I actually had to download a trial of HSMworks to finish the micro tool part that imachining broke because I couldn't manually override the trochoidal paths in SC. As much as I loved imachining, the one issue I could never get around was trying to keep the imachining paths while manually setting cutting parameters. Gibbs and Mastercam are great and I doubt you would have any issue with them. That being said, there are definitely other options that are as good or better out there. The ability to just click a curve in SW and say 'open' without doing anything else is so fantastic (cough, fusion, cough). The setup and profile selection, especially dealing with open contours was SO nice. Other than that, programming was so easy. I can only think of three instances where imachining broke a tool: a micro tool in aluminum (likely because I didn't have the SFM to make it work), a 3/16 tool in Ti 6-4 (likely because I didn't have the coolant to make it work), and a 5/8 tool in some S7 tool steel (because I was a moron and tried to do something without a very rigid setup. Anything metallic was as simple as tossing in the ultimate strength and moving the slider. We did everything from foams up to tool steel. iMachining is also fantastic, especially for unconventional tools. The sheer number of strategies for surfacing alone makes it worth it. Without a doubt, solidCAM is better than the integrated CAM. I used SolidCAM for 3 years running mostly surfaced parts in 3 and 4x. I never got any payment, don't work at that place anymore, and havent used or heard from SC in like 6 years. Disclaimer: My company got solidcam for free as part of a project we worked on that SC liked.

Solidcam vs camworks