BRL-CAD is a powerful cross-platform open source solid modeling computer-aided design (CAD) system.

BRL-CAD provides solid geometry editing, ray-tracing, geometric analysis, image and signal-processing, performance analysis tools, a robust high-performance geometry engine, and much more. It's more than a million lines of code, 400+ binary applications, dozens of libraries, and has been under development for more than 25 years.  BRL-CAD became an open source project in 2004.

The BRL-CAD community is represented and developed by a consortium of individuals in the open source community from industry, academia, government, and private industry all over the world. Our organizational interests in BRL-CAD vary across the project's primary focus areas including CAD, CAM (manufacturing), CAE (engineering), solid modeling (analysis), and computer graphics.

BRL-CAD's users are primarily composed of individuals in the CAD industry where modeling requirements are fundamentally different from those of content modelers (such as Blender) that are used for animation, gaming, and film purposes.  BRL-CAD's primary competitors are in an entirely separate industry where commercial products like AutoCAD, Solidworks, Pro/Engineer, and CATIA dominate. See our industry diagram for a visual overview of where BRL-CAD fits within the various CAD industries.

Our goal is to become the best solid modeling system by encouraging worldwide collaboration, improving recognition and awareness, providing effective user-friendly features, and by continuing to work hard at catering to our users' needs.