Does anyone use another program other than easel? My subscription runs out 28 of this month and wondering if I should choose another program. Thanks for any info.
I still use Easel and I take advantage of the four free days per month to do other projects. I also use VCarve Desktop. It is an excellent software and I plan to upgrade to the VCarve Pro this year. With that I use UGS (Universal GCode Sender) to do the carving and it is FREE. The great thing is that no internet is required. Don’t forget about Inkscape again FREE. It is great for converting files to SVG. Hope this helps you.
I use V-carve Pro along with CNCJS (the code sender part of the workflow). The learning curve for v-carve pro is a bit higher than for easel. But with that knowledge comes power, including full 3D carving (easel only does 2 and 2.5D carving), Depending on what you carve decides the answer. If all you ever do is 2.5D jobs then easel is fine, if you find there are a lot fo things that you can’t do and want all the widgets in V-carve then that’s right for you. Depending on needs you then need to decide V-carve or v-carve Pro (the biggest issue with non-pro is it has a size limit, beyond which you must tile, while pro can do any size. CNCJS vs. UGS is mostly down to small subtle items. For me particularly I wanted manual control over my dust collector (which it thinks if mist-coolant [i.e. M7] and so the coolant controls are right out there along with some handy 3-axis probe features.
It really depend on what kind of projects/carvings you want to do.
I use a combination of Easel/Easel Pro/Inkscape/Photoshop/Fusion360/UGS.