SOLIDWORKS for Academic Researchers

Eligibility
Research licences must be owned, operated and maintained by a college, university, or university-owned facility, and must be used exclusively for the purposes of research by professors, students, or internal research staff. University-owned facilities may include research laboratories, cooperative/joint institutes, medical schools and teaching hospitals. In some cases academic consortiums and non-profits may also qualify.

Research licences may not be owned by government funded research and development centres, technology incubators, spin-off companies, or tech transfer programs. Fab labs, hobby centres are also automatically disqualified, even if they have non-profit status. Students, professors or staff of universities may not use the Research licence to provide individual consulting services.

N.B. The heavily subsidised SOLIDWORKS Education Edition is available to colleges and universities for instructional use; for non-funded undergraduate student research projects as part of their degree; for non-funded graduate student projects with no deliverables; and for internal use curriculum development only. For all other research projects a separate Research Licence must be obtained.

Standalone or Network Version?
A SOLIDWORKS Research Licence can be supplied as a standalone version or a network version. Even if purchasing just one licence, it is important to understand the difference.

The SOLIDWORKS Research Standalone version is for installation on just one computer. This might be a laptop which the researcher could use on site or at home.

If you have a few researchers using a shared workspace then a network version should be considered. A network version is available for an additional one-off payment. It provides you with the Research Network Licence Manager software which will need to be installed on one computer (normally a server). You can then install the SOLIDWORKS Research Network software on as many computers as you like provided they are connected to the server. Whenever the software is run it will contact the Licence Manager to detect how many computers are currently using it. If you only have one licence, it will only allow one computer to be in use at any one time, for two licences, two computers can be used at any one time, etc.

Minimum Hardware Requirements
2017-2018 Edition: Windows 7/8.1/10 (64-bit only)
N.B. if 32-bit is required we can supply:
2014-2015 Edition: Windows 7/8/8.1 (32 and 64-bit)
A full list of system requirements and recommendations can be found here.