What you need to run GLB Expert

The short version

• SOLIDWORKS 2022 or newer, 64-bit (Standard, Professional or Premium)
• Windows 10 or Windows 11, 64-bit — see the table below, it depends on your SOLIDWORKS release
• .NET Framework 4.8 — already part of Windows 10 (May 2019 Update and later) and Windows 11. If it is missing, our installer downloads and installs it for you.
• Administrator rights to install (the add-in registers with Windows). Not needed afterwards.
• About 25 MB of disk space

Nothing else. No Visual C++ redistributable, no Java, no separate viewer, no service running in the background.

Which Windows — decided by your SOLIDWORKS

Every SOLIDWORKS release supports a different set of Windows versions, and Dassault Systèmes changes this over time. GLB Expert runs wherever your SOLIDWORKS runs, so this table is the one that matters:

SOLIDWORKS	Windows
2026	Windows 11 (64-bit) only	Windows 10 is not supported
2025	Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit)	Windows 10 support ended with SP5
2024	Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit)
2023	Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit)
2022	Windows 10 (64-bit)	Windows 11 added in SP2.0

Windows 10 reached Microsoft's end of support in October 2025. Source for the rows above: the SOLIDWORKS system requirements published by Dassault Systèmes — please confirm against their page for your exact service pack.

SOLIDWORKS 2021 and older

Not supported, and we will not pretend otherwise. GLB Expert is built against the SOLIDWORKS 2022 API; most of the calls it makes are far older than that, so it may well work on 2021 — but we have not validated it, so we do not sell it as working.

If you are on an older release: install it anyway and use the free trial. The add-in tells you the first time you export that your SOLIDWORKS is below the tested minimum, and you will know within a minute whether it works — before you pay for anything.

.NET Framework 4.8

This is the only external component GLB Expert needs, and you almost certainly already have it: Microsoft ships it inside Windows 10 version 1903 (May 2019 Update) and every later Windows 10 and Windows 11 release. Every Windows version that can run SOLIDWORKS 2022 or newer includes it.

If it really is missing, the GLB Expert installer offers to download it from Microsoft (about 1.4 MB) and install it for you. On a workstation with no internet access, install the offline package from Microsoft's download page first, then run our setup again.

Hardware

GLB Expert adds no hardware requirements of its own — if SOLIDWORKS runs comfortably on your workstation, so does GLB Expert. For reference, Dassault Systèmes asks for a 64-bit processor, 16 GB RAM minimum (32 GB recommended) and an SSD.

Export is CPU and memory work, not graphics work: a certified professional GPU matters for SOLIDWORKS itself, not for producing a GLB file. Very large assemblies use more memory during tessellation — the same models that are already heavy in SOLIDWORKS.

Internet access

• To activate a licence: yes, once. Air-gapped machines use offline activation instead.
• To keep working: the licence re-checks quietly every 3 days and keeps working for 30 days without a successful check. It recovers by itself when the machine is online again.
• To export: never. Your CAD data does not leave your computer — see privacy.

Interface languages

English, Turkish, German and Japanese. By default the add-in follows your SOLIDWORKS interface language; you can override it in GLB Expert → Options.