KetchUp – Open-source SketchUp alternative built with Rust and WebGPU

That name is really close to ask to be sued... remember the Mikerowsoft vs Microsoft.

• QuantumNomad_ · 6 hours ago

  Better rename it to “I Can’t Believe it’s Not Cat Soup 3D”

• dcoulmbe · 4 hours ago

  yeah, it didn't think much of it until I started seeing a lot of stars on Github.. I think I'll rename it Dovetail3D

• rogerclark · 2 hours ago

  The name also makes no sense anymore. Isn't it obvious that "SketchUp" is itself just a thin pun that references the word "ketchup"? They're just calling it nearly the exact same thing except that now "ketchup" on its own no longer has anything to do with drawing or sketching anything!!

Great work! Feedback : every time I draw a rectangle it asks me to name the object; seems like the wrong default behavior.

• pippy360 · 6 hours ago

  >every time I draw a rectangle it asks me to name the object; yeah this seems insane. The push/pull also doesn't work the way I expect it to. Sketchups main selling point was how easy it was to use and pick up

  • LinguaBrowse · 2 hours ago

    Yeah, this falls well short of Sketchup's intuitiveness. Every interaction I try on KetchUp has some kind of gotcha. It doesn't snap to grid by default, and as you say, it's insane that I have to name every rectangle. I can't extrude a face with a single click-and-drag of the push/pull tool; instead I've got to select it first with the arrow tool (which strangely does not match how the Move tool behaves), then extrude. Also, clicking and roving through the File/Edit/View/Tools menubar doesn't interact as expected. Sorry to say, this ain't SketchUp. It seems like yet another flashy vibe-code that has fulfilled an 80% quality level but crumbled on the final 20% of polish that really makes or breaks the user experience. Really feels like the author didn't test-drive it for usability.

Tell your agent to add some showcases of the features on the landing page. Impressive how good that rust UI feels in a browser though. Even the text rendering is impressive. Maybe rust really is the future of cross platform web+mobile apps.

See also https://ingetrazo.com/en/ as an alternative vibecoded SketchUp clone.

• 4ff618 · 6 hours ago

  Thank you for this link!

• jijji · 5 hours ago

  wow this is a really well-built application, it even comes with its own MCP server and LLM integrations, nice work.

You spelled length wrong

I love it. I do 3D printing as a hobby, but I really dislike the design phase. I usually need simple shapes: boxes or enclosures for electronics. I can find most of what I need on Thingiverse and similar platforms, but there’s always that 20% of things I need to design myself to adapt them to my specific needs. SketchUp 8 was the easiest software for me to learn, and it just clicks with me. I really wanted to learn FreeCAD, but there's something about the way it works that I just can't get along with, so I keep going back to SketchUp. Later, I tried all the alternatives: Onshape, Fusion, Tinkercad, and the new SolidCraft, but SketchUp still feels so simple and intuitive to me. I've had better luck with OpenSCAD for simple things, and I still need to try it out with LLMs. That's on my TODO list!

• dceddia · 3 hours ago

  I've had some good luck with using Claude (Opus 5.5) for making models for 3D printing just by describing the thing I want (with measurements if you've got em) and having it create an OpenSCAD file. It's also weirdly good at taking an existing STL file of a functional print and writing some python to modify it. One example was a badge holder that I liked the design of, but only held 2 badges. I wanted 3, plus a slot on the back for a key. Gave it measurements of the key, it grafted a key slot on the back, and added the third badge slot. In typical 3D printing fashion, of course I had to print like 5 iterations of the thing until the sizing of everything actually worked.

I like the idea and the name from the title, but if this is using LLMs, I'm not interested... Good luck to you anyway, I'm sure there's an audience for this. Used to know a guy who used SketchUp quite a bit. He modeled his basement living room with its weird overhangs and then a U desk to fit exactly into a corner by the stairs, then built the desk. I think he had no prior CAD experience.

• charcircuit · 6 hours ago

  Pretty much all software is built using LLMs. That's a rather harsh filter.

