The project started around 2010 as a fork of QCAD 2.0.5.0. It began as a project to build CAM capabilities into the community version of QCad for use with a Mechmate CNC router. This gave rise to CADuntu. The project was known as CADuntu only for a couple of months before the community decided that the name was inappropriate. After some discussion within the community and research on existing names, CADuntu was renamed to LibreCAD.

Since QCad CE was built around the outdated Qt3 library, it had to be ported to Qt4 before additional enhancements. Porting the rendering engine to Qt4 proved to be a large task, so initially LibreCAD, the 1.0.0 series, still depended on the Qt3 support library. Thanks to our master developer Rallaz the Qt4 porting was completed during the development of 2.0.0 series and LibreCAD has become Qt3 free. The latest version of LibreCAD, the 2.2.0 series, requires the Qt5 framework.