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Effective June 7, 2026, Autodesk will no longer sell nor support EAGLE
- BMc2020 3y agoKicad is where you want to go in the free price category of ecad programs.
- genmud 3y agoIMHO its better than OrCAD, probably as good or better than diptrace and about on par with Altium for people without managed libraries. Once they improve their library management system, it will surpass Altium in nearly every way possible.
- gaze 3y agoPush and shove isn’t great, the schematic editor doesn’t sensibly move wires around when you drag components, you can’t query designs with SQLish syntax to make bulk changes, there’s no room functionality, no via stitching and guarding, no multi-channel… it’s good but not there yet.
- brusselssprouts 3y agoKicad 7 has orthogonal wire drag in the schematic now.
- gaze 3y agoAh nice! That’s good to hear. I have no doubt that the things I listed will get implemented eventually. Altium should indeed be scared.
- adql 3y agoIsn't scripting API de-facto way to do bulk stuff for KiCAD. But yeah saying it is as advanced as Altium is a stretch. "Good enough for all but the most advanced high-speed stuff" is probably better description.
- gaze 3y agoGood enough for most anything as long as you’re willing to really grit your way through it for the more complicated stuff — some of which is high speed but also including multichannel and big bga fan-out and other stuff. Also — the common open source refrain “there’s a scripting interface” is just another way of saying “the feature isn’t implemented, but you can implement it yourself.” It’s not terribly helpful.
- dylan604 3y agolooks like somebody saw the drama on the lack of notice to changes from reddit and decide to go another way.
- londons_explore 3y agoKinda makes sense - you can earn a lot of money selling copies for 3 years while taking all the devs off it and doing security bugfixes only.
- jc4p 3y agoAutodesk bought EAGLE in 2016, so just about ten years between acquisition and discontinuation. EAGLE is the first PCB design app I learned (and had a harder onramp than React) so this is sad, but it is important to note that most hobbyists have already switched over to KiCad: https://www.kicad.org/ https://www.kicad.org/
- samtho 3y agoEven professionally, some of the places I worked for lately preferred KiCAD because you can check in libraries and projects to git and see meaningful diffs.
- jwitthuhn 3y agoSurprised it lasted that long. This reminds me of when they bought out Softimage in 2009 because XSI might have grown into something that challenges Maya, then released the last version in 2014 after delivering five years of barely any new features.
- 111111IIIIIII 3y ago[flagged]
- wlesieutre 3y agoLet me guess, they gave it half-baked support for FBX files?
- ShadowBanThis01 3y agoAutodesk: one of the most despicable, anti-customer, anti-consumer companies on the planet. I struggle with the quirks of FreeCAD happily to avoid putting a penny in Autodesk's pocket. Too bad CAD is such a complex, niche product category.
- abakker 3y agoThis is a weird take for me. Compared to the time I save with fusion360, even just as a tool for solving geometry problems, it is easily worth the fees. If you need to both design and either print/cut/machine in the same tool, it is a fantastic value. I wish they made some different decisions, but their product is great value.
- _2d30 3y agoThere’s a large contingent on HN where if a company is at all successful at making money, they are of the opinion that that company is evil. Only the companies, organizations and products that fail to earn can be morally good. Interestingly, it is also the case that the failures are usually caused, not by any fault of the failure itself but rather by the antagonistic, evil behavior of the successes.
- NikolaNovak 3y agoAll the while our zeitgeist is that we should be paid large salaries for flexible remote work on things we enjoy without any input from project managers or business owners :-). These salaries should come out of some bucket of money other than "corporate business profit" , ideally :-) (yes yes its not necessarily the same people. But often enough it is! :)
- nickpeterson 3y ago“Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.” Nobody has a problem with companies that make money by offering a solid product that people buy. The anger comes from companies gaining money by other means. Any of these might qualify: - Selling my data. - Buying out the competition and letting the products die. - employing manipulative tricks to get extra money from people (especially children). I’m sure there are many more examples. HN readers don’t hate success, they hate success at any cost.
- MegaDeKay 3y agoNot surprised. This guarantees Kicad all day long for hobby hackers going forward. In other news, the "free" version of their Fusion 360 loses functionality to the paid version on a regular basis. Wonder if it will suffer a similar fate, or if the free version will end up to forever suffer as some emaciated skeleton of the real app.
