GrabCAD Workbench Is Gone. Here’s a Free Replacement Built by a Fab Shop

For years, GrabCAD Workbench was the default answer to a common question: how does a small team share and discuss CAD files without buying a PDM system? Then its corporate owner killed it. Users got migration notices, years of shared projects got an eviction date, and the industry press spent 2025 publishing roundups of where the stranded should go next. That’s the free-tool lifecycle when a big company owns it: useful, popular, acquired, sunset.

And look at what those roundups recommend instead: engineering data management platforms. Cloud PDM, revision-controlled vaults, per-seat pricing, onboarding calls, sales demos. Fine products for an engineering department with a budget line. But most Workbench users weren’t running change orders; they were sharing a part with a machinist or a customer and talking about it. Telling them to migrate to PDM is telling someone whose pickup died to buy a freight train. The lightweight end of this market got abandoned, and nobody serious stepped into it.

We stepped into it, because everything else was that bad

Here’s the honest origin story: if Workbench’s replacements, or any of the free viewers, had actually been any good, we would never have built an entire service ourselves. We’re a fabrication shop with parts to review and customers to answer, and everything we tried had a horrific catch somewhere: forced logins, uploads that expire in 30 days, 400 MB installs with per-machine registration, paid mobile apps, or a PDM sales call. So we worked around every one of those failures on purpose, built STEPFILE.com for our own shop, and then shared it.

It does the job Workbench actually did for most people, and then keeps going. Open STEP, IGES, STL, OBJ, glTF, GLB, or DXF in any browser, no install, no login just to look. Free accounts get saved models with version history, notes pinned to exact positions on the geometry, threaded discussions on the model, and share links that carry your staged setup to recipients who never pay. And the thing nobody else does at all: PDF drawings, BOMs, DXF flat patterns, and photos attach to the model and share as one package under one link. Groups with roles and live folder shares cover the team side.

The part that matters after Workbench

STEPFILE.com is built and owned by Texas Metal Works, a metal fabrication shop in Conroe, Texas. No venture capital, no corporate parent hunting for things to sunset, no acquisition looming. It’s free as in beer, and the optional paid plans exist for exactly one reason: so the service pays its own way and stays here for the long haul. After what happened to Workbench, that might be the most important feature on the list.