Cheetah3D is aimed primarily at amateur artists, and so focuses on providing features for creating simple 3D scenes. Its selection of features is narrow but focused to add in its usefulness and simplicity. For example, it supports a variety of geometric primitives, including polygon meshes and Bezier curves. Its features also allow for box modeling with subdivision surfaces In addition, it has some simple animation support, including spline-based camera paths and targeted objects. It also supports skeletal deformations, morph targets, and subdivision surfaces, making its character animation effective.

The program also has advanced rendering settings, which allow for antialiasing, raytraced shadows, depth of field, HDRI, ambient occlusion, caustics lighting, soft shadowing and photon-mapped caustics.

The program uses many of the common 3D file formats, including 3ds, obj, sia, and FBX. Media produced by the program can also be used in Unity, which is a game development tool.

Cheetah3D 5.0 was released on 8 October 2009^[4]. Added features include a node-based material system, an improved render engine, new modelling tools such as a bevel tool and a bend modifier, and Collada file format support. This version requires at least Mac OS X v10.4, but is also compatible with Mac OS X v10.5 and Mac OS X v10.6^[5].