- userbinator 3y agoThis guarantees Kicad all day long for hobby hackers going forward. Based on what I see in the Chinese electronics communities, pirated Altium seems to be quite popular too.
- samtho 3y agoI work with random vendors from Ali Express, I do have to say there has been a growing number of them giving me zipped KiCAD files with edit histories indicating they likely used it to develop the project on.
- fortysixdegrees 3y agoThat sounds fascinating... How do you end up with AliExpress vendors sending you EDA?
- samtho 3y agoI just ask. It’s usually for dev boards for newly produced ICs that they are selling and there are no published reference designs yet.
- InitialLastName 3y agoJudging by the footprints/models I come across (from real companies doing 10M+ part volumes annually), there appears to be an entire society built around Altium Designer 2009 and educational licenses of Solidworks.
- bsder 3y ago
- aetherspawn 3y agoKiCad is pretty good these days, and I hear OrCad is used by Apple and is inexpensive.
- gaudat 3y agoYes, OrCAD is used by Apple from the style of iDevice schematics floating around on the interwebs. A contractor told me he can get OrCad for a few hundred dollars per year but I never see the actual price being listed on its web site. It looks like those "if you need to ask the price you cannot afford it" software. My gut tells me it is one of these, seeing it is from one of the big EDAs. And OrCad looks atrocious on the HiDPI screen the contractor is using... UI scaling is all screwed up.
- naikrovek 3y ago$2400/year looks like.
- stn8188 3y agoIf you buy at the right time when they have a sale, you can get the basic version for about $500, if I remember correctly.
- cvccvroomvroom 3y agoI used OrCad in industrial embedded products in the late 90's. I'm surprised it's still going.
- deepspace 3y agoI used OrCad at university in the 80s. The UI was unintuitive even back then, when there were very few other GUI applications to compare it with. I guess the people who used it a lot back then got used to the UI and developed muscle memory for it. One of my classmates works at Apple, and it is certainly the case for him.
- Gibbon1 3y ago
- bobsmooth 3y agoI will also offer my praise for kicad.
- frmdstryr 3y agoI've been happy with https://horizon-eda.org/ https://horizon-eda.org/
- twarge 3y agoSecond this! Horizon EDA is far closer to Eagle's library management than KiCad. And it's also much better than Eagle.
- jiveturkey 3y agoappears to be abandonware. i remember trying it back in its day.
- genmud 3y agoI think it is just burst-y in development and a newer project. Last updates were in may.
- RX14 3y agoIt's had consistent contributions for 5 years now, with the latest being about a month ago.
- jiveturkey 3y agothanks. i was going by the state of the documentation and the youtube presence.
- cristoperb 3y agoThere's also https://librepcb.org/ https://librepcb.org/ Has anyone had time to try Horizon and/or LibrePCB and compare them to KiCad?
- rock_hard 3y agoThere is a great migration guide here from the flux team on how to onboard coming from Eagle https://docs.flux.ai/Introduction/eagle-to-flux---migration-guide https://docs.flux.ai/Introduction/eagle-to-flux---migration-...
- jareklupinski 3y agoI just got into a great flow where I have a couple ULPs that export BOM and CPL files for JLCPCB, been very painless way of getting stuff made for a while I don't want to lock myself into EasyEDA, and trying KiCAD a few years ago wasn't the easiest switchover...
- myself248 3y agoKiCAD has improved massively since version 5, although the switch will still take some brain-contortion. IMHO it's worth it, and the sooner you take the plunge the better.
- eyegor 3y agoHow are the spice integrations for kicad now? I haven't used it in probably 10 years so I'm not sure where it's at anymore. I also had trouble using it for laying out traces where length/resistance was critical (high frequency signaling). Altium has been the only thing I've touched recently, but I also rarely do circuit design now, so a "friendly" interface is nice. That's why I prefer using fusion 360 to solidworks or nx.
- jpleger 3y agoI don't use it but I have heard both good things and bad things about it. One of the big limitations is the fact they use ngspice for their simulation and many models are encrypted. So lots of folks use it as a frontend for ltspice. TL;DR, it can be challenging, but there is support for it.
- thrtythreeforty 3y agoKiCAD has plugins that will bounce Gerber files in exactly the format JLCPCB wants, including assembly and BOM info, with one click. v7 is quite good. There are a couple UI irritations remaining but the core feature set is awesome.