  • mapontosevenths · 5 hours ago

    It's pretty easy to avoid. You just don't use anything Apple, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Adobe, ServiceNow, Mozilla, Linux, etc. There are literally at least 5 softwares you can still use... As long as you stick to BeOS.

A pun doesn't make a name not trademark infringement.

• rogerclark · 2 hours ago

  It's not even a pun! The original name was barely a pun at all... this just the original name with any semblance of pun removed! Agh!

  • charcircuit · 1 hour ago

    There is a popular condiment called ketchup. There is a clear pun between Ketchup and KetchUp.

• selcuka · 1 hour ago

  They seem to have renamed it to BenchUp. Not sure whether that would be sufficient.

It would benefit from curated examples in the File menu to demonstrate the features and give first time users something to interact with.

This is awesome. At the same time I wonder if we are entering an era in which it’s just better to build your own tools Need a 3D modeler? Use Claude or codex to build the 3D model first, then build the modeler around it as you iterate towards what you want to build So many times I’ve had to spend hours learning a software, reading docs, doing tutorials, only to later be able to do a small basic idea of what I actually wanted to do in the first place Now I can just build only the software I need, for the thing I need it for (or, ala REA, maybe either modify or reverse engineer some existing software, to better fit my workflows) In that sense, it would also be cool to be able to drive KetchUp with an agent. I’m a big fan of what pen.dev has done (although now their tool is not free/open anymore)

• heyzk · 5 hours ago

  I really appreciate this sentiment, and at the same time there are real opportunity costs to building and maintaining your own tools. Even in the era of tokens. I think it comes down to where you want to spend your time and attention. https://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html

  • anonzzzies · 5 hours ago

    I definitely find it easier to create the subset of blender that I need than learning blender, even if it is throwaway.

    • heyzk · 4 hours ago

      And a fantastic learning experience

    • wilted-iris · 4 hours ago

      To offer a counterpoint, I’m currently spending a lot of time on the other side of this: having my agent use blender in the background and build on top of it. My agent can drive it well and I’ve benefited from its import capability, renderers, layering, and simulation. I get a lot from blender, even though I don’t ever see its UI.

    • t-writescode · 4 hours ago

      I ... really..? What sort of stuff are you wanting out of Blender? If it's 3d printing, you probably literally just need to do the soda can or donut tutorial - not even the whole donut tutorial. Like, I have to imagine that 80% of the "quick stuff" people need to do in Blender would be done with: * create quad * exude like 5 times * done Maaaybe * perform boolean operation between object and a circle or 3 --- Like, I have less than 200 hours in Blender and I was pretty functional after like ... 30 minutes to an hour of a single tutorial.

    • 1123581321 · 3 hours ago

      I don’t see how this could be faster (and not buggier) than generating a script to make what you want in Blender for you. You’ve likely just switched hobbies to your Blender clone instead of what you wanted to make.

• 0xb0565e486 · 5 hours ago

  Skip the 3D modeler and have the agent do the operations directly instead. A good visualizer might be useful thought! If that part of the work needs to be validated.

  • dyarosla · 3 hours ago

    Ask any 3D creative and you’ll know that AI is not yet sufficient to generate 3D models at the quality that most industries need them at.

• bhouston · 5 hours ago

  > At the same time I wonder if we are entering an era in which it’s just better to build your own tools I wonder if Claude Code and other similar tools start to maintain their own base apps that everyone keeps asking for? This would be like a "cache" that makes the requests cheaper/easier to deliver? Then everyone's "own" apps is really just a customization layer on top of a solid base that already does all the heavy lifting. So many people are building their own versions of: - PDF editors - Word processors - 3D editors - Video editors - Pixel-based image editors - Vector-based image editors - CAD editors etc. In some of these there are a few flavors as well that are major architectural choices. But most of what people are doing is just playing around with UI and file formats. Much of the functionality is generally the same.

  • guhidalg · 5 hours ago

    Sigh... are we really just going to re-invent plugins?

