6 ms·

Just a quick comment on the product, since this it effectively an ad for Altium. They typically present themselves as the most popular solution, but they also

Just a quick comment on the product, since this it effectively an ad for Altium. They typically present themselves as the most popular solution, but they also very clearly out-price any hobbyist at $10k for a perpetual licence. Their "hobby" version CircuitStudio lacks critical features and has 0 support and 0 updates and the forums are just crickets. But KiCad is free, open source, and looks similar enough that I had a great time following the Altium tutorials by Rick Hartley with it. In my opinion, that also invalidates their claim that Altium is the most commonly used PCB design software, because there likely are 100x more hobbyists using KiCad than people able to spend $10k on a hobby. It seems to me like Altium is developing like Eagle. They used to court the makers and hobbyists and then greatly profited when those people started working. But now both of them are mostly in the business of milking companies who have existing data in their proprietary file format.

0_____0 3y ago
What has your experience with Altium been like?
- quailfarmer 3y ago
  It’s the best layout software I’ve used. Nevertheless, I’ve started preferring KiCAD for personal projects for the reasons mentioned above.
  - shadowpho 3y ago
    Kicad also did a GIGANTIC leap forward in the past two years.
jjoonathan 3y ago
Yep. Altium started content marketing like mad right around the time KiCad became good enough and got the glitches / crashing under control. KiCad version 6 was a huge jump in quality. I don't mind the content marketing, I just wish they had a plan that I could rationalize paying for as a hobbyist and they simply don't.
hugs 3y ago
It's hard to stay in business selling something for $0. Meanwhile, there are companies with more money than $Deity that look at $10K as a rounding error compared to their high-end engineer's salary. So Altium follows the money. As a huge open-source nerd, I used to think something like $10K for Altium was a borderline crime. Now I sell robots for the same amount. (And people in the industry still say I'm charging too little.) Long story long, if you think $10K is too much for something, you're not their target market. (And as long as there are viable open-source alternatives, I don't have a problem with that.)
- fragmede 3y ago
  Wait what kind of robotics? After ChatGPT, that's the next big thing.
  - hugs 3y ago
    It's in my bio, but I after my "internet fame" with Selenium and Appium, I now make physical robots that do the same thing: tap buttons on phone screens for end-to-end testing. (There are lots of little reasons why a physical robot would be preferable over an emulator or a USB-tethered device, but perhaps, that's another thread for another day...)
    - fragmede 3y ago
      Oh I was hoping it was secret TidyBot competitor. I've always dreamed of building a phone screen tester, and then you could sell it as a cloud bare metal cellphone
- eyegor 3y ago
  $10k is kind of a crime for individuals. For businesses, absolutely, high prices for critical tools with support contracts is a no brainer. I just about coughed up a lung when I heard how much my company pays for 2 floating licenses of specialized engineering software (six figures per year). But in terms of ROI, it's easy to justify. Your robot could easily sell at 20-30k. If you add some kind of calibration/support service to guarantee whatever operating parameters, you could charge a subscription on top of that. Test equipment is normally fairly expensive and specialized, and no one who runs tests in a commercial environment wants to be in a situation where they are their own checks/balances. So even though they could easily build/maintain test equipment themselves, companies will avoid it if possible. It's why businesses will buy the $5k name brand multimeters, test probes, etc instead of the $200 no name one with the same specs.
spacedcowboy 3y ago