- e-_pusher 3y agoKiCad v7 is wonderful.
- joshfee 3y agoIts not open source, but after trying a number of these tools (as a total noob hobbyist) I found Diptrace to be the most intuitive and they do offer a freeware for hobbyists
- genmud 3y agoDiptrace isn't too bad, they also have a cheap version [1] for non-commercial use if you need more than just 2 layer boards. Only thing is I wish they had a native OSX version. https://diptrace.com/buy/non-profit/ https://diptrace.com/buy/non-profit/
- MrBuddyCasino 3y agoI recently tried the OSX version, its running via some WINE wrapper, has a huge package size and doesn't support Retina resolution. Not recommended.
- cvccvroomvroom 3y agoCorporations going to corporate.
- lbayes 3y agoFor folks who are considering Kicad, but not sure if it will be useful at a professional level... We professionally design, engineer and manufacture accessible technology for disabled veterans and we are also developing robotic systems for industrial automation. We have a half-dozen active projects running on Kicad and have been using it for almost 4 years now. As with anything, there have been occasional frustrations with updates but overall, the tool consistently gets better over time. The main decision to select Kicad was based on the plain text representation of project state which enables (1) improved workflows with Git, (2) scriptable bulk edits (3) simpler, sharable extensions / plugins and (4) easier continuous integration for build artifacts.
- krasin 3y agoThere's also an amazing KiBot ([1]) that enables a lot of automation without much effort to setup. 1. https://github.com/INTI-CMNB/KiBot https://github.com/INTI-CMNB/KiBot
- sschueller 3y agoYes, KiBot is awesome. Just yesterday I saw that I can panelize my PCBs in my CI pipline! https://sschueller.github.io/posts/ci-cd-with-kicad-and-gitlab/ https://sschueller.github.io/posts/ci-cd-with-kicad-and-gitl...
- TaylorAlexander 3y agoI learned PCB design on Eagle, switched to Kicad about 5 years ago, and in the last three years have really been doing a LOT of PCB design with Kicad. I love it so much! Here's a dense four layer brushless motor control board I designed recently, which can be viewed online in the amazing Kicanvas viewer: 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...
- lsllc 3y agoDitto (in that I learned Eagle and switched to KiCad a few years ago). KiCad is great! Way better than Eagle.
- throwaway69123 3y agoThey should open source it then
- genmud 3y ago> Autocad need I say more?
- Mockapapella 3y agoBeen a few years since I've worked with EEs, but isn't EAGLE the industry standard? Like, would this be similar to if Adobe shut down Photoshop?
- InitialLastName 3y agoThe functionality is already included in fusion360, so it's more like if Adobe stopped selling standalone installations of Photoshop and forced all their users onto cloud-oriented subscription plans (hint: that's what Adobe did).
- cmbuck 3y agoEagle is far from an industry standard. In fact I don't remember hearing about a single company who uses it. Perhaps some small companies preferred Eagle. In industry it is far more common to see hardware companies use Altium, OrCad, Cadence, or even Mentor Graphics. I've also heard of one company who uses KiCad. One of the big drivers for which EDA tool suite hardware companies choose is integration/compatibility with their Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) tools. My understanding is the bigger tools have better solutions for this than Eagle.
- _fizz_buzz_ 3y agoI worked for a company about 10 years ago that used eagle. As far as I know they haven't switched away from it. But it was a very small shop (<20 people) and I would definitely say it is rather the exception than the norm. Before KiCad took of the last few years, it was pretty popular with hobbyists though.
- joshvm 3y agoAltium is probably the industry standard, though there are several high-end competitors (OrCAD for example). Similar to how Solidworks is usually considered the standard for CAD, but there are lots of competitors in the $2k/annum range. EAGLE was/is certainly used in production in many places, but it gained traction because it was competent and their free tier was good enough for almost all hobbyist work. EAGLE was barely maintained for years, until Autodesk bought it and started making a lot of improvements, but the changes were often buggy and broke existing workflows. They also changed the pricing structure and many pro customers were unhappy about that too. But while a lot of people grouched about it, it's not like EAGLE was ever been a shining beacon of good UX. It seems like EAGLE is being merged into Fusion 360 instead, so you have a unified electronics/CAD environment.
