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What are some professional alternatives to KiCad? I've seen Altium (which already appears leagues ahead of KiCad, but the license fee is really high...) but non

What are some professional alternatives to KiCad? I've seen Altium (which already appears leagues ahead of KiCad, but the license fee is really high...) but none others.

krasin 3y ago
> What are some professional alternatives to KiCad? I've seen Altium (which already appears leagues ahead of KiCad, but the license fee is really high...) but none others. Kicad is on a good track to become as capable as Altium, if we judge over the last 3-4 years of the progress. I made it a habit to give them money annually via the Donate button on their front page: https://www.kicad.org https://www.kicad.org.
- hkwerf 3y ago
  At least for many common use cases that is absolutely true. IMO other tools mostly excel at special tasks. Be it having a good component library, or less rocky integration with external tools, for example for FPGA/ASIC configuration or layout, so the stuff that is heavily driven by commercial interest in increasing an engineer's speed or lowering defect rate. (Disclaimer: Haven't been doing electronics for two years, though, as I switched to Software.)
  - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
    Can I ask how did you switch career from hardware to swoftware?
    - hkwerf 3y ago
      I'm a generalist with a degree in computer science and physics, experience in science (a little), software and electronics engineering, and a lot more non-technical stuff. While I'm certainly a lousy software engineer, it's more than enough to get hired in and around Munich.
      - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
        Can I ask what kind of coding do you do at your current job? Embedded or web? I also want to make the switch from embedded software to higher level software but all employers scoff at my lack of modern SW experience. Also around Germany.
        bboygravity 3y ago
        I'm in a similar position (EE doing embedded programming with experience in Python C and C++ and a bunch of other stuff) and also thinking about switching to higher level stuff (web-apps, business apps, whatever). Also in Europe. My motivation: the higher level stuff seems easier with up to twice higher hourly rates, but most importantly: it seems way easier to get fully remote jobs in the higher level programming areas. I would even take a pay-cut in exchange for fully remote: it's my nr 1 motivator to switch to something else. What's your motivation if I may ask? Just curious.
        ChuckNorris89 3y ago
        >What's your motivation if I may ask? Just curious. Same. Mostly the possibility of WFH which is absent if you ever need to touch lower level HW. Pay I can take it or leave it. > the higher level stuff seems easier It's not really easier though. I had a 3 month stint doing some backend contract work and the amount of framework fuckery and the speed of development on live web systems that customers use, can be crazy stressful compared to embedded. It's like changing the components of a car, while driving it. Shit breaks much more often. Embedded felt much less stressful since any of my commits to production didn't instantly impact thousands of customers at once like on the web, with the risk of fucking their data or experience.
        hkwerf 3y ago
        Technically it's embedded, but the products are sufficiently complex that my day-to-day work involves everything from the usual embedded stuff (hardware set-up, FPGAs), managing devices, web development (Most devices have a reasonably modern SPA web interface using different frameworks) and signal processing. A lot of the work needs to scale from small embedded SoCs to bigger "appliances" and further. I'm pushing very much for modern techniques, such as shipping virtual units as containers for evaluation or development against our device APIs, which our customers quite like. While a lot of it is in C and C++, I'm generally also pushing for newer languages, for example a lot of the tooling I build is nowadays in Rust. For reference, the public part of what my employer sells: https://work-microwave.com/work-microwave-products/ https://work-microwave.com/work-microwave-products/ . There's a lot more that's not public, though. (If you're interested, feel free to have a look at the careers page. If you plan to switch and are a good fit otherwise, I'm certain that could be accommodated. In case you choose to apply, drop a note that you have a recommendation from an employee, it should speed things up. We are definitely looking for many new engineers as we're growing quickly. ;) )
hkwerf 3y ago
There's probably no single field where you will find more solutions to the same problem, maybe except for text editors? Common ones would be Mentor Xpedition, PADS, Cadence or OrCAD, though. Another irritatingly common one is Eagle, but last I used it it was quite a bit worse than KiCad. However, this is a small subset of the actual list. Chances are, there's many companies working with proprietary PCB designers that were discontinued 20 years ago or just maintained for a few companies.
- petsfed 3y ago
  Eagle was popular because you could get it for free as a hobbyist. That suckered me in years ago, convinced my employer to pay for the license, and then they got acquired by Autodesk literally 2 weeks later and refused to honor the license we had just bought, so I had to guard my installer binary with my life. And then we ourselves got acquired by a company that could afford Altium. Last I used KiCad for much (ca 2018), I found the workflow to be kind of clunky so I never expended much effort to get really good with it. For instance, their footprint assignment scheme caused so many errors because you couldn't, at that time, assign footprints to a given part in the component editor. Thus, you could spend a lot of time getting the footprint just so, then not notice you fat fingered the footprint assignment unless you did the old trick of printing out your solder mask and hand populating your board. But whatever KiCad's current flaws, its not Fritzing, so that helps.
  - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
    KiCad has made significant improvements since 2018. There are still warts but it is much more polished overall.
  - johnwalkr 3y ago
    KiCAD is clunky but Eagle is just plain weird. Even copy/paste is a completely unique workflow compared to anything I've ever seen.
    - hkwerf 3y ago
      Eagle's poor copy and paste when I had to use it at university was a real shocker. So much work for such a common task. And it was so easy to get it wrong. Sadly, it's not like KiCad excels there either. At least to my knowledge it's not possible to replicate a routed part of your module like it's already possible to reuse schematics sheets, is it?
IshKebab 3y ago
I think the other two big expensive pro ones are Mentor Expedition and Cadence Allegro. There's also NI Ultiboard. I haven't used any of them though. I don't think you need them unless you're doing really pro stuff (e.g. a PCIe card or motherboard) or RF design. On the free side they mostly suck. KiCad is powerful but has AWFUL usability. Don't bother unless you're willing to fight the software and spend hours on tutorials for things that should be trivial. Think early Blender but worse. The other free options are: * Eagle: Terrible. Do not bother. No idea why anyone uses this. Doesn't even get copy and paste right. * gEDA: Awful. Do not use. * DesignSpark PCB. This is very Windows 95 and a bit odd in some ways, but it's probably the easiest to use software and it's not limited like some free software (frequently there are board size or component count limits). Very decent option. If you're new to PCB design and use Windows I think I would maybe recommend this. Either this or... * Horizon EDA: A new option that uses the KiCad routing engine but is way more usable. I would say this is the best free option at the moment, and it's open source. Except maybe LibrePCB because... * LibrePCB: I haven't actually gotten around to trying this yet so I have no idea. May be good, may be awful.
- dima55 3y ago
  gEDA was quite good when it was active. In the last few years the ringdove eda project is actively maintaining and improving pcb, while the lepton eda project is actively maintaining and improving the rest. They're quite good.
timtzm 3y ago
I’m experimenting with flux.ai. Browser based pcb design. It has promise and a good team.

