Comparison
Where this fits, and where it does not.
Prices and limits below are taken from each vendor’s own published material and were checked on . Where a vendor does not publish a price, this page says so instead of guessing.
| SHD Sim | ANSYS Fluent | simFlow | SimScale | OpenFOAM alone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Entry paid price | £550/month, or £5,500/year | No published list price | €8,000/year | No published price | Free |
| Free tier | 250,000 cells or 100,000 nodes, 1 core, no time limit | Student version, non-commercial | 200,000 mesh nodes, 1 CPU, no time limit | 3,000 core hours, public projects only | Unlimited — it is the solver |
| Runs on | Your Windows desktop | Desktop and HPC | Your desktop | Their cloud only | Linux, or WSL on Windows |
| Where your data lives | Your disk | Your disk | Your disk | Their cloud | Your disk |
| Metered compute | No | HPC packs sold separately | No | Yes — core hours | No |
| Solver | OpenFOAM v2606, bundled | Proprietary (Fluent, CFX) | OpenFOAM | OpenFOAM, CodeAster and others | OpenFOAM |
| Published validation | Published in full, with the numbers | Extensive, decades of it | Validation cases published | Validation cases published | Extensive, community and vendor |
Free-tier sizes are not directly comparable: ours is measured in mesh cells, simFlow’s in mesh nodes. For a hexahedral mesh the two are similar; for a tetrahedral one they are not. Treat them as the same order of magnitude rather than as a 25% difference.
Where ANSYS Fluent is the right answer
Fluent is a more capable and far more thoroughly validated product than this one, and it would be silly to pretend otherwise. It has decades of published validation, a solver ecosystem this does not approach, and a support and training structure built for large engineering organisations.
If your work is certified, if a regulator or a customer requires a recognised toolchain, or if you need physics beyond what is listed on the product page, buy Fluent. That is the honest answer and you would reach it anyway.
ANSYS does not publish list prices, and neither will we on their behalf. Third-party estimates commonly put a single commercial CFD seat in the region of tens of thousands of US dollars a year, with perpetual licences higher again plus annual maintenance — but those are resellers’ and aggregators’ numbers, not ANSYS’s, and real pricing varies enormously with seat count, modules, HPC packs and negotiation. Get a quote.
The short version for each
vs ANSYS Fluent
A different category of purchase. Fluent is the incumbent for certified and large-organisation work, with validation and support to match. This is a desktop tool at a price you can approve yourself, for work that does not require that toolchain.
vs simFlow
The closest analogue — a desktop OpenFOAM front end, published price, free tier of a similar order. simFlow is the more mature product and has been doing this far longer. The differences are price (€8,000/yr against £5,500/yr), and that we publish our validation gaps.
vs SimScale
SimScale has the better interface, and it is genuinely good. It is also cloud-only and metered by core hours, and your projects are public on the free tier. If your geometry cannot leave your network, that decides it before anything else does.
vs OpenFOAM alone
The real competitor. OpenFOAM is free and you may already run it. What you are paying for is not the solver — it is the same solver — but the hours spent hand-writing dictionaries and rediscovering which fields a boundary condition needs.
Sources
Checked on . Vendors change prices; if something here is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will correct it.
- simFlow pricing
Professional €8,000/yr single seat; Enterprise €10,000/yr floating; free version 200,000 mesh nodes and 1 CPU with no time limit.
- SimScale pricing
Community free with 3,000 core hours and public projects only; Mechanical, Professional and Enterprise are quote-only with no published price.
- ANSYS pricing
Ansys does not publish list prices for Fluent or CFX. Any figure you see quoted, including on this page, is a third-party estimate or a resold quote.
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