The parts of CAD you actually use
Grid and snap keep lines straight and shapes true. A fixed scale — one grid square equals one foot — keeps proportions honest. Dimension lines read in feet and inches. Undo, redo, save, and duplicate cover the workflow. Text labels and a title block make the sheet presentable.
That list covers nearly every site plan, layout, and takeoff sketch a contracting business produces. It's also small enough to learn in one sitting, which is the difference between software that gets used and software that gets abandoned.
The parts you're not paying for
No paper-space/model-space juggling, no command line, no layer standards manual, no annual license audit, no workstation requirements. Complexity you don't use is cost — in dollars, in training time, and in drawings that never get made.
If your work genuinely needs full parametric CAD — engineered structures, fabrication detail, survey integration — use full CAD and the professionals trained on it. For everything else, simpler is faster.
- Zero install: runs in the browser
- Learnable in minutes, not weeks
- Free plan to start; $19/month for unlimited drawings
- Templates instead of blank-sheet setup
- Client-ready PDF export built in
Honest positioning
SiteBuildHub Draft is not a CAD replacement and doesn't claim compatibility with CAD file formats. It's a purpose-built contractor drawing tool that happens to cover the drafting tasks contractors search 'online CAD' hoping to solve: clean, scaled, dimensioned job drawings, made fast.