What are some professional alternatives to KiCad? I've seen Altium (which already appears leagues ahead of KiCad, but the license fee is really high...) but none others.

krasin 3y ago

> What are some professional alternatives to KiCad? I've seen Altium (which already appears leagues ahead of KiCad, but the license fee is really high...) but none others. Kicad is on a good track to become as capable as Altium, if we judge over the last 3-4 years of the progress. I made it a habit to give them money annually via the Donate button on their front page: https://www.kicad.org https://www.kicad.org.

hkwerf 3y ago
At least for many common use cases that is absolutely true. IMO other tools mostly excel at special tasks. Be it having a good component library, or less rocky integration with external tools, for example for FPGA/ASIC configuration or layout, so the stuff that is heavily driven by commercial interest in increasing an engineer's speed or lowering defect rate. (Disclaimer: Haven't been doing electronics for two years, though, as I switched to Software.)
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago
  Can I ask how did you switch career from hardware to swoftware?
  - hkwerf 3y ago
    I'm a generalist with a degree in computer science and physics, experience in science (a little), software and electronics engineering, and a lot more non-technical stuff. While I'm certainly a lousy software engineer, it's more than enough to get hired in and around Munich.
    - ChuckNorris89 3y ago
      Can I ask what kind of coding do you do at your current job? Embedded or web? I also want to make the switch from embedded software to higher level software but all employers scoff at my lack of modern SW experience. Also around Germany.
      - bboygravity 3y ago
        I'm in a similar position (EE doing embedded programming with experience in Python C and C++ and a bunch of other stuff) and also thinking about switching to higher level stuff (web-apps, business apps, whatever). Also in Europe. My motivation: the higher level stuff seems easier with up to twice higher hourly rates, but most importantly: it seems way easier to get fully remote jobs in the higher level programming areas. I would even take a pay-cut in exchange for fully remote: it's my nr 1 motivator to switch to something else. What's your motivation if I may ask? Just curious.
        ChuckNorris89 3y ago
        >What's your motivation if I may ask? Just curious. Same. Mostly the possibility of WFH which is absent if you ever need to touch lower level HW. Pay I can take it or leave it. > the higher level stuff seems easier It's not really easier though. I had a 3 month stint doing some backend contract work and the amount of framework fuckery and the speed of development on live web systems that customers use, can be crazy stressful compared to embedded. It's like changing the components of a car, while driving it. Shit breaks much more often. Embedded felt much less stressful since any of my commits to production didn't instantly impact thousands of customers at once like on the web, with the risk of fucking their data or experience.
      - hkwerf 3y ago
        Technically it's embedded, but the products are sufficiently complex that my day-to-day work involves everything from the usual embedded stuff (hardware set-up, FPGAs), managing devices, web development (Most devices have a reasonably modern SPA web interface using different frameworks) and signal processing. A lot of the work needs to scale from small embedded SoCs to bigger "appliances" and further. I'm pushing very much for modern techniques, such as shipping virtual units as containers for evaluation or development against our device APIs, which our customers quite like. While a lot of it is in C and C++, I'm generally also pushing for newer languages, for example a lot of the tooling I build is nowadays in Rust. For reference, the public part of what my employer sells: https://work-microwave.com/work-microwave-products/ https://work-microwave.com/work-microwave-products/ . There's a lot more that's not public, though. (If you're interested, feel free to have a look at the careers page. If you plan to switch and are a good fit otherwise, I'm certain that could be accommodated. In case you choose to apply, drop a note that you have a recommendation from an employee, it should speed things up. We are definitely looking for many new engineers as we're growing quickly. ;) )

