Over hear my colleague is very positive about Modo. Therefore I am curious what you think about the pros and cons compared to Rhino.
For me this is also important to give proper sales advice.
I would say that there isn’t any real way to compare the two, Modo is SubD modelling while Rhino is nurbs, it’s a very different way of working. Modo is great for modelling, animation, particles, physics sim,particles and rendering, it’s more like tsplines with many more options. Rhino allows much more precision and has more of a cad feel to it. Modo is more photoshop while Rhino is illustrator. I would suggest using both. Lightwave would also be a good choice or if you only want to model have a look at Silo, development stopped on it a couple of years ago but it’s very straightforward.
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Thanks for your feedback.
So Rhino is more for manufacturing stuff as Modo is more for presenting stuff?
Modo is better suited to animation and visualization than manufacturing, it can be used for 3 d printing. I would find it much easier to work from an orthographic drawing in Rhino. Booleans, chamfers and bevels are all much
neater with Rhino, you also have the benefit of grasshopper and a large range of other plugins. Could you tell me the type of designs that you are working on . Anything designed in Rhino can be imported into modo as obj files.
Over here I am not considering to use Modo for design work. However some of my customers have to present procedures of for example heavy lift operations. We also do these kinds of jobs for them. We experience Bongo to be very limited then.
Also having NURBS objects in complex scene’s slow down video performance and result in very large Rhino files. Therefore using meshes and other animation solutions move us to other software for those kind of applications.
Did you consider using one of the game engines Unity or Unreal Tournament, a good example of Unity (not by me) http://hwd3d.com/vimeo-video/navy-actuator-virtual-training/
Yes, we are also experimenting with more interactive solutions like Unity.
It remains difficult to chose the proper software solution for the desired applications. Still Rhino is a nice jack of all trades when it comes to modeling and rendering.
One would never design a car with Modo, but Modo is very good for generally visualizing scenes.
About car design I think Modo is great for the exploration phase, but not for the final model. That’s why T-Splines is a great addition to Rhino.
People, please don’t forget about Blender!
Blender is an amazing tool for SubD modeling and animation.
The better: it’s totally free of charge!
I use both all the time. Rhino is very solid with almost no crashing. Modo is not anywhere near as stable. They both compliment each other but if you need just one, I would get Rhino. That’s for my type of work though. Design, logos and product shots. This includes Brazil, Arion and Octane for rendering.
comparing modo vs rhino is like comparing apples with pears.
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The way I look at it is like this - you have a client who wants a design for a shampoo bottle (think graceful curves, caps, tapering geometry, etc.). If your client wants a design ready for fabrication with all the technical data required - Rhino. But if your mandate is to provide product shots and a simple TV animation showing the shampoo bottle twirling up into the air, breaking out into a smile and then blowing some bubbles - modo. As has been said before, they’re very different tools that address different needs of the design and fabrication process. The geometry that modo creates isn’t useful in the fabrication process and it has no annotations (dimensions, labels, etc.). Rhino on the other hand can do only very basic animations - it’s not the sort of tool that you’re going to use to make your shampoo bottle morph into a smile.
And, as joddys says, don’t forget about Blender. Not a week goes by that Blender doesn’t announce some new functionality equal or better than the expensive programs.
Thanks all for your feedback. Now I have a clear idea about the differences.
Gerard, I do not want to intrude, but on the internet, for example, on youtube, there are many explanatory videos on Rhino and Modo, so it is easier to understand the differences between the two software.
Needless to explain everything in words, do not you think?
Yeah, modo is a crash fest. Great program but Save every 5 minutes or less. You will lose work. Rhino on the other hand is a work horse, runs all day - day in day out - with no complaints, no crashes.
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Thanks for the tip Davide.
as other mentioned it is not a good idea to compare the two - different beasts 
.
Rhino works great with more technical items, building basic shapes, or flowing shapes without huge amount of local detail.
Modo will work amazingly well if you want to work on the more organic stuff, with some local detail or tweak items. Oh, and trust me , after a while of working inside Modo you’ll quickly start to miss things like fallofs in other apps. On top of that it also has a very good render engine.
So I’d say it is cool to have both - they complement each other nicely. In fact I have both in my workshop.
Also a comment about Modo and manufacturing. IMO it can work in this field as well (unless you work on models with crazy amount of precision , down to microns - but usually it is something that engineers need more). You can further expand its usability by the addition of PowerSubD to Nurbs plugin. This will alllow you to bring those models into Rhino as NURBS, so you can finish the model out and work on those parts that require additional precision (thread and screw for example).
The limit is when it comes to trying to do it the other way - Rhino to Modo . Rhino mesher makes some nasty triangles around the edges (well , unless you are able to work with untrimmed surfaces) , no tweaks to mesh command setting will get rid of those completly (but for sure can make a huge difference). This makes such mesh almost unusable in terms of tweaking in any subd modeler (would love to see improved interoperability in this situation). But it will be ok if you only need to bring such mesh for the rendering only.
I know this is nearly 6 years ago that you wrote this but having just started learning rhino and dabbled in modo. How would you use both? I work in set design, so often have to model things such as banquet halls, space ports, police stations, labs etc. Just have no idea how to integrate these two amazing programmes into my workflow. Thanks in advance.