> KiCad is easily better than any ECAD tool you can buy for $1,000 or less. Well, we pulled the plug on Altium when KiCad 6.0 was released and have not looked

> KiCad is easily better than any ECAD tool you can buy for $1,000 or less. Well, we pulled the plug on Altium when KiCad 6.0 was released and have not looked back. We got really sick of Altium nonsense, just had enough of it. Their focus on cloud to sell the company really caused damage and every release broke something new. We do everything from relatively simple four layer boards to complex multi-GHz boards with challenging signal and power integrity constraints. KiCad has no problem at all providing the tools we need to complete these designs. I can't see ever going back to Altium. As far as libraries are concerned. Professional organizations rarely (I would say, never) use built-in libraries. The reason for this is that you are responsible for reliability, manufacturability and product life-cycle. This means every component needs to be qualified and fully vetted to the extent required by the nature of the product. Which, in turn, means that you are always going to want to define all the components and use internally-built libraries you can trust. There are other reasons for this, that's just the basics.