Hew for SketchUp users

You know SketchUp — and Hew works the way SketchUp taught you: draw on a face, push/pull it into shape, inference snapping everywhere, mostly the same keyboard shortcuts. Your muscle memory carries over almost untouched. The reflexes you had to learn, though, you can drop: in Hew every push/pull produces a discrete, watertight object. Nothing welds to a neighbor because you forgot to group it, nothing goes hollow because one face got deleted, and Union/Subtract/Intersect only run when you ask. It’s Select All + Make Group as the data model instead of a habit.

The practical differences are about money and reach. Hew is free and open source — native apps for macOS, Windows, and Linux, plus a browser app that is the full modeler, not a reduced tier. It opens your .skp files (2017 format, which newer SketchUp versions can Save As) through a clean-room reader, and saves to an open, documented format.

Because the two are so alike, whether Hew works for you comes down to whether your particular tools and workflows are there. So instead of a broad-strokes table, here is the tool-by-tool accounting — including the places where SketchUp is ahead, the places where Hew is ahead (paper output and the phone, mostly), and where the most popular extensions land, since Hew has no extension system to port them to.

Tool by tool

Drawing — near-complete overlap

	SketchUp	Hew
Line	Yes	Yes
Rectangle	Yes, plus a Rotated Rectangle tool	Yes; no rotated-rectangle tool — lock a plane with the arrow keys or rotate the shape after
Circle	Yes	Yes, with typed radius
Polygon	Yes	Yes; side count typed (6s) and remembered
Arcs	Three tools: 2-Point, 3-Point, Pie	One arc tool: endpoints plus bulge; Alt cycles closing it as a pie or a chord
Freehand	Yes	No
Drawing on a face	Splits the face (sticky geometry)	Same — drawing on a solid’s face splits it for push/pull
Choosing the drawing plane	Inferred from faces and view	Hovered face, or arrow-key locks to a world-axis plane through the next click
Editing a drawing	Sticky edges, Eraser tool	Lines select and delete individually, a drawn curve selects as one, each connected shape moves as its own island, and an Edit Vertex tool adjusts single points; no eraser-drag tool

Modify & solid operations — the core carries over; Trim, Split, and radial arrays don't

	SketchUp	Hew
Push/Pull	Yes; double-click repeats, modifier key leaves a face behind	Same, including double-click repeat and a new-coincident-solid modifier — plus through-cuts that can split a solid in two, and push/pull on any planar face however oblique its neighbors
Push/pull on curved walls	JointPushPull extension territory	Drawn circle and arc walls move as one whole wall (the radius changes); other curved surfaces move one facet at a time
Follow Me	Yes	Yes — partial sweeps by dragging with a live length readout, flat profiles stood upright automatically, spheres and goblets via pole closure, and a merge-as-you-sweep gesture
Offset	Yes	Yes — sketch regions and solid faces
Move / Copy / arrays	Move with copy toggle; xN and /N arrays	Same: Alt toggles copy, 3x and 3/ arrays
Rotate	Yes; rotate-copy builds radial arrays	Rotate on any axis with snapping and typed angles; no rotate-copy, so no radial arrays
Scale	Yes	Yes — face/edge/corner grips, typed factors, center anchoring
Solid tools	Outer Shell (free); Union, Subtract, Trim, Intersect, Split (paid tiers)	Union, Subtract, Intersect — on solids and whole groups alike, included; no Trim or Split
Slice	—	Cut any solid along a plane into two watertight solids
Intersect Faces	Yes	No equivalent; booleans are the only way geometry combines
Soften / Smooth edges	Manual	Automatic on drawn curves’ facet seams; no manual soften tool

Precision & measurement — same philosophy, near parity

	SketchUp	Hew
Measurements box	Typed mid-gesture	Same: 24cm, 9.5", 0.24m, unit-aware everywhere
Units	Metric and imperial, incl. architectural	Same, feet-and-inches included
Tape Measure	Point-to-point, parallel guides, resize model	Same — plus guides on any plane, and in-context resize that rescales just a group or component from one typed measurement
Protractor	Angled guides	Same
Dimensions	Linear dimensions in the model	Linear and radial dimensions, anchored to geometry, constant on-screen size
Text	Screen and leader text	Leader text anchored to geometry
3D Text	Yes	Yes — always a watertight solid, placed on any face or plane, bundled and system fonts or load your own
Drawing axes	Relocatable	Same — move and orient the document axes

Organization & reuse — same vocabulary, minus the parametric and cloud parts

	SketchUp	Hew
Groups	Yes	Yes — nested, and booleans accept whole groups
Components	Definitions and instances, edit in place	Same, including nested components, drill-down editing, Make Unique, and Explode
Dynamic / Live Components	Yes (paid or legacy)	No parametric components
Tags	Tags with folders	Nested tag paths (Desk/Set), multiple tags per object, per-tag visibility, select-by-tag, rename in place
Outliner	Desktop and paid tiers only — the free web tier has none	Yes, everywhere the app runs — double-click drills into any level, breadcrumb steps back out
Scenes	Saved views plus slideshow/animation export	Scenes save camera, visibility, and the section cut, with animated transitions in the app; no animation export
3D Warehouse	Enormous	Nothing like it — a personal Library of your own components, materials, and models, on desktop and in the browser