    • bhouston · 5 hours ago

      We do need a safe layer for non-engineers to customize apps. All these clones of Photoshop and similar tools are mostly dead ends, they are experiments to see if you can do it, but there will be a consolidation around regularly maintained and powerful and complete apps that likely also offer support. These experiments are dead-ends for the most part long-term. Fun play things, but they will not gain significantly user bases.

      • t-writescode · 4 hours ago

        Isn't this more of an argument to use common OSS choices? Like, encourage people to use Blender for 3d modelling; LibreOffice for documents; Gimp, Krita, or one of the many other art programs for ... art; OBS for simple video stuff; and so on and so forth?

      • stonogo · 1 hour ago

        > We do need a safe layer for non-engineers to customize apps. Why? Every time someone cripples software in the name of safety it just gets replaced with more capable software that isn't.

    • Gigachad · 1 hour ago

      Plugins have long been troubled. It’s hard to make a plugin interface that is actually useful while also not breaking on every app update. And plugins have been such a massive vector for distributing malware.

  • socalgal2 · 2 hours ago

    I guess I'm too used to the collaboration features of word processors like Google Docs. If I build my own, those go out the window otherwise everyone has to sign up for my word processor and learn my word processor's UX. For the rest, at least so far, I haven't had the collaboration experience but for word processors I can't go back to local files that can't easily be edited/viewed/commented on by multiple people or myself on every device I own.

  • ripplarity · 1 hour ago

    yes but tons of new features introduced making things interesting

  • Gigachad · 1 hour ago

    We have existing tools for this. You fork the repo of the closest thing and have AI tune it to exactly what you want.

• dyarosla · 5 hours ago

  I literally just had Claude build a 3D modeler slice of Blender that I wanted but that also works in VR [video: ( https://www.reddit.com/r/aigamedev/s/q5Y6cskYb9 )] I think the value of adapting full tools to your own workflow far outweighs the maintenance costs nowadays. The tool above for instance took my agent a couple hours and it was good to go. It wasn’t a small slice by any means either: it supports edit/obj mode, extrude, loop cuts, modifiers like subdiv, save/load, undo/redo, bones, auto rig, posing, and more. Mind you, this is a slice of an open source tool which was still outside of what I wanted from it. Cost wasn’t even part of the equation here.

  • t-writescode · 4 hours ago

    That's a pretty neat looking program. Since Blender is OSS, you could probably use one of the existing VR views for Blender and write a bunch of in-app Python scripts to do what you want, if you wanted to also be able to output to Blender files and work within Blender already. This looks like a pretty well-trodden area in Blender.

    • dyarosla · 4 hours ago

      Yes I could fiddle and adjust - But see, i dont want that. I want a modeler that works how i want, some things that work like Blender and others that work a different way. Adding scripts into an existing product does not serve this. I think we are entering into a new era where we don’t need to accept fully featured software with all of its decisions should they not fit ours.

      • t-writescode · 4 hours ago

        You might be surprised just how much you can rewrite of Blender's UI if you want to. And you get battle-tested software and a huge collection of existing plugins, operational modes, export formats, all that. Fully bespoke software for everything you want is a way toward losing interoperability between people and platforms.

        • dyarosla · 4 hours ago

          It doesnt have to be one or the other: you can have custom software that still works within existing/interoperable formats, as I’m doing here (im not planning to reinvent OBJ/FBX/BLEND) But building up as opposed to building down or rewriting is freeing. I can pull in ideas from Houdini and mix them in. I can use Blender’s source as reference for specific implementations should I need. I can keep my tooling specific to the projects Im working on and design it to fit that as opposed to build a workflow within a software meant to be general purpose. IMO, this kind of full customization is going to become far more commonplace.

  • nico · 4 hours ago

    Very cool. I’m in the process of creating a video game and building all the tooling around it, both for me and the players. And also, for doing things like recording a quick sequence of gameplay, “sandwiching” it with an intro/otro and posting to YouTube, then ingesting the engagement data to show on the internal player… still early days, not enough data to start optimizing on it, but I’m really enjoying building exactly what I want as I go along One of the tools (built for me to score options of different assets): https://id-le.com/review/intro-logo-animation Video: https://youtube.com/shorts/tlI9_XBuqVk Repo: https://github.com/nicobrenner/id-le Online: https://id-le.com/

• wccrawford · 5 hours ago

  I think that could be true once you're experienced enough to know what you want. Before that, though, I think you have to learn what the experts do and what can be done and what you should want. And then you can start to make your own opinions. By then, unless the major players have done it really wrong, you're not going to make something better than what already exists. Right now, it's different, because we have that experience prior to the ability to just wish up an app and have it happen.