hkwerf 3y ago

There's probably no single field where you will find more solutions to the same problem, maybe except for text editors? Common ones would be Mentor Xpedition, PADS, Cadence or OrCAD, though. Another irritatingly common one is Eagle, but last I used it it was quite a bit worse than KiCad. However, this is a small subset of the actual list. Chances are, there's many companies working with proprietary PCB designers that were discontinued 20 years ago or just maintained for a few companies.

petsfed 3y ago
Eagle was popular because you could get it for free as a hobbyist. That suckered me in years ago, convinced my employer to pay for the license, and then they got acquired by Autodesk literally 2 weeks later and refused to honor the license we had just bought, so I had to guard my installer binary with my life. And then we ourselves got acquired by a company that could afford Altium. Last I used KiCad for much (ca 2018), I found the workflow to be kind of clunky so I never expended much effort to get really good with it. For instance, their footprint assignment scheme caused so many errors because you couldn't, at that time, assign footprints to a given part in the component editor. Thus, you could spend a lot of time getting the footprint just so, then not notice you fat fingered the footprint assignment unless you did the old trick of printing out your solder mask and hand populating your board. But whatever KiCad's current flaws, its not Fritzing, so that helps.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
  KiCad has made significant improvements since 2018. There are still warts but it is much more polished overall.
- johnwalkr 3y ago
  KiCAD is clunky but Eagle is just plain weird. Even copy/paste is a completely unique workflow compared to anything I've ever seen.
  - hkwerf 3y ago
    Eagle's poor copy and paste when I had to use it at university was a real shocker. So much work for such a common task. And it was so easy to get it wrong. Sadly, it's not like KiCad excels there either. At least to my knowledge it's not possible to replicate a routed part of your module like it's already possible to reuse schematics sheets, is it?

IshKebab 3y ago

I think the other two big expensive pro ones are Mentor Expedition and Cadence Allegro. There's also NI Ultiboard. I haven't used any of them though. I don't think you need them unless you're doing really pro stuff (e.g. a PCIe card or motherboard) or RF design. On the free side they mostly suck. KiCad is powerful but has AWFUL usability. Don't bother unless you're willing to fight the software and spend hours on tutorials for things that should be trivial. Think early Blender but worse. The other free options are: * Eagle: Terrible. Do not bother. No idea why anyone uses this. Doesn't even get copy and paste right. * gEDA: Awful. Do not use. * DesignSpark PCB. This is very Windows 95 and a bit odd in some ways, but it's probably the easiest to use software and it's not limited like some free software (frequently there are board size or component count limits). Very decent option. If you're new to PCB design and use Windows I think I would maybe recommend this. Either this or... * Horizon EDA: A new option that uses the KiCad routing engine but is way more usable. I would say this is the best free option at the moment, and it's open source. Except maybe LibrePCB because... * LibrePCB: I haven't actually gotten around to trying this yet so I have no idea. May be good, may be awful.

dima55 3y ago
gEDA was quite good when it was active. In the last few years the ringdove eda project is actively maintaining and improving pcb, while the lepton eda project is actively maintaining and improving the rest. They're quite good.

timtzm 3y ago

I’m experimenting with flux.ai. Browser based pcb design. It has promise and a good team.