I switched from Eagle to Altium for a few reasons - Autodesk took my 3-years subscription money and then ditched Eagle, did no work, updates or improvements on the product I'd actually subscribed to, and tried to force me to move to a cloud-based app. No thanks. Never again, Autodesk. - Altium is a world away from Eagle, with its push/shove routing, rules, field-solver for impedance matching, dynamic lookup for components, just, well, everything basically. It's a steeper learning curve than Eagle, but it's far and away just better as well. - A perpetual license is what makes it worthwhile. Altium is already way more than I need, as a hobbyist, which gives me a lot of room to grow into it. I'd been using Eagle for ~20 years before switching, and I'd spent a lot on that over the years. If I get the same time-scale out of Altium that I did out of Eagle, it's not so bad averaged out.
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  Altium ended perpetual licenses in 2021. I have a perpetual license of Altium 21, but when my salesperson came back for Altium 22, they had stopped the perpetual licensing scheme. To put numbers to it, it used to be $5000 for a license and $2000/year for a support contract on that license ($7000 in the first year covering the license and the support), and it's now something like $3000 for an annual license with no perpetual option. KiCad has been slowly getting toward feature parity with Altium 21, and I have had more fun with KiCad for hobby projects anyway. For those who tried it years ago, when I first tried KiCad in 2014, it was pretty crappy, but at some point between then and now they got their act in gear. The modern version is pretty close to a professional tool, and they are essentially taking feature ideas from Altium, so it's a pretty easy switch.
  - spacedcowboy 3y ago
    Can’t be true. I bought a perpetual license just over 12 months ago (as in 5 days over 12 months ago). It still works fine, and it says it’s perpetual. Edit: and isn’t. They offer a perpetual license here [1] [1]: https://www.altium.com/altium-designer/licensing https://www.altium.com/altium-designer/licensing
    - 3y ago
userbinator 3y ago
Among hobbyists, Altium is probably just as pirated as Photoshop.
- djmips 3y ago
  I thought you couldn't pirate Photoshop anymore?
mhh__ 3y ago
Kicad is getting better and better but in a few ways it is still basically a toy compared to the big boy packages. That being said altium is pretty rotten internally it seems, just looks nice.
- theatrus2 3y ago
  KiCad is getting better and better. At this point Altium is copying features _from_ KiCad, so you know the competition is real :). Altium is still a Delphi-ish program, though with lots of things now just compiling to .Net. The core layout package has always been solid with a very small core developer group running it which is really more what its known for. The library management parts with collaboration are actually getting a lot better (ECAD<->MCAD, etc). Altium gained tons of weird stuff with a super weird push to "FPGAs for everything", a giant off-shore (not Australian or Carlsbad) development team, and... all of that crash and burned and no actual customer actually understood what was happening. Much of that legacy is still in parts, but most of the features have been removed by now.
  - spacedcowboy 3y ago
    If you need it, the field solver for high-speed diff pairs in Altium is head and shoulders above the approximation techniques in the online tools - which never agree with each other anyway. Kicad is no better than the online ones. The price of a standalone field solver (which would be more capable than Altium’s, for sure) is more than the price of Altium… Given that an FPGA can output a lot of diff pairs at pretty high speeds these days, even us hobbyists can have a need for this sort of tech.
    - samtho 3y ago
      99% of the time, I’m routing CMOS logic, i2c, SPI, maybe a CAN network here or there. I have maybe 10 projects where I worked with anything so critical that it required the most precise diff pair length matching. I think SRAM was the only that actually was affected by lackadaisically ran diff pairs. Even then, KiCAD has successfully guided me to routing a number of signals that are capable of data transmission well into the megahertz range.
jrockway 3y ago
I always laugh at their ads/sponsorships on YouTube videos. I am sure Altium Designer is great, but there is no way you can afford it if you don't have significant income directly derived from the things that it saves time with. The shit that other engineering fields go through to practice their craft is always depressing. If you're a mechanical engineer, half your salary is Solidworks. Electronics engineer, Altium. Software engineer? Everything is free. Occasionally someone shows up with a fancy IDE and wants $75 a year for it, and that's as high as it goes. Weird stuff.