• Aurornis · 5 hours ago

  I have several personal tools I’ve built and maintained. It’s always more work than it looks. You can get to mostly usable tools quickly if your request isn’t too difficult, but every time I use them I run into another thing that needs to be fixed, changed, clarified, or cleaned up. It’s fun at first, but over time you realize you’re spending more time building the tools than using the tools to build the thing you originally wanted to work on. I think personal software is best for highly specific tools or for things you need to use repeatedly for a very long time. For something like a SketchUp competitor, I wouldn’t want to try to maintain my own. The number of edge cases and features is bigger than you imagine up front, and the vibecoded version that might appear a few hours after your prompt is going to be very far from the version you want to use.

  • altmanaltman · 4 hours ago

    Isn't the whole argument that ai-driven code will reduce the time spent building because AI can do it now? And a SketchUp competitor by defintion will not be personal software just like SketchUp is not.

    • vips7L · 4 hours ago

      AI can’t do it. You still have to hold its hand. You still have to sit there and ask it to do things. There is no fire and forget.

      • altmanaltman · 4 hours ago

        For personal projects that don't matter? Sorry but that's your opinion at this point. I respect it but also fully disagree. Also even in that case, isn't it still reducing time and problems we have with pre-AI personal projects like maintainability and feature creep like you mentioned.

        • vips7L · 4 hours ago

          It’s just my opinion that you have to ask the LLM to do things? Seems like reality to me tbh.

        • 80fj0348i · 4 hours ago

          > For personal projects that don't matter? My personal projects matter a lot. For some of them I am trusting my private data in the code, so I need to hold it to a high security and privacy standard. For others, I have hundreds or thousands of users (game mods, helper tools for hobbies, etc.), and I don't want to ship low quality to them.

        • Aurornis · 3 hours ago

          > For personal projects that don't matter? If it doesn’t matter then do what you want. By definition, it doesn’t matter. Some of us actually use these tools, so it does matter. You do have to consider things when it matters.

    • Aurornis · 4 hours ago

      I was talking about AI developed tooling. It’s amazing that you can get something usable quickly, but then every time you use the software you’re back in the AI working on your tool. Using AI to build the tool becomes the project, replacing the project that led you to think about vibecoding a tool.

  • Gigachad · 3 hours ago

    I’ve been using the vibecoded Lightroom clone and it’s 5000 commits and around 20 releases in yet still has countless issues and missing features. I feel like it will get there eventually but the idea that you should just vibe up your own Lightroom rather than using an existing one is absurd with today’s tech. It’s still a massive amount of work even if it is way faster than ever before. The vibecoded apps all rely on an army of users exploring the program and reporting all the bugs and edge cases. You don’t want to be doing that on your own.

• baby · 4 hours ago

  Looking at CRM tools these days and they are so complicated that I’m thinking of just using my tool and add features as I need them. Would love to hear advice from people who use CRM tools on the job.

• gamblor956 · 3 hours ago

  Once upon a time, not so long ago, people gained skills by learning about things instead of outsourcing all the hard parts. By outsourcing the modeling to Claude or whatever, you don't learn how to build 3d models on your own. You've become dependent on the LLMs, and you're trivially replaceable by someone who can build 3d models on their own...because they can also learn to tell Claude to do all the work.

  • t-writescode · 3 hours ago

    I mean, there is value to artisan work (paying for it), and there’s value in quick stuff; but I’m not sure LLMs can do either in the case of 3d art. Their models are horribly topoligized, which will matter for most use cases for models; and if you’re just using it to make a cube, it’d be better to learn the related program to do that. People tend to ask LLMs to make full art pieces (a decade of specialized knowledge and muscle memory), not “draw me a square”. In 3d art, there is a gulf between the easy stuff and the hard stuff. Tl; dr: for 3d art, I agree.

