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KiCad will be even more relevant going forward as Altium quality inevitably craters (ever so slowly) under Renesas leadership. That said, KiCad has a lot of wor

KiCad will be even more relevant going forward as Altium quality inevitably craters (ever so slowly) under Renesas leadership. That said, KiCad has a lot of work to do[0] to prepare for that transition period and start wooing Altium customers. Otherwise someone else will have to step in. 0: https://www.reddit.com/r/diypedals/comments/14bz17c/comment/joi88c0/ https://www.reddit.com/r/diypedals/comments/14bz17c/comment/...

NikkiA 3y ago
Altium cratered in quality about 10 minutes after it ceased being Protel, first because of their braindead attempt to turn it into a generic FPGA layout system, then by their insistance on making it cloud based.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  I absolutely loathe cloud based tooling. It really sits wrong with me that to do any kind of development you start off with shipping your IP to another party, who may or may not have their security done properly.
Aurornis 3y ago
KiCad is a fantastic option for simple PCBs. For even moderately complex work, Altium and KiCad aren’t even comparable. I don’t think the size of this gap is obvious to the average hobbyist, but professional packages like Altium have a depth and breadth of features that will take years or decades to replicate in the open source space. There’s a reason professionals and organizations are paying huge amounts of money for Altium licenses still.
- bsder 3y ago
  Anybody who needs real PCB features isn't using Alitum. They're using Mentor Xpedition or Cadence Allegro.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    A company down the road from me building automotive electronics including for Formula 1, would beg to differ.
    - OJFord 3y ago
      By 'real electronics' they probably mean high frequency or very high speed designs, a GPU card manufacturer say. No doubt there's a lot of complexity in F1 electronics, but they certainly have more space, cooling, reasonable environment, etc. to work with than some industries. (Not to disagree that it was dismissive and a lot of serious work gets done with Altium Designer, and for that matter Kicad, of course.)
      - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        >By 'real electronics' they probably mean high frequency or very high speed designs, a GPU card manufacturer say. I duuno man, at a startup I worked at, the graybeard EE was doing 2.4GHz RF design on software cheaper and more rudimentary than Altium, let alone Cadence. So I'm always rolling my eyes when someone uses the world "real" as some sort of macho flex with vague meaning like "real men", "real work", "real engineering", "real software development", as if only their particular example makes the world go round and scoff at everything else like it's unimportant child's play.
        vanchor3 3y ago
        Sure, you can do 2.4GHz on a 2 layer board with even the simplest programs, or even Inkscape really. The hard part is arguably knowing the write math involved to design with signal integrity in mind. When you start working with very high speed things like DDR4/DDR5 on 14 layer boards you could do it with simpler software, but I don't see why you would. The time saved with the design tools and signal integrity simulations would likely be worth much more than the licensing cost, especially if you're bigger than a small hobby shop. Not to mention the money saved on having software that can identify mistakes early on when the PCBs alone can cost thousands. And then there's all the other bits like conforming to standards, providing deliverables in a format that the next place down the line deems "acceptable" (or they're just picky), as interoperability with other teams, because sometimes you're just one small part of the design process.
- _fizz_buzz_ 3y ago
  We switched from Altium to kicad and it has been great so far. Haven’t found a feature that existed in Altium that we are missing now. For support we subscribe to kipro[1], which is a lot cheaper than an Altium license and their support blows Altium support easily out of the water. If you report a bug to them which is easy enough to fix, the next minor release will have it implemented. Altium has (or at least had) bugs that persisted for years and reporting them did nothing. We build power electronics, so this isn’t RF stuff or Gigabit communication. So I cannot speak for that. [1] https://www.kipro-pcb.com/ https://www.kipro-pcb.com/
  - Aurornis 3y ago
    > We switched from Altium to kicad and it has been great so far. Haven’t found a feature that existed in Altium that we are missing now. If the feature set of KiCad fits your needs, then it's a great choice. It does quite well at simple boards and it can be made to work for certain minimal high-speed or RF boards if you have enough space and know how to make it work for you. However, I'm surprised you haven't found any features that you're missing. Even common settings like design rules are missing frequently-used features in KiCad. I immediately miss some of the more fine-grained design rule settings of the more powerful packages every time I use KiCad.