- jwrallie 3y agoThey did not mention Linux at all in the notice. EAGLE supported Linux but as far as I know, Fusion 360 does not. Maybe I am their only user that cares, but this is the main reason I will be pushing my coworkers to migrate to KiCad. When Autodesk claim Fusion 360 has the same functionality as Eagle and can replace it, that is a lie. It does not work on Linux so it is not a valid replacement.
- genmud 3y agoYea, I have looked at F360 EDA and there are a lot of features that either are buggy as hell or just don't exist. I'm not sure that F360 is going to get much uptake from EEs until the software has had a few more years to bake and by then, most will likely have migrated to other tools.
- sebazzz 3y agoThat Fusion 360 doesn't work on Linux is probably a business decision too, because it packs a lot of web tech. F360 isn't very far from a packaged web app.
- inferiorhuman 3y agoFusion 360 is very much a native app. Qt and all that jazz. Just one that's been nerfed in the name of cloud. Certainly it's trending more towards "cloud based" features over the years. As for Linux support, Fusion was kept around despite never turning a profit because it was the CEO's pet project. To that end I'd expect that not supporting Linux was mostly a business decision. Technically I don't think there's a ton of institutional knowledge around Linux on the product teams. It's been well known internally that it makes an atrocious amount of RPC calls since the Carl Bass days. If I had to make a guess, I'd say that historically most of what you've seen with slow startup relates to authorization more than anything else. You could probably mitmproxy it if you really wanted to, the last time I checked they weren't doing any certificate pinning. Hell, at one point Little Snitch even wanted to know if I wanted to access a staging server.
- neltnerb 3y agoThey definitely don't care, or at least Miguel got ignored. Fusion 360 is so slow and bloated it's an embarrassment on Windows. Takes minutes just to start. Loading it in VMware is a joke (my best computer is Ubuntu). I was willing to put up with it for doing 3D board renderings, but no. Not for actual work. I cannot open an app inside a badly written and slow program with excessive DRM with a subset of the features of the program I've used for 20 years. It's just not happening. I will switch to KiCAD first, it's not nearly as big and uninteresting a transition. If I made MCAD + ECAD stuff more, maybe, but seriously how many people do that. It's a dream. It's super cool when and if it works. It's like VR though. It has three real use cases -- checking interferences, shifting component positions to address interferences, and making accurate panel cutouts. That's all I've found. The first two are simply enough handled with IDF. Or a STP export from KiCAD which works fine. And a panel cutout can be addressed with a STP export too. It's cute, Fusion 360, in that it tries to be MCAD, ECAD, etc all in one place. It, like most things of that nature, does badly at all of them. Features should be optional, let me explore MCAD-ECAD integration when I decide it would be an advantage rather than because of software limitations.
- flaminHotSpeedo 3y agoAutodesk has the honor of being one of the few companies that are so shitty I'm _happy_ to pay money to their competitors. I paid for a full solidworks license for a year (before discovering the makers license) and grumbled only mildly.
- faraggi 3y agoYou should consider donating to it's OSS competitors. Still lots of catching up needed in the cad space.
- hospitalJail 3y agoFreeCAD? What does FreeCAD need next? Maybe Assembly, but I can always download the Assembly3 plugin. Outside of having to download a plugin, FreeCAD has never limited me.
- regularfry 3y agoIt really really really needs to fix the topological naming problem. It also needs a UI overhaul and some convenience functionality to knock some of the rougher edges off common workflows. It's possible to do a lot with FreeCAD, so in that sense it's not particularly limited, but it's deeply annoying to have to jump through some of the hoops it puts in your way.
- phkahler 3y agoFrom what I've read, it needs more UI consistency between workbenches. They should also use the constraint solver from Solvespace everywhere.
- regularfry 3y agoThe whole workbench system is shonky, for my money. It ends up with a situation where arbitrary UI context switches are needed to jump from one bit of functionality to another, just because of the historical accident of who worked on which piece of code. Using the Solvespace solver is an interesting problem: it would switch up the FreeCAD licence from the LGPL to the GPLv3. The FreeCAD folks don't want to do that: it's fine from a licensing point of view, but they don't want the additional constraints.
