SpeakCAD vs Tinkercad: dragging blocks, or parts with real dimensions
Tinkercad made CAD approachable by turning it into building blocks, and it is still the right first CAD for a child or a classroom. It runs out when a part has to fit something: there is no fillet tool, each shape has its own unlinked size fields, and phones are unsupported. SpeakCAD keeps the tap-and-type way of working and puts the numbers in charge: nine hand tools in millimetres on the face you tap, an AI for what the tools cannot do, and a file sliced for your printer at the end.| Criterion | SpeakCAD | Tinkercad |
|---|---|---|
| Install | None: runs entirely in the browser | None: browser-based |
| On a phone | Full editor, laid out for a thumb; the tools sit in a bottom sheet | No: phones are unsupported and the window must be at least 864 px wide (its requirements page) |
| Input | Starters (box, plate, cylinder, tray), STL/3MF uploads, hand tools on a tapped face, or a text description for the AI | Drag-and-drop primitives |
| Precision | Exact millimetres typed into the tool or into your text; a starter's and the AI's sizes are named numbers, so changing one rebuilds the part (a hand edit stays where you placed it, in millimetres from the face's edges) | Position and size fields per shape, not linked to each other |
| Fillets and chamfers | Fillet tool: the straight edges around a flat face, all or the ones you pick, rounded or chamfered (a fillet at the foot of a tab too); Round: the corners of a part. An edge of a curved face is an AI request | None (cylinder workarounds) |
| Editing | Tap a face: hole, cut, add, extrude, text, round, fillet, shell, measure, and copies in a row, a grid or a circle, free; or chat: “make the walls 2 mm thicker” | Select and resize shapes; a change means re-dragging and re-aligning |
| Parametric | Yes | No |
| Exports | STL, 3MF, G-code sliced for 380+ printers | STL, OBJ, GLTF, SVG |
| Account | Free account (Google or e-mail), no card: hand tools and the files they make come with it, the live demo needs none; AI uses credits, from Maker at $7.99 a month | Free Autodesk account; Tinkercad is free |
| Best for | Functional parts with exact dimensions, on a phone or a computer | Learning CAD, classrooms, quick simple shapes |
Precision without the fiddling
A bracket with two M4 holes 40 mm apart is a box starter and two taps of the Hole tool in SpeakCAD, with the M4 clearance preset, or one sentence to the AI. In Tinkercad it is two cylinders set to Hole, dragged and aligned by hand. Because a SpeakCAD starter is a program with named sizes, making the bracket 10 mm longer later is one number. Holes placed by hand stay where you placed them, so check them with Measure and move the one that should follow on its card, in millimetres from the edges; holes the AI wrote from the named sizes move with them. In Tinkercad every shape is re-dragged and regrouped.
Rounded corners
Tinkercad has no fillet tool: people build rounded shapes from cylinders and rebuild them when the size changes. SpeakCAD's Fillet tool rounds or chamfers the straight edges around a flat face you tap, all of them or the ones you pick (the top edges of a box, one front edge, the rim of a hole), and adds a fillet at the foot of a tab standing on the face; Round rounds the corners of a part (the edges parallel to the normal of the face you tapped), and a pocket you cut by hand gets its own corner radius. The numbers stay on their cards, so a change of radius is one number. An edge of a curved face is a sentence to the AI, which builds it into the model.
Where Tinkercad shines
Tinkercad is free for everyone, excellent for children and classrooms, and its direct manipulation is intuitive for artistic or freeform arrangements of shapes. It exports more formats (STL, OBJ, GLTF, SVG) and connects to Autodesk's ecosystem. If you are teaching, or the part is a nameplate rather than a bracket, use it.
Where SpeakCAD shines
Anything with measurements: replacement parts, enclosures, brackets, organizers. The hand tools and the files they make are free, the editor runs on the phone next to the printer, and the AI is there for the shapes the tools do not cover. Printability rules are applied by default and the meshes are manifold, so you spend less time repairing exports, and the file can come out already sliced for your printer. More on moving over from Tinkercad.