Coming from Tinkercad
Hew for Tinkercad users
The step up when you've outgrown primitives: drawn profiles, exact dimensions, and files that are yours — still free, still in a browser.
You know Tinkercad: drag primitives onto the workplane, size them, mark some as holes, group — and you have a real solid you can print. Hew keeps everything that makes that work: it runs free in a browser, every object is a genuine watertight solid, and combining shapes is always an explicit act. The difference is where shapes come from. Instead of a tray of primitives, you draw your own profile — rectangle, circle, polygon, arcs, lines — and push/pull it into a solid. Any outline you can draw becomes a part, which is exactly the wall you hit in Tinkercad when the shape you need isn’t in the tray.
The workflow grows up with you. You type exact sizes mid-gesture (24cm, 9.5"), snap to inferred endpoints and midpoints, drop guide lines, dimension the result, and print a template at exact scale. Groups nest; components repeat a part and edit everywhere at once; tags and scenes organize a model bigger than one desk. There are native desktop apps too (macOS, Windows, Linux), and your files are local, in an open documented format, with no account anywhere.
The cost is a floor that’s higher than drag-and-drop: Hew asks you to draw. The Getting Started guide takes about fifteen minutes and covers the whole loop. What Hew doesn’t have is Tinkercad’s classroom machinery — no class management, no Codeblocks, no circuits.
Feature comparison
| Tinkercad | Hew | |
|---|---|---|
| Price & account | Free, Autodesk account, cloud files | Free and open source, no account, local files in an open format |
| Runs in a browser | Yes — browser only | Yes — and native macOS/Windows/Linux apps |
| Where shapes come from | Primitive shapes you size | Profiles you draw, then push/pull |
| Combining | Group with holes | Union / Subtract / Intersect, explicit |
| Solids | Always solid | Always solid, watertight status shown live |
| Precision | Typed sizes, grid snap | Typed unit-aware lengths, inference snapping, guides, tape measure, dimensions |
| Repetition | Copy/paste, duplicate | Components: shared definition, per-instance placement, edit once |
| Print/export | STL, OBJ, SVG | STL, 3MF, glTF, USDZ, SVG, plus paper templates at exact scale |
| Classrooms, Codeblocks, circuits | Tinkercad’s education suite | None |
That last row is the real boundary: Tinkercad is also an education platform, and Hew is only a modeler.