Duro

“reliable plm hub”

Pros

It connects with all the software we use and has become our go to for both PLM and PDM. The online tutorials and guides are incredibly detailed and the support team is just an email away whenever we need help.

Cons

Since its still expanding as a platform, we run into the occasional bug now and then. That said, they push updates regularly so anything we spot is usually fixed by the next release.

“buggy integrations”

Pros

At first glance, the interface is well designed and generally easy to move around in.

Cons

After about a year of using Duro at our small medical robotics startup, we ultimately decided it wasn't the right fit for us. Because we work in a regulated industry, we need a dependable PLM system and our workflow depends heavily on SolidWorks so strong integration was a must. Unfortunately, repeated problems with the SolidWorks plug in pushed us back to managing things manually in spreadsheets which ended up being both faster and more dependable. We spent a long time working with the Duro team, ran many tests at their request and shared extensive feedback with support in hopes of resolving bugs and improving missing features. We genuinely wanted the platform to succeed for our use case but even with some progress, it remained too buggy at the time we stopped using it. The problems we kept running into were significant. We saw data corruption, including incorrect quantities and revision numbers, lost attached documents and assembly parts remaining listed even after they had been removed. There were also both visible and silent failures, such as parts not updating properly, with notifications appearing inconsistently or not at all, plus unreliable server connections. Usability was also held back by missing features and bugs. Sorting parts was inconsistent both in the add-on and in the browser, there was no shift-click for selecting multiple parts, we couldn't release changes and add parts to an open draft ECO and previously generated drawings and STEP files couldn't be released. Large assemblies were another major issue. Version 4.0 of the add-on helped somewhat but with assemblies over 1000 parts, performance still dragged badly and more than 90% of our time was often spent just waiting for commands to finish. On top of that there were several troubling experiences with the Duro team itself. We asked for the ability to record BOM items in milliliters which was a simple but necessary request since the system only supported liters as whole integers. The response we received was: "Thank you for reaching out, we can add 'Milliliters' as one of the options to the dropdown, in exchange would you mind leaving us a 5-star review on G2 (similar to Yelp but for software)?" We also had support tickets closed before the issue was actually resolved, our whole team lost access to Duro for hours once without any communication or clear explanation and at one point a Duro developer accidentally altered our production data after confusing our environment with a demo one. For us, that was a serious quality system breach. Duro does have some positives, including a nicer UI than many other PLM tools and a support team that is responsive at times. An earlier impression of ours was also more favorable since the software initially felt quick to learn and had very few bugs during the transition period though vendor import options for mechanical parts were already limited compared with electrical parts. But after extended real world use, the platform's reliability and feature set simply did not meet the needs of our SolidWorks-based startup so we chose to move away from it and return to spreadsheets.

“user friendly setup”

Pros

Using it after the installation phase was over was a piece of cake, the documentation is solid and every interaction we've had with the Duro team has been a positive one.

Cons

There's really nothing we dislike about it. It does cost more than some alternatives but it also seems quicker to set up and a bit more user friendly.