- jiveturkey 3y agosorry to say it, but no great loss. i learned on EAGLE and even bought a license. (or was there no free version at all?) i dare say i became quite expert at it (not hard, it's a very limited software) and liked the script/macro capabilities which i used for BOM mgmt. but come on, it's terrible. that said, it's too bad they don't open source it. maybe they will. now i use orcad. there was a price and mindshare war going on and orcad was offered for $400. it was something of a bronze age for EDA at the time.
- phendrenad2 3y agoThey still sell EAGLE? I switched to Fusion 360 ages ago. Also tried KiCAD but eh, it's just not the same quality. Still salty that Altium destroyed CircuitMaker with low-quality updates with show-stopping bugs, and absolutely failed to incentivize me to upgrade to CircuitStudio because it is wildly different from CircuitMaker.
- moritz 3y ago“Can I work with my files locally in Fusion 360? Fusion 360 is a cloud-based 3D mode…” Ok bye, KiCad it is.
- kramerger 3y agoSince you all are discussing kicad, please don't forget that they accept donations to support future development https://www.kicad.org/donate/ https://www.kicad.org/donate/
- amelius 3y agoAny tips on how to convince my boss, and what amount to donate?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- blastersyndrome 3y agoAround mid 2018 I was working on a personal project that absolutely needed a custom PCB. KiCad 5 had just launched, and so I flipped a coin to decide if I should make it in Eagle or Kicad. I ended up choosing KiCad. Looking back five years later, I could not be happier. Now almost on a monthly basis I hear about Fusion360 receiving some kind of update that strips features away in lieu of running them exclusively in the cloud, or they just arbitrarily change things and make it qualitatively worse for the end user by upselling them features. I don't want anything to do with that and so HP isn't getting a dime of my money.
- zirgs 3y agoWhy is Autodesk allowed to buy and kill off its competitors?
- kuon 3y agoWe use kicad for large complicated projects. The tool works but you need to get creative (write scripts) to manage libraries and run simulations. It's also missing some RF features that you need to integrate external tools for. For smaller hobby project it's really good and has all you need.
- exar0815 3y agoLuckily, we went off Eagle a while ago. We used it mainly because we couldn't justify 4 Altium Licenses for our department. Building system prototypes and measurement equipment just isn't profitable enough inside a multi-billion USD super tanker of a company it seems. We try to go open source to prevent stuff like that as much as possible. I would say we are around 80% there so far (excluding obviously manufacturer-specific stuff like STM Cube IDE). KiCad, Gitea, drawio, Python(and thank heavens for pyvisa), Octave, OpenProject. Next up is probably Eclipse Capella. The only stuff we currently can't get rid of are Simulink and SolidWorks. Well, maybe in the future.
- rta5 3y agoAre you using simulink for code generation or something else? I used to work at a company that made automotive controllers and a simulink "platform" for developing controls on them, and I occasionally flirt with starting a similar company that uses a cheaper/open source toolchain, but always come up empty handed. There are some academic libraries and papers around the Xcos ecosystem, but nothing near production level that I could find.
- exar0815 3y agoYes, mainly Code Generation for Automotive. I do have to admit it's a great piece of Software!
- phkahler 3y agoYou might want to check out wxMaxima for symbolic math. FreeCAD and Solvespace are both aiming at mcad, but neither are yet. FreeCAD could get better if they spend a year focusing on usability and consistency improvements.
- superkuh 3y agoEmbrace. Extend. Extinguish.
- ryukoposting 3y agoThey already effectively killed EAGLE as I knew it, so this isn't really a surprise. What a wonderful piece of software. I'm sad to see it go.
- garganzol 3y agoA typical acquikill stretched in time. They might have integrated worthy EAGLE ideas into their own product though. Reminds me Macromedia Fireworks vs Adobe Photoshop situation - Fireworks had been acquired, good parts transplanted to Photoshop, then killed.
- Gordonjcp 3y agoOthers have mentioned the "plain text files" thing, so let me just mention the "plain text files" thing. Everything is stored as a plain text file. It's just text. Hell, it's practically human-readable, if you're a fairly nerdy human. You can store them in git, or any other source code repository. You can email them or stick them up on a server, without them getting mangled, because they're just text. You can run scripts on them, or just plain open them in a text editor and do search-and-replace on them. You can even write code to write files for you - take a bunch of stuff and programmatically design footprints and components, any way you like, because it's just plain text files, describing lines and co-ordinates and stuff. Can't get any less locked-in than that!