- j16sdiz 3y ago
  Depends on how good the alternative are, $75 can easily be justified. IntelliJ was far more productive than its peer in its first 5 years or so
- zem 3y ago
  back in 2004 I remember coming across "understand for c++", which cost something like $1000/seat but which was absolutely the best thing I have seen for navigating and working with a large inherited codebase.
  - uxp100 3y ago
    Understand is still around, and probably still that expensive. I’m not aware of a better tool, but it has its weaknesses. Often we would make understand-only changes to help it “see” better, since we were taking diagrams straight from Understand and pasting them into our paperwork.
stephen_g 3y ago
It's a professional tool, they're probably just looking at the professional market for the claim (i.e. it would be from sales data so Kicad isn't going to even show up)
iancmceachern 3y ago
For hobbiests, yes. In industry, for organizations with many engineers who need to collaborate together on many boards making up a complex system, Altium is really the only choice. Also check out diptrace, I'm thinking of going with it for my next fee boards because it seems to have a very intuitive focus on its UI and also costs less than allium (they have a free tier), I just don't bees the power of Altium, but am tired if the archaic UI and workflows in eagle, kicad, etc.
- timpattinson 3y ago
  Altium is far from the only choice for professionals, but if you have to ask, you can't afford them.
TaylorAlexander 3y ago
Kicad is so amazing. Extremely powerful tool with no imposed limits that is completely free and widely used. I just finished the third rev of my open source low cost high power brushless motor controller in kicad. Open formats means Thea Flowers was able to make a beautiful web viewer that takes a GitHub link to a kicad board or schematic file and displays it for ya. You can see my new board in your browser right here: https://kicanvas.org/?github=https://github.com/Twisted-Fields/rp2040-motor-controller/blob/main/RP2040_motor.kicad_pcb https://kicanvas.org/?github=https://github.com/Twisted-Fiel... I also recently designed a PCB for a friends art project where I needed to place a bunch of LEDs in concentric rings. I used a nice python library for kicad board files to generate a board with all the LEDs placed, then imported the rest of my components and continued with layout as normal. But beyond the fact that it’s a high quality tool, and has easy to manipulate and read open formats, and loads of easy to use third party tools, is the fact that kicad is and always will be free and open source. That means that when I make my boards open source (and all of my work is open source), I know anyone anywhere in the world can download kicad and use the designs. I used altium to design some boards at google. It’s clearly a powerful tool. If that’s already what you know, you don’t want to share your designs or collaborate with others who don’t have altium, and you have a license, then go ahead and use it. Or if you want to get a job at a large firm that likely uses altium, then go learn the tool. But if you want to learn a PCB tool for 99% of hobbyist and a good deal of professional work, kicad is likely a better choice.
bboygravity 3y ago
Last time I got a quotation it was more than 10k USD per seat per unit time (1 year or 2 years, not sure). I don't think they do perpetual licenses (anymore?). TLDR: it's worse than 10k perpetual :p
ilyt 3y ago
> In my opinion, that also invalidates their claim that Altium is the most commonly used PCB design software, because there likely are 100x more hobbyists using KiCad than people able to spend $10k on a hobby. I guess that depends whether you look at per-user or per-PCB basis
STM32F030R8 3y ago
Altium is an enterprise level software that is just in a different league as kicad. Both are great products but it’s no sense comparing two very different products. I’ve never personally seen a company seriously use Kicad. I’m sure it’s possible but it’s not a tool you want your company to depend on. I find it hard to believe altiums ‘most commonly used’ claim. Maybe cadence just isn’t as worried about marketing? Haha.

