BioCAD Dental Context BioCAD Dental is part of the broader BioCAD framework, which was originally developed for biomedical engineering and later adapted for dental applications. The dental edition focuses on 3D modeling and simulation tasks such as prosthetic design, anatomical visualization, and pre-surgical planning. Unlike many commercial platforms, BioCAD Dental is open and research-oriented, making it especially valuable in universities, teaching hospitals, and R&D labs where customization

DentCAM Free Context DentCAM Free is a starter edition of a dental CAD/CAM package. Unlike the full commercial versions, it doesn’t try to cover the entire workflow of prosthetic design and milling. Instead, it focuses on the early stages: importing scans, visualizing them, and preparing very simple models for training or demonstration. That makes it useful for classrooms, pilot projects, or small practices exploring digital dentistry for the first time.

While its features are limited, the free

Med3D Lite Context Med3D Lite is the reduced edition of the Med3D framework, aimed at education and light clinical tasks rather than full-scale production. While the main Med3D platform is used in research and advanced imaging, the Lite version narrows the focus to visualization and simple 3D model handling. Dental schools and smaller clinics often adopt it to explore 3D anatomy or to prepare case data before sending it to heavier CAD/CAM systems.

Its appeal lies in accessibility: the software

Open3D Dental Context Open3D Dental is a community-driven extension of the Open3D library, tailored for dental applications. At its core, Open3D is a general 3D data processing framework, widely used in research for working with meshes, point clouds, and volumetric models. The dental fork adapts these tools for clinical and educational use: cleaning intraoral scans, aligning meshes, and preparing STL/PLY files for downstream CAD/CAM systems.

It is not an end-user chairside system — instead, it

CAD Assistant (Dental meshes) Context CAD Assistant is a free 3D viewer and converter developed by the OpenCascade team. Out of the box, it’s not a dental tool, yet many clinics and labs use it as a practical helper when working with mesh data. It can quickly open STL or OBJ files from intraoral scanners, let staff check if a model is oriented correctly, measure a distance, or convert it into another format before sending it further down the workflow.

Because it is lightweight and cross-platfor

OrthoSketch Free Context OrthoSketch Free is the entry-level version of a digital orthodontic sketching tool. It isn’t meant to replace advanced CAD software — instead, it gives students, interns, and smaller clinics a way to work with digital cases without the heavy cost or steep learning curve. With it, a user can draw treatment ideas, adjust tooth positions, and prepare simple orthodontic scenarios.

Because it’s the free edition, the feature set is modest, but still enough for teaching labs