    - delfinom 3y ago
      KiCad has basic design rules and a design rules scripting system, you can create a lot of design rules through that mechanism. Generally we take feedback on rules that can't currently be scripted and there are real applications for.
  - m00x 3y ago
    KiCAD is amazing for simple PCBs, but if you're going into 10+ layers and dealing with high-frequency designs, you're going to have a lot of issues.
- quatrefoil 3y ago
  Similarly to many other open-source design apps, KiCad has a fairly horrid UX and lacks some enterprise features (especially around collaboration on larger projects), but it's definitely being used for complex projects at a good number of companies. And the reasons why professionals and organizations are paying huge amounts for specific software are often less enlightened than we tend to assume. Inertia is a huge factor. Many universities train students to use Altium, for example, so it's often the path of least resistance. Plus, when you have processes and teams built around a tool that was cutting-edge a decade or two ago, it can be hard to switch. Especially for niche software like this, interoperability tents to be poor, every vendor invents their own UI and terminology from first principles, etc. But KiCad and Altium are not the only choices. There are affordable "serious hobbyist" products with much better UX (e.g., Diptrace) and there are higher-end commercial tools that leave Altium in the dust.
- tverbeure 3y ago
  How does Altium compare against Cadence Allegro?
- rcxdude 3y ago
  The gap is closing, and that should be deeply embarrasing to Altium, given the difference in resources. But Altium has completely squandered their efforts on stuff that isn't actually particularly useful for most of their users, while failing to fix bugs or otherwise improve the usability of their products for ~90% of their users. Altium today is about as useful to me as Altium 10 years ago. KiCAD has improved by leaps and bounds in the same timeframe.
- numpad0 3y ago
  I was once at an event, and a guy had some beautiful mixed signal something at a booth. Somehow I asked "so this is actually done in like KiCad..." and he kind of cut me with "well I have Altium subscription actually" and that, sufficed. Quality and feature set difference between these products is that obvious at mid-high ranges.
bsder 3y ago
Altium quality turned to crap the moment you could have libraries that you couldn't extract the data from. The single thing Altium really had going for it was that it had sort of become a lingua franca of sharable designs. And engineers, being the lazy shits they are, would simply pack up the library and ship it with the schematics. Consequently, you got an actual, engineering validated symbol and layout when a company gave you schematics. Once Altium changed such that you could ship a library that couldn't be extracted from, they lost the only thing that really set them apart from the competition. All the cloud and parts management crap was just insult to injury after that. KiCAD is good enough for all but the most demanding commercial use at this point. It has some quirks, but all CAD programs do. Every major release has been a big step forward. Version 7 was a huge step up, and they're about to release Version 8. The biggest issues with KiCad would be using them for very complex designs: huge numbers of length-matched busses (think desktop computer motherboards), weird flex designs that need combined electro-mechanical CAD, so many signals that you need a complex autorouter, extremely advanced inventory management, etc.
- vrinsd 3y ago
  The step backwards you see Altium regarding not being able to freely export/import is the result of a nut job named Henry Potts, who also formerly ruled Mentor with an iron fist. He did not bring about positive change, quite the opposite. He did the same thing regarding locking down import/export with Expedition circa ~2006 or ~2008(?) specifically to tie people into a Mentor flow, breaking years of tools people had written that enabled footprint / schematic import/export capability. In an a "Jack Welch" kind of way, somehow he attained industry envy from the other EDA companies and Altium hired him, even though, like Jack Welch, he's not someone who actually did positive things.
1letterunixname 3y ago
Altium could always get worse. Renesas could be bought by a private equity firm.
m00x 3y ago
Do you have any data to back up that take or are you just spewing FUD for no reason?

NikkiA 3y ago

Altium cratered in quality about 10 minutes after it ceased being Protel, first because of their braindead attempt to turn it into a generic FPGA layout system, then by their insistance on making it cloud based.

jacquesm 3y ago
I absolutely loathe cloud based tooling. It really sits wrong with me that to do any kind of development you start off with shipping your IP to another party, who may or may not have their security done properly.

