It's a bit more complicated for 3D CAD (I'm talking about the mechanical engineering type here) than just rebasing frequently. I'm going to write a long comment because I hope someone will solve my problem..

I'm looking for a good tool for 3D CAD version control because the available ones are all expensive and focus on features for managers, not engineers (like approval workflows). I was excited by Jamsync, but I don't think this will work well for a few reasons. First, CAD software generally modifies every file you open, unless it is read-only. This is mainly because even rotating a model causes a file change. Second, it's really common for multiple engineers to work in the same assembly, even if they are working in different parts. Third, merging of the CAD files, which are binary, isn't usually possible even when using the same vendor for both CAD and version control. So all you can do is select a version to keep, you can't merge. It's annoying because often one person's real work is overwritten just because someone else had a stale copy of an assembly file, and saved over the real work with something trivial like a view rotation. Only there's no easy way even compare two versions so the most common scenario is redoing the work. CAD won't generally continuously load any changes like in the example on your website, because engineers have assemblies open, for the entire day, with all or most files in a project, and these are loaded into memory once and locked on the disk.

All this means that one feature is 100% required: (a) explicit checkout and checkin of the files you want to work on, only allowed by one user at a time. It's almost a requirement (b) to do this with a plugin in the CAD software itself, because hierarchies within CAD assembly files are used to select, open, etc files, and because CAD files are often just names with a consecutive numbering scheme. It's quite painful to have to use a different interface to locate and checkout/checkin files.

If you can offer these two things you may have a decent market for small companies using CAD. Self-hosting (c) is a requirement for many industries. A file viewer (d) is nice to have but not at all required, and every other software attempts to add JIRA-type features (e) which frankly just becomes another place other than the correct place to document things.

The only software I've seen which really hit the mark was grabcad workbench, which is unfortunately being discontinued[1]. It did just a, b, and d and it was free too!

The offerings from actual CAD vendors are way too heavy, need dedicated roles to maintain them, and cost more than CAD licenses. Kenesto[2] does a, b, d and and Bild[3] does a, d only. Kenesto looks good but I've heard complaints that it feels barely maintained. Bild looked promising but it's slow and not only is it lacking b, a plugin for CAD, you have to use its webview application which offers no search, preview or sorting options so you have spend your time scrolling through a list of files. And of course, both offer way too many unwanted features. Everyone selling version control software for CAD doesn't seem to realize that we don't want to them to compete with Siemens on features. We want a few features done well, and already have tools or workflows for tickets, approvals, commenting, etc.

[1] https://blog.grabcad.com/blog/2022/08/09/a-fond-farewell-to-...

[2] https://www.kenesto.com/buynow

[3] https://www.getbild.com/plans