A free, volunteer-run community for SOLIDWORKS users across Greater Boston. We've been meeting at member companies, schools, and makerspaces for a decade — for hands-on training, real talk with other engineers, and one very large festival every summer.
Boston SWUG (originally the Boston Area North SolidWorks User Group, or BANSWUG) is one of the longest-running SOLIDWORKS User Group Network (SWUGN) chapters in New England. Our meeting records go back to 2015, but the group's roots as an informal gathering of local engineers go back further still.
For most of our history, we've met at the offices of member companies and sponsors across the Boston area — Medica, FLIR, ITT, Lytron, ProSource, and many more opened their doors to host an evening of free SOLIDWORKS training, networking, and pizza. We've also gathered at schools like Middlesex Community College and UMass Lowell, at the Charles River Museum of Industry, and at SOLIDWORKS' own Waltham headquarters.
Along the way we ran periodic SLUGME events — larger joint meetups with sister user groups across the region — and, like everyone else, took our meetings fully virtual in 2020 before returning in person in November 2021 with "Back to BostonSWUG."
In 2023 our June meeting grew into something bigger: the first BostonSWUG Summer Festival, a full afternoon of breakout sessions, food, and prizes at Dassault Systèmes' Waltham campus. It's now our marquee annual event, running every summer since. In 2025 we also kicked off a new partnership with Mill Forge Makerspace in Norwood, hosting smaller recurring meetups in a hands-on maker space alongside our usual technical sessions.
Today BostonSWUG has over 170 members. Every meeting is free, open to the public, and run entirely by volunteers — we're just engineers who like SOLIDWORKS and like getting other engineers together to talk about it.