CABINET VISION Reviews

Summary: Once it's set up and running to your requirements, it's amazing how much you can get done in a short period. If your shop doesn't have too many requirements for complex and highly specific customizations in its deliverables, getting CV set up to your requirements might be relatively easy. CV could be a great product for you in that case. But if you're a full custom shop, and every job you do is a whole new adventure in cabinetry, then I hope you have a guru-level CV tech on staff, and a lot of time and even more patience. Otherwise, you will lose your mind trying to make it work.

Positive: Cabinet Vision is incredibly productive if what you're building is basically one of a few standard designs where you're mostly just changing the dimensions and specifying standard features that come as a built-in part of CV. If you had a particular 15-cabinet job that was based entirely on a standard design, and your crew didn't need every little detail drawn out in meticulous blueprints in order to get it built, then you could draft that job, generate CNC and stop-saw files, print out your reports and drawings, and release it to the plant in literally 10 minutes. It is also fairly customizable, although that turns out to be a double-edged sword, as you'll read below.

Negative: If your designs are highly customized, or you frequently get requests for things that your CV setup can't easily handle more or less "out of the box", things go downhill fast. To customize your setup beyond the basics, you'll be messing with the internals of this thing, and those internals are mostly poorly designed and full of bugs. The parts of the app you use to do things like customizing your materials and construction standards vary in quality from "OK" to just barely usable on a good day, and there is a fair amount of old cruft in there of forms and input boxes from earlier releases that no longer seem to do anything.

The way CV models cabinets is extensible through an unnamed scripting language that sort of resembles VBScript, except that it sucks even worse than actual VBScript. Its reporting system is similarly extensible via SQL and (genuine) VBScript. Again, the tools you are given (code editing panes and form design utilities) are packed with quirks, bugs, and basic usability issues (such as text input boxes that are ridiculously small), and these defects will wear you down through the course of a day. The feeling of frustration is increased by the fact that many of these issues are just really basic things that would be very easy to fix if Hexagon cared about this product.

The help file contains enough information to get you sort of started, but it doesn't go into nearly enough detail for mastery. Much of the fundamentals about how CV "thinks" as it generates models is left as something for you to figure out through trial and error. And this is made harder that it should be by the fact that you often can't know whether something is going sideways because of your own mistake or because of one of CV's own countless "program issues". CV even stumps Hexagon's own tech support people from time to time. I was once on a call with them to try to figure out why my attempt to automate programming the CNC to add a 22.5-degree miter on the edge of a part wasn't working. Even they couldn't get to the bottom of this relatively simple task after two hours of trying. I had to resort to a clunky workaround—one of dozens or probably hundreds of such in my system.

This package is basically a mess under the hood, and the result is that implementing your own CV customizations beyond a fairly simple level is a truly excruciating experience, even for people who have been using CV and programming other CAD/CAM systems for decades.

Summary: Overall I wish anytime I need to change a computer or upgrade licensing it wasn't such a pain. The bad experiences leave me looking for new software.

Positive: Designs Cabinets, has lots of features (even if they don't work all the time), pricing is reasonable for what you get.

Negative: All of the support surrounding this software is terrible. Features are plentiful but trying to get them working is a nightmare. Their website says AMD Graphics work and they super don't. Support takes days to get back to you and even when you follow their documentation to try and fix your issues it still doesn't work. Support wont schedule a meeting just keeps you waiting until you miss their phone call only to start the cycle over again.

Summary: They are the most one sided company I have ever dealt with. They have no customer appreciation.

Positive: The idea is great but the company is a failure at taking care of its customers. The moment you pay them a dime you become someone they extort money from you annually.

Negative: I would never recommend this company or its product.

Summary: Wish i never was introduced to this program. We've used it for over 10+ years now and the updates they make are, frankly, stupid. they'll move buttons around and change colors and add a couple features but never address underlying issues.

Positive: Creates parts for cabinet fabrication.

- I don't have a lot of positive feedback for cabinet vision other than it creates parts of cabinet makers to assemble.

Negative: - not designed for highly custom cabinets
- setting up libraries and cabinet construction methods, etc. is not intuitive and causes frustration
- live drawing feature doesn't work properly - AutoCAD has what we want - making submittal drawings (good ones that you can read) takes soooo much time
- features of program do not work properly
- support takes 2-3 days to respond
- can't rely on user forum - I've had questions that never get answered
- simple things like you can't import a SketchUp model using there "import SketchUp model" button - you'd have to call support for them to tell you to save your SketchUp file as version 8 - TONS OF STUFF LIKE THIS INSIDE THE PROGRAM
- super expensive - they'll charge you every chance they get