eplan, learning how to use it in my spare time, and then convince the owners to buy copies of this proper software.

If you don't need DWG compatibility, there is even more choice for a very small fraction of the price. AutoCad Electrical does help you out with having electrical symbols and keeping track of device tags and interruption points as well as doing automatic wire numbering. I find that you have to constantly verify and correct wire numbers and device tags. It is not worth the money. E-plan P8 is a great piece of software but you need to invest the time to learn it properly then use it on a regular basis. Canon 2009 driver.

If your company has any kind of standard that deviates from what Autodesk has decided everyone should use, you will spend a LOT of time setting up the new system. The main difference between ACADe and E-Plan is that ACADe is AutoCAD with a bunch of hack-and-slash lisp routines on top of it, and E-Plan was built from the ground-up as an electrical schematic drawing package. I've never used E-Plan, but ACADe is a very 'you will do things OUR way' kind of program.

AutoCad Electrical does help you out with having electrical symbols and keeping track of device tags and interruption points as well as doing automatic wire numbering. I find that you have to constantly verify and correct wire numbers and device tags. It is not worth the money. E-plan P8 is a great piece of software but you need to invest the time to learn it properly then use it on a regular basis.

At that time the Visio guys also started the IntelliCAD development. So I assume there was some bad blood there. Anyway AutoDesk, to make Actrix more attractive, contracted 4 partners to develop symbol catalogs for Actrix and the promis-e folks were chosen to do the electrical symbols. The other partners were, Coldstream, EAI, and Peregrine Systems. The promis-e folks had nothing to do with the development of Actrix only a supplier of symbol catalogs.