About
About Musa CAD
I’m Pranay Kiran, and I write and maintain Musa CAD: a free, open-source 2D CAD application that works the way AutoCAD does, on a core built to stay fast with large drawings. It’s made in the open on GitHub, where anyone can read it, build it and make it better.
What Musa CAD stands for
- Free, for everyone
- No price, no subscription, no account and no license key. Free software under the LGPL.
- Your habits, not mine
- AutoCAD's ribbon, command line, prompts and shortcuts, so years of muscle memory still count.
- Your drawings stay yours
- No telemetry, no analytics, no cloud. Drawings never leave your computer.
- Fast because it should be
- Multi-threaded and GPU-accelerated, so a large drawing pans, zooms and edits without a stutter.
How it’s made
Musa CAD is written in modern C++23 on Qt 6. Drawing runs on three threads — one for the interface and commands, one for geometry, one for rendering — that share no mutable state, so editing never stalls the view. Geometry lives in its own 2D kernel, with no third-party CAD library underneath, and the viewport draws a million primitives in a handful of GPU draw calls. The architecture notes go deeper.
The code is released under the GNU LGPL-3.0-or-later. It builds on open-source work by many others, credited in the third-party licenses, and the contributors list names everyone who has helped.
Get in touch
- Bugs and feature requests: the issue tracker on GitHub, so others can find the answer too.
- Everything else — questions, press, partnerships, privacy: [email protected].
- Elsewhere: the MusaCAD organization on GitHub, home to the app and this website, and Flathub.
Reporting a security problem
If you find a security problem in Musa CAD or on this website, please report it privately rather than in a public issue — through GitHub’s private vulnerability reporting, or by email to [email protected] — with enough detail to reproduce it. I’ll reply, keep you in the loop until it’s fixed, and credit you in the release notes if you’d like.
Supporting the work
Musa CAD is funded by the people who use it. If it saves you a subscription, a donation buys development time — and starring the repository, reporting bugs and telling a colleague help just as much.