0_____0 3y ago

What has your experience with Altium been like?

quailfarmer 3y ago
It’s the best layout software I’ve used. Nevertheless, I’ve started preferring KiCAD for personal projects for the reasons mentioned above.
- shadowpho 3y ago
  Kicad also did a GIGANTIC leap forward in the past two years.

jjoonathan 3y ago

Yep. Altium started content marketing like mad right around the time KiCad became good enough and got the glitches / crashing under control. KiCad version 6 was a huge jump in quality. I don't mind the content marketing, I just wish they had a plan that I could rationalize paying for as a hobbyist and they simply don't.

hugs 3y ago

It's hard to stay in business selling something for $0. Meanwhile, there are companies with more money than $Deity that look at $10K as a rounding error compared to their high-end engineer's salary. So Altium follows the money. As a huge open-source nerd, I used to think something like $10K for Altium was a borderline crime. Now I sell robots for the same amount. (And people in the industry still say I'm charging too little.) Long story long, if you think $10K is too much for something, you're not their target market. (And as long as there are viable open-source alternatives, I don't have a problem with that.)

fragmede 3y ago
Wait what kind of robotics? After ChatGPT, that's the next big thing.
- hugs 3y ago
  It's in my bio, but I after my "internet fame" with Selenium and Appium, I now make physical robots that do the same thing: tap buttons on phone screens for end-to-end testing. (There are lots of little reasons why a physical robot would be preferable over an emulator or a USB-tethered device, but perhaps, that's another thread for another day...)
  - fragmede 3y ago
    Oh I was hoping it was secret TidyBot competitor. I've always dreamed of building a phone screen tester, and then you could sell it as a cloud bare metal cellphone
eyegor 3y ago
$10k is kind of a crime for individuals. For businesses, absolutely, high prices for critical tools with support contracts is a no brainer. I just about coughed up a lung when I heard how much my company pays for 2 floating licenses of specialized engineering software (six figures per year). But in terms of ROI, it's easy to justify. Your robot could easily sell at 20-30k. If you add some kind of calibration/support service to guarantee whatever operating parameters, you could charge a subscription on top of that. Test equipment is normally fairly expensive and specialized, and no one who runs tests in a commercial environment wants to be in a situation where they are their own checks/balances. So even though they could easily build/maintain test equipment themselves, companies will avoid it if possible. It's why businesses will buy the $5k name brand multimeters, test probes, etc instead of the $200 no name one with the same specs.

spacedcowboy 3y ago

I switched from Eagle to Altium for a few reasons - Autodesk took my 3-years subscription money and then ditched Eagle, did no work, updates or improvements on the product I'd actually subscribed to, and tried to force me to move to a cloud-based app. No thanks. Never again, Autodesk. - Altium is a world away from Eagle, with its push/shove routing, rules, field-solver for impedance matching, dynamic lookup for components, just, well, everything basically. It's a steeper learning curve than Eagle, but it's far and away just better as well. - A perpetual license is what makes it worthwhile. Altium is already way more than I need, as a hobbyist, which gives me a lot of room to grow into it. I'd been using Eagle for ~20 years before switching, and I'd spent a lot on that over the years. If I get the same time-scale out of Altium that I did out of Eagle, it's not so bad averaged out.

pclmulqdq 3y ago
Altium ended perpetual licenses in 2021. I have a perpetual license of Altium 21, but when my salesperson came back for Altium 22, they had stopped the perpetual licensing scheme. To put numbers to it, it used to be $5000 for a license and $2000/year for a support contract on that license ($7000 in the first year covering the license and the support), and it's now something like $3000 for an annual license with no perpetual option. KiCad has been slowly getting toward feature parity with Altium 21, and I have had more fun with KiCad for hobby projects anyway. For those who tried it years ago, when I first tried KiCad in 2014, it was pretty crappy, but at some point between then and now they got their act in gear. The modern version is pretty close to a professional tool, and they are essentially taking feature ideas from Altium, so it's a pretty easy switch.
- spacedcowboy 3y ago
  Can’t be true. I bought a perpetual license just over 12 months ago (as in 5 days over 12 months ago). It still works fine, and it says it’s perpetual. Edit: and isn’t. They offer a perpetual license here [1] [1]: https://www.altium.com/altium-designer/licensing https://www.altium.com/altium-designer/licensing
  - 3y ago

userbinator 3y ago

Among hobbyists, Altium is probably just as pirated as Photoshop.

djmips 3y ago
I thought you couldn't pirate Photoshop anymore?

mhh__ 3y ago

Kicad is getting better and better but in a few ways it is still basically a toy compared to the big boy packages. That being said altium is pretty rotten internally it seems, just looks nice.

theatrus2 3y ago
KiCad is getting better and better. At this point Altium is copying features _from_ KiCad, so you know the competition is real :). Altium is still a Delphi-ish program, though with lots of things now just compiling to .Net. The core layout package has always been solid with a very small core developer group running it which is really more what its known for. The library management parts with collaboration are actually getting a lot better (ECAD<->MCAD, etc). Altium gained tons of weird stuff with a super weird push to "FPGAs for everything", a giant off-shore (not Australian or Carlsbad) development team, and... all of that crash and burned and no actual customer actually understood what was happening. Much of that legacy is still in parts, but most of the features have been removed by now.
- spacedcowboy 3y ago
  If you need it, the field solver for high-speed diff pairs in Altium is head and shoulders above the approximation techniques in the online tools - which never agree with each other anyway. Kicad is no better than the online ones. The price of a standalone field solver (which would be more capable than Altium’s, for sure) is more than the price of Altium… Given that an FPGA can output a lot of diff pairs at pretty high speeds these days, even us hobbyists can have a need for this sort of tech.
  - samtho 3y ago
    99% of the time, I’m routing CMOS logic, i2c, SPI, maybe a CAN network here or there. I have maybe 10 projects where I worked with anything so critical that it required the most precise diff pair length matching. I think SRAM was the only that actually was affected by lackadaisically ran diff pairs. Even then, KiCAD has successfully guided me to routing a number of signals that are capable of data transmission well into the megahertz range.

