I have used both SolidCAM and MasterCAM and my advice is to skip SolidCAM. Our company had MC9 mill level 1 and instead of paying 9k to upgrade to level 3 when we needed to do 3D work, we bought S-CAM for this work. This was a mistake. SolidCAM runs very slowly, crashes often, and doesn't allow fine toolpath control. Now, we have purchased MCX2 level 3 and this has been working awesome for us.