• geraneum · 3 hours ago

  > I wonder if we are entering an era in which it’s just better to build your own tools Not necessarily. But only if what you need is not available in open source or not achievable by forking open source. Otherwise it’s a waste of money (token) and attention. This is a significantly smaller pool that “build [all] your own tools”. Although, AI mega corpos would love if we do constantly re-build everything. You can tell by the tendency of the agents to write everything from scratch instead of importing the code that does the same thing or better.

• socalgal2 · 3 hours ago

  My experience is it's short to get a working tool and long to finish. Many 3D modulers (blender for example) have literally 1000s of features. Yes, you might not need all of them but you probably need 100s, each with quirks and UI/UX decisions. Just iterating on camera controls can take days. You get an orbit camera working via a prompt. But then find it only zooms in/out so far because the LLM decided that was ideal. So you prompt to fix that. Then you find moving the camera is not zoom aware so it moves in meters per frame and when you're zoomed in things move too faster. So you prompt to fix that. Repeat 10000x. Every feature, extrude, bevel, chamfer, subdivide, select vertices, select faces, select edges, etc etc all require this handholding and finese. At least that's my experience. Small tools with few features is great. a 3D modeler is not that.

• cael450 · 3 hours ago

  I have always been skeptical of the reality of this, especially for businesses. But then one person on our CSM team spent a week building an alternative to Gainsight, saving the company like $90k a year. Granted, it required a technical person to do it even with vibe coding, but it doesn’t take much of his time to maintain it.

• secretsatan · 3 hours ago

  This just sounds so horribly inefficient though i’m sure the makers of LLMs love you.

• pettijohn · 2 hours ago

  I've been using SolidCraft with MCP and Codex to model things. Pretty wild. I gave it a photo of a pencil sketch and a paragraph; a few minutes later I had a 3D model. https://solidcraft.io/mcp/

• superpapotas · 54 minutes ago

  you can try fabivo, its not for all uses, but i think the ai agent is great.

• solarkraft · 24 minutes ago

  With strong building blocks, perhaps. But I don’t want to maintain millions of lines of AI generated CAD kernel (or pay the token and wait time). I’m also happy not having to make design choices in that space considering I have 0 experience with it. It’s still a liability.

• burgerone · 7 minutes ago

  Why are people suddenly entirely unwilling to invest effort into their projects... Wat is the point of personal projects if in the end you learned nothing

Is OBJ a viable form of geometry export here? Not clear what else it can export.

• emmelaich · 5 hours ago

  export menu lists stl and obj.

  • dofm · 5 hours ago

    Ahh. OK. Both mesh formats, perhaps not so useful for buildings CAD but it is what it is.

Is KetchUp free? Yes. KetchUp is open source under the MIT license and written in Rust. Omg why is rust relevant to the question whether this is free or not.

• shaunpud · 5 hours ago

  I run it on Arch

• gpm · 4 hours ago

  Free-as-in-freedom FSF style implies the natural follow on question to "am I allowed to change it" is "how easy will it be for me to change it"... PS. I think you might also want to review the comment guidelines on this site... e.g. "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. "

  • astr0n0m3r · 4 hours ago

    The comment was fine and infinitesimally critical considering the FAQs were vibe-coded as well.

• faangguyindia · 3 hours ago

  It matters because if it used Electron, people may say it will use more RAM.

Whoever built this, thank you!

Does KetchUp plan to support importing existing SketchUp (.skp) files? For people with a library of existing models, import compatibility would matter more than export — STL/OBJ lose the editable structure that makes those files reusable.

• mendelmaleh · 4 hours ago

  hew3d does apparently

i'd also recommend checking out https://hew3d.com/ ( https://github.com/hew3d/hew ) i directed pi to their documentation + github repo and created a pretty awesome skill that allows me to take measurements on paper, snap a pic, and then have it generate the drawing. can also snap a general pic and then provide a model number of an item in the pic, and it will maintain scale. this stuff used to take me an hour+!

