If you are interested in dynamic, thermal/fire or creep/shrinkage analysis, you have to use ATENA Science (GiD).

In other cases, it depends on your problem. Generally, the ATENA Engineering 2D/3D GUE is more user friendly at the cost of being more limited compared to GiD. In ATENA Sci, you have more control, but you have to pay attention to many things that are handled automatically in ATENA Egr.

If you have curved geometry which can/should not be easily replaced with straight lines and flat surfaces (or a geometry which complicated in some other way), we recommend to use GiD.

The plans for new development for this year (or two) concentrate more on ATENA Sci, however, the Engieering GUEs have already been quite polished during the last years and therefore do need that many changes and improvements as ATENA Sci. Of course, the Engineering GUEs are planned to be maintained and supported during the next years.

If you are still undecided, I suggest to quickly go through our ATENA 3D and ATENA-GiD Tutorials, which both guide you through modelling of the same shear beam experiment.