Rhino's market share?

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Bob McNeel on November 3, 2011 at 9:47pm

What does that mean? Share assumes a percentage, right? Percentage of what?

Those products are not mutually exclusive. If someone uses Rhino, it is likely that they also use one of the other product listed above.

Sorry, but I'm confused.

Permalink Reply by Charles Aweida on November 5, 2011 at 11:45am

Hi Bob, a friend of mine went to your lecture at UCLA which sparked a few discussions. We were discussing the different modeling tools in terms of GUI, diversity of user base(different things they are used for), their respective communities, the ability to seek help through forums, APIs and so on. It seems as if Rhino and Maya are the primary choice for most university students. I was curious if licenses for Rhino were increasing at a faster rate than lets say licenses for 3dsMAX. I know this is not a fair comparison due to the fact that the supporting communities are vastly different and use the tools for different purposes and as you noted the products are not mutually exclusive, but nonetheless it would be interesting to see some stats in regards to the growth of Rhino over the years in comparison to the growth of other products. This was nothing more than my curiosity and I was unable to find any stats online regarding just how popular each software is or how many people even use 3d modeling tools. 

Permalink Reply by Chris Chalmers on June 8, 2012 at 8:05pm

I've got a similar question about rhino and grasshopper. More specifically: how many rhino seats worldwide? How many grasshopper users? (I suppose the GH number could be represented by downloads). Full disclosure: I ask this for the purpose of predicting interest in a plugin I'm planning to develop. 

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on June 9, 2012 at 2:52am

We don't know. We know how many Rhinos we shipped of course, but that is not an exact indication of how many people out there are using Rhino. Someone who bought Rhino2, then Rhino3, then Rhino4 is probably only using Rhino4, but three people who bought Rhino2, Rhino3 and Rhino4 respectively are three people using one version each.

We certainly don't know how many Grasshopper users there are. Grasshopper installers are not always downloaded via our website or -once downloaded- used multiple times (think class-rooms and company IT). We have no way of knowing whether someone who once downloaded Grasshopper is still using it. That being said, Grasshopper is downloaded ~100 times a day from our website and this number has been fairly constant since 2009 (though slightly on the increase, I'd say ~80 a day in early 2009). There are nearly 96,000 unique email addresses in the Grasshopper mailing list, more than 455,000 in the Rhino4 mailing list.

The size of this community (>17,000 registered users) is a much better indicator of user-base magnitude, but even here we have no idea how many people registered but are now no longer using GH as we do not collect use statistics (yet).

--

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by Peter Mehrtens on June 9, 2012 at 4:15am

I don't believe the number of registered users of this forum is a good barometer on how many people actively utilize Grasshopper.

Personally I know numerous people who use Rhino/Grasshopper on a daily basis and are not registered here. I've noticed this from both corporate and classroom environments.

 

Actually the majority of people I met using GH in commercial projects post nothing or close to nothing here.

 

Cheers

Peter

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on June 9, 2012 at 5:01am

I didn't mean the size of the community is equivalent to the size of the user-base, I meant it is a relatively good indicator of it. But unfortunately I do not know the multiplication factor between registered and unregistered users. Could be anywhere between 2 and 200 as far as I know.

--

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Poprad, Slovakia