I absolutely love sketchup, and seeing it passed between various developers and never improved while gradually getting less and less free was very sad. it was awesome when owned by google and totally free. super happy to see a spiritual successor!

• twelvechairs · 4 hours ago

  Classic case of high value to end users but low revenue, because ease of use doesnt bring money. Gained a huge user base quickly then sold to Google who wanted it apparently to help people toy around in Google earth, then they did little with it and eventually sold to Trimble, mostly a surveying company, who similarly had hopes it would help expand their users and market reach, which it hasnt really its mostly still evades commercial revenues and continues to be used by the same kind of users as originally

Been waiting so long for this

Small feature request: I can't figure out how to use it with a trackpad. Seems to be mouse-only. I use sketchup with a trackpad plus one of the different modifier keys for pan, zoom and orbit.

This is so awesome and something I definitely need. I'm a very casual user of SketchUp (I use it once every few months), but I have a single file which is a detailed model of my house, which I have invested many hours in creating, and that only works on the full Desktop app. So the free web app is not an option for me. And a subscription doesn't make financial sense so I have to ask for a new trial every time I have a home renovation project and I need to modify my model. I'm aware that eventually they might refuse a new trial (they haven't yet) and that day I will just stop using it and learn Blender. However, I'm now realizing that at least for home renovation projects, an essential feature is the SketchUp 3D Warehouse, where you can download user shared models of a TV, a toaster, a chair, etc. Specially for a casual user, you don't need to have the exact model of your real chair, just a chair will do. So the warehouse is an essential part of the value. I'm sure there are alternatives for free models other than SketchUp 3D Warehouse, but having it directly in SketchUp is super convenient.

• jkl5xx · 3 hours ago

  Just have Claude generate assets like that with blender or something. It gets you good enough 3d models pretty quick

• jphorism · 2 hours ago

  +1 to the 3D Warehouse. I have used it extensively over the years for trialing furniture; IKEA seems to have most of their models designed to scale there.

I loved SketchUp! When I was first getting started with Unity I made all my early models in Sketchup. Thanks for sharing.

I see projects like this as both cool and terrifying for the economy

I actually vibe-coded (kinda vibe, mostly hand holding) a "2D Sketchup" for myself for a large yard renovation/construction project we've been doing for about 12 months. It was mostly successful - as others noted, you spend a lot of time investing in the tool rather than drawing your project.

Lot of upvotes and positive comments for a piece of software that can't extrude a cube without glitching. No point filing a bug report; if the AI can't write it right, the AI probably can't fix it, and no one is willing to do the work.

I tried it out, and it still differs from SketchUp’s habits/workflow. If the goal is to replace SketchUp, would it be better to keep the habits consistent with SketchUp?

Love love this. The SketchUp workflow has always clicked for me, but its increasingly difficult to access it as it's ownership has changes and they've monetise it more This is great for small scale STL design too

As a very long time user and lover of SketchUp, I'm still peeved about the direction Trimble took in neglecting the SketchUp desktop modeler in favor of a web-based UI. Their licensing was also terrible... first they discontinued the free version of SketchUp, and then later on they discontinued perpetual licensing, meaning the only way to get the desktop modeler was to pay several hundred per year, which wasn't worth it to me. If a vibecoded alternative displaces it in the market, I won't feel one bit sorry for them. The kinds of large scale projects I like to make in SketchUp really began to feel constrained at a certain point. A modeler with SketchUp's incredible UI that can take full advantage of any computer's available graphics hardware to render large amounts of geometry more efficiently would be a wonderful thing. I'm very possessive of my SketchUp models, and so the idea of storing them on any kind of cloud server I don't have control over is abhorrent to me. I was not happy to see Trimble putting so much effort into making a web-based modeler.

All thats missing is a MCP server!

To this day I still use the 2017 freeware version (through WINE) for drafting all my home projects. It's just so darned intuitive to me (for anything without too many curves, at least) and I can't be bothered to learn anything else. The web version works in a pinch but it has always felt slower and less capable to me. Going to have to try this!