jrockway 3y ago

I always laugh at their ads/sponsorships on YouTube videos. I am sure Altium Designer is great, but there is no way you can afford it if you don't have significant income directly derived from the things that it saves time with. The shit that other engineering fields go through to practice their craft is always depressing. If you're a mechanical engineer, half your salary is Solidworks. Electronics engineer, Altium. Software engineer? Everything is free. Occasionally someone shows up with a fancy IDE and wants $75 a year for it, and that's as high as it goes. Weird stuff.

j16sdiz 3y ago
Depends on how good the alternative are, $75 can easily be justified. IntelliJ was far more productive than its peer in its first 5 years or so
zem 3y ago
back in 2004 I remember coming across "understand for c++", which cost something like $1000/seat but which was absolutely the best thing I have seen for navigating and working with a large inherited codebase.
- uxp100 3y ago
  Understand is still around, and probably still that expensive. I’m not aware of a better tool, but it has its weaknesses. Often we would make understand-only changes to help it “see” better, since we were taking diagrams straight from Understand and pasting them into our paperwork.

stephen_g 3y ago

It's a professional tool, they're probably just looking at the professional market for the claim (i.e. it would be from sales data so Kicad isn't going to even show up)

iancmceachern 3y ago

For hobbiests, yes. In industry, for organizations with many engineers who need to collaborate together on many boards making up a complex system, Altium is really the only choice. Also check out diptrace, I'm thinking of going with it for my next fee boards because it seems to have a very intuitive focus on its UI and also costs less than allium (they have a free tier), I just don't bees the power of Altium, but am tired if the archaic UI and workflows in eagle, kicad, etc.

timpattinson 3y ago
Altium is far from the only choice for professionals, but if you have to ask, you can't afford them.

TaylorAlexander 3y ago

Kicad is so amazing. Extremely powerful tool with no imposed limits that is completely free and widely used. I just finished the third rev of my open source low cost high power brushless motor controller in kicad. Open formats means Thea Flowers was able to make a beautiful web viewer that takes a GitHub link to a kicad board or schematic file and displays it for ya. You can see my new board in your browser right here: https://kicanvas.org/?github=https://github.com/Twisted-Fields/rp2040-motor-controller/blob/main/RP2040_motor.kicad_pcb https://kicanvas.org/?github=https://github.com/Twisted-Fiel... I also recently designed a PCB for a friends art project where I needed to place a bunch of LEDs in concentric rings. I used a nice python library for kicad board files to generate a board with all the LEDs placed, then imported the rest of my components and continued with layout as normal. But beyond the fact that it’s a high quality tool, and has easy to manipulate and read open formats, and loads of easy to use third party tools, is the fact that kicad is and always will be free and open source. That means that when I make my boards open source (and all of my work is open source), I know anyone anywhere in the world can download kicad and use the designs. I used altium to design some boards at google. It’s clearly a powerful tool. If that’s already what you know, you don’t want to share your designs or collaborate with others who don’t have altium, and you have a license, then go ahead and use it. Or if you want to get a job at a large firm that likely uses altium, then go learn the tool. But if you want to learn a PCB tool for 99% of hobbyist and a good deal of professional work, kicad is likely a better choice.

bboygravity 3y ago

Last time I got a quotation it was more than 10k USD per seat per unit time (1 year or 2 years, not sure). I don't think they do perpetual licenses (anymore?). TLDR: it's worse than 10k perpetual :p

ilyt 3y ago

> In my opinion, that also invalidates their claim that Altium is the most commonly used PCB design software, because there likely are 100x more hobbyists using KiCad than people able to spend $10k on a hobby. I guess that depends whether you look at per-user or per-PCB basis

STM32F030R8 3y ago

Altium is an enterprise level software that is just in a different league as kicad. Both are great products but it’s no sense comparing two very different products. I’ve never personally seen a company seriously use Kicad. I’m sure it’s possible but it’s not a tool you want your company to depend on. I find it hard to believe altiums ‘most commonly used’ claim. Maybe cadence just isn’t as worried about marketing? Haha.