CadQuery/cadquery

CadQuery is an intuitive, easy-to-use Python module for building parametric 3D CAD models. Using CadQuery, you can write short, simple scripts that produce high quality CAD models. It is easy to make many different objects using a single script that can be customized.

CadQuery is often compared to OpenSCAD. Like OpenSCAD, CadQuery is an open-source, script based, parametric model generator. However, CadQuery stands out in many ways and has several key advantages:

CadQuery was built to be used as a Python library without any GUI. This makes it great for use cases such as integration into servers, or creating scientific and engineering scripts. Options for visualization are also available including CQ-Editor and JupyterLab.

For those who are interested, the OCP repository contains the current OCCT wrapper used by CQ.

The original version of CadQuery was built on the FreeCAD API. This was great because it allowed for fast development and easy cross-platform capability. However, we eventually started reaching the limits of the API for some advanced operations and selectors. This 2.0 version of CadQuery is based directly on a Python wrapper of the OCCT kernel. This gives us a great deal more control and flexibility, at the expense of some simplicity and having to handle the cross-platform aspects of deployment ourselves. We believe this is a worthwhile trade-off to allow CadQuery to continue to grow and expand in the future.