I have been a long-time SketchUp customer and am increasingly concerned about the lack of innovation relative to the cost of annual subscriptions.
Since SketchUp was acquired from Google, visible progress on core capabilities feels minimal, while subscription costs continue.
Specific gaps that are hard to ignore:
No native photo-to-3D model capability with full color, despite tools like Microsoft Copilot already offering this class of functionality.
No chat or prompt-driven modeling interface to generate geometry from explicit dimensions (for example, X by Y by Z). Or chat help that can take snipping of screen and make recommendations and action.
Limited CAD interoperability. There is no native support for key industry file types such as Parasolid, IGES, or STEP, which are table stakes in modern engineering workflows.
As a paying customer, the value exchange feels unbalanced. Trimble continues to charge increasingly high fees without delivering the features users clearly want and need to stay competitive.
I am asking directly: what is the roadmap to close these gaps, and why are these fundamental capabilities still missing in 2026?
FWIW I wish AI development would take a long walk off a short pier into the depths of the clean water that data centers suck out of the ground and our communities and that resources were spent on other improvements. But I donât think there is any stopping that train.
Parasolid seems pretty niche and specific.
I want native output to CadWorks for my customers that use it for timber framing but I donât think that is ever going to happen.
I see this is a feature request post, but I see no specific feature requested⌠I wonât waste a vote on âgeneral improvement required, pull up your pantsâ, although the sentiment is probably a fairly common one lol.
Some of this criticism is a bit like buying a diesel car for efficiency, torque, and lower running costs, then criticising it for not performing like a petrol performance engine or asking why it canât simply run on a completely different fuel system. You choose it for a specific set of strengths, and that comes with a different underlying design.
SketchUp follows the same logic: itâs built for fast architectural modelling and clear design communication, not the heavy engineering data structures behind STEP, IGES, or Parasolid. Those arenât missing features so much as they belong to a different class of software designed for manufacturing-grade solid modelling and downstream engineering workflows.
So the real issue is often less about a lack of innovation, and more about using a tool outside the domain it was designed to serve.
personally, I think innovation stopped around when google bought sketchup from Last.
since then itâs been new icons, new tools, new engines, better performances, warehouses, APIs, AI tools.
so no real innovation. just trinkets.
All I mean to say is it is a specific tool for a specific thing, so if it turns out the tool you chose isnât the right tool for that job.. then maybe a different tool is in order.
And sometimes, I wish he hadnât because now every couple of weeks someone comes around and announce that âeveryone is gonna move to rhino because itâs betterâ.
and yeah, if thatâs what you think⌠maybe itâs time to switch indeed.
Well.. to be fair, he raised a few valid points and none of them was âSketchup needs more AIâ or STEP/Parasolid, neither âswitch to Rhino, is betterâ.
There is absolutely photo-to-3D and prompt driven modeling functions, itâs just a lack of looking for it on the user side. That being said, like any of the other CAD systems out there these systems - in my own opinion - do not increase efficiency.
Iâll give you the same challenge someone else gave me: for any CAD platform that has a prompt model generation (including SU), ask it to generate a cube. Heck, be specific and say âa cube with six equal sidesâ. Then turn the rendering view to a wireframe, and tell me how many faces that âcubeâ has. Is it 6?
Lol - to be fair, people were doing that with both Rhino AND Blender far before I ever made that video. I find the âIâm switching to Blenderâ posts especially funny
oh yeah, true, but recently Iâve seen a case of âwell, Justin Geis, the sketchup expert, said that rhino was better andâŚâ and all I could do was sigh at them.
not even sure they watched the whole thing. maybe they stopped at the miniature