Camera & display — navigation carries over; the presentation layer doesn't

	SketchUp	Hew
Orbit / Pan / Zoom	Yes	Same, same mouse buttons, O/H/Z
Standard views	Yes	Same set, one click above the viewport
Parallel projection	Yes	Yes
Field of view	Typed FOV	Through the Zoom tool: Shift-drag, or type degrees or a 35mm focal length; no separate FOV command
Position Camera / Look Around / Walk	Yes, with collision in Walk	Yes; no collision detection
Section planes	Several planes, fills in newer versions	One section plane at a time, no cut fill; saved with the file and captured by Scenes
Styles	Sketchy edges, profiles, watermarks…	No style system — one clean draw style, light and dark themes
Shadows, geolocation, fog	Yes	No
Match Photo	Yes	No
X-ray / back edges	Yes	No

Materials — the same model, without the bundled catalogs

	SketchUp	Hew
Painting	Paint Bucket: faces or whole objects	Same — per-face paint plus an object default material
Image textures	Yes, at real-world scale	Yes — PNG/JPEG at a physical size, tiling across faces
Position Texture	Pin-based	Same, corner pins
Opacity	Per material	Per material
Sample a material	Alt-click	Alt-click
Bundled material catalogs	Large	None — the palette starts empty; the Library keeps materials you make

Files & interop — open formats on Hew's side, CAD formats on SketchUp's

	SketchUp	Hew
Native format	.skp, proprietary	.hew — an open, documented zip of JSON and geometry buffers
Reading the other’s files	—	Imports .skp (2017 format; newer SketchUp can Save As 2017); does not write .skp
DWG / DXF	Import and export (paid tiers)	No
COLLADA (.dae)	Import and export	Import, including a healing pass for SketchUp’s exporter’s quirks
STL	Import and export	Import and export — export re-facets curves at your chosen smoothness and is gated on solidity
3MF	No	Export, with named parts and colors
glTF	Native import/export since SketchUp 2025; extensions before that	Import and export, Blender round-trip tested
USDZ	Native import/export since SketchUp 2025 (paid tiers)	Export — AR-ready on iPhone/iPad
Autosave / crash recovery	Yes	Yes — a recovery snapshot every 12 seconds

Paper, phone & rendering — where moving to Hew is an upgrade, except rendering

	SketchUp	Hew
Print to scale	Possible, but it’s work: the desktop print dialog needs a standard view, Parallel Projection, and window-cropping (tiling is Windows-only); the polished route is LayOut, which is a paid tier	One print dialog on every platform, browser included: pick a scale, get exact-size output — bitmap or true vector
Full-size paper templates	LayOut poster printing at 100%, or the fiddly dialog above	First-class: print at 1:1, tiled across pages with trim marks and a scale bar, tape the sheets together at the bench
2D vector export	PDF/EPS/DWG via paid tiers and LayOut	SVG line drawings from any view
Your model on a phone	SketchUp Viewer app — iOS only (the Android app was discontinued in 2025), Trimble account sign-in, AR costs extra without a subscription	Shop Mode in any phone browser, Android included: QR handoff from the desktop app, no account, a measurement-first touch UI — and View in AR on iPhone/iPad, free
Rendering	A deep bench of extensions: V-Ray, Enscape, Twilight…	None — export glTF to Blender or a renderer

The extension question — Hew has no extension system; here's where the big ones land

Hew has no equivalent of the Extension Warehouse, so the honest question is what each popular extension’s job maps to. (The superscripts in Solid Inspector² and CleanUp³ aren’t footnotes — they’re part of the extensions’ names.)

Extension	Its job	In Hew
OpenCutList	Cut lists, cutting diagrams, labels, and cost reports	Partial: printing can append a cut-list page (part, quantity, L × W × H, with identical parts folded), and Shop Mode’s parts sheet is a live cutlist on your phone — but no cutting-diagram/nesting layout for sheet stock
Fredo6 RoundCorner	Fillets and bevels	No fillet/chamfer tool; edge profiles only via Follow Me
Fredo6 JointPushPull	Push/pull on curved surfaces	Partly built in: drawn circle/arc walls push/pull as one wall; arbitrary curved surfaces don’t
Curviloft	Lofting and skinning	No equivalent
Solid Inspector²	Find and fix the holes that keep a group from being solid	Not needed — objects can’t stop being solid, and watertight status is shown live
CleanUp³	Purge stray edges, faces, and duplicate geometry	Mostly not needed — there is no loose-geometry soup to clean
Artisan	Subdivision and organic sculpting	No equivalent; Hew isn’t for organic modeling
Profile Builder	Parametric profile assemblies	No equivalent

If your SketchUp life runs through LayOut, dynamic components, rendering extensions, or OpenCutList, Hew doesn’t replace those today. If it runs through the core modeling loop — draw, push/pull, measure, organize, and get the result onto paper or out to the shop — everything above says exactly which parts carry over, and the paper-and-phone row is the one place a move is an outright upgrade.

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