Our company has taken a look at several different packages. The main ones looked at are:
1. Tekla Tedds
2. SCIA
3. RISA
4. Visual Analysis
For straight up calculation based structural package that can help you keep good records of structural design and create reports in an organized manner, Tekla Tedds is the best for that. It is intuitive to use, comes with training, and the tech support is AWESOME. It has modules for just about every design scenario you could think of and performs code checks. However, it does not make a 3D model, perform FEA, or do steel connection design.
RISA does a lot, including 3D and FEA, but no code checks. I'm not sure if it does connection design.
SCIA is similar to RISA, but includes another package for connection design available as an extra.
Visual Analysis is a good program. It can make simple 3D drawings, do FEA, and perform calculations. However, no connection design and user support consists mainly of U-tube videos.
Ultimately, it depends what you need to do and how much you want to spend. For the money, tekla TEDDS is a work horse and a great way to provide structural reports for record keeping. RISA SCIA and Visual Analysis are respectively very expensive to expensive.
Check them out for yourself, but those are the ones we are making a decision on right now. I imagine we will probably get Tekkla Tedds and SCIA (SCIA since our parent company already has licenses).
Good luck!
------------------------------
James Lingo P.E., M.ASCE
Senior Design Engineer
Schust Engineering, Inc.
Auburn IN
------------------------------
Original Message:
Sent: 05-12-2017 07:14
From: Soussan Bathaee
Subject: Structural software
What is the most recent software for structural design?
Sent from my iPad