I've been using Caesar for close to 20 years, so I'm quite comfortable with what it can and can't do well. Since you're people don't sound like they are familiar with either system, I think you'll find the learning curve to be about the same. If you are already an Intergraph house on the piping side, they'll probably cut you a better deal to use Caesar and vice versa on the AutoPlant/AutoPIPE side from Bentley. Intergraph came in and jacked the prices up to what are, while probably more realistic, much more expensive levels in line with AutoPIPE.Īnother consideration will be what your company uses for piping design software. Now, though, I've come to appreciate that Caesar hadn't really been making much in the way of improvements because their fees were probably barely keeping the lights on. The AutoPIPE guys would call on us and when it came down to pricing, they were 10x what we were paying for Caesar. We had largely stuck with Caesar because (before Intergraph bought out Coade) the annual renewal fee was insanely cheap. Though, that is changing somewhat as there are some big players here that have switched to AutoPIPE. I don't know where you're located, but here in Houston, odds are better that a stress engineer is going to be familiar with Caesar. Coade's first attempt at a Windows version of Caesar (4.0) was an unusable mess and we kept on with the last DOS version (3.24) for several more years until 5.0 came along. To some degree, I think they almost fell into the same trap against AutoPIPE as AutoPIPE came out with a strong graphical based product that was Windows while Caesar clung to DOS into the early 2000's.

They were the first to offer a PC based stress program. A lot of that comes from them catching on to the switch from mainframes to PC's at the right time back in the 80's. Caesar II is kind of like what IBM was back in the mainframe days - the saying used used to be 'Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.'Ĭaesar is probably better than 80% of the marketshare for pipe stress analysis software.

Autopipe tutorial