Aurornis 3y ago

KiCad is a fantastic option for simple PCBs. For even moderately complex work, Altium and KiCad aren’t even comparable. I don’t think the size of this gap is obvious to the average hobbyist, but professional packages like Altium have a depth and breadth of features that will take years or decades to replicate in the open source space. There’s a reason professionals and organizations are paying huge amounts of money for Altium licenses still.

bsder 3y ago
Anybody who needs real PCB features isn't using Alitum. They're using Mentor Xpedition or Cadence Allegro.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  A company down the road from me building automotive electronics including for Formula 1, would beg to differ.
  - OJFord 3y ago
    By 'real electronics' they probably mean high frequency or very high speed designs, a GPU card manufacturer say. No doubt there's a lot of complexity in F1 electronics, but they certainly have more space, cooling, reasonable environment, etc. to work with than some industries. (Not to disagree that it was dismissive and a lot of serious work gets done with Altium Designer, and for that matter Kicad, of course.)
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      >By 'real electronics' they probably mean high frequency or very high speed designs, a GPU card manufacturer say. I duuno man, at a startup I worked at, the graybeard EE was doing 2.4GHz RF design on software cheaper and more rudimentary than Altium, let alone Cadence. So I'm always rolling my eyes when someone uses the world "real" as some sort of macho flex with vague meaning like "real men", "real work", "real engineering", "real software development", as if only their particular example makes the world go round and scoff at everything else like it's unimportant child's play.
      - vanchor3 3y ago
        Sure, you can do 2.4GHz on a 2 layer board with even the simplest programs, or even Inkscape really. The hard part is arguably knowing the write math involved to design with signal integrity in mind. When you start working with very high speed things like DDR4/DDR5 on 14 layer boards you could do it with simpler software, but I don't see why you would. The time saved with the design tools and signal integrity simulations would likely be worth much more than the licensing cost, especially if you're bigger than a small hobby shop. Not to mention the money saved on having software that can identify mistakes early on when the PCBs alone can cost thousands. And then there's all the other bits like conforming to standards, providing deliverables in a format that the next place down the line deems "acceptable" (or they're just picky), as interoperability with other teams, because sometimes you're just one small part of the design process.
_fizz_buzz_ 3y ago
We switched from Altium to kicad and it has been great so far. Haven’t found a feature that existed in Altium that we are missing now. For support we subscribe to kipro[1], which is a lot cheaper than an Altium license and their support blows Altium support easily out of the water. If you report a bug to them which is easy enough to fix, the next minor release will have it implemented. Altium has (or at least had) bugs that persisted for years and reporting them did nothing. We build power electronics, so this isn’t RF stuff or Gigabit communication. So I cannot speak for that. [1] https://www.kipro-pcb.com/ https://www.kipro-pcb.com/
- Aurornis 3y ago
  > We switched from Altium to kicad and it has been great so far. Haven’t found a feature that existed in Altium that we are missing now. If the feature set of KiCad fits your needs, then it's a great choice. It does quite well at simple boards and it can be made to work for certain minimal high-speed or RF boards if you have enough space and know how to make it work for you. However, I'm surprised you haven't found any features that you're missing. Even common settings like design rules are missing frequently-used features in KiCad. I immediately miss some of the more fine-grained design rule settings of the more powerful packages every time I use KiCad.
  - delfinom 3y ago
    KiCad has basic design rules and a design rules scripting system, you can create a lot of design rules through that mechanism. Generally we take feedback on rules that can't currently be scripted and there are real applications for.
- m00x 3y ago
  KiCAD is amazing for simple PCBs, but if you're going into 10+ layers and dealing with high-frequency designs, you're going to have a lot of issues.
quatrefoil 3y ago
Similarly to many other open-source design apps, KiCad has a fairly horrid UX and lacks some enterprise features (especially around collaboration on larger projects), but it's definitely being used for complex projects at a good number of companies. And the reasons why professionals and organizations are paying huge amounts for specific software are often less enlightened than we tend to assume. Inertia is a huge factor. Many universities train students to use Altium, for example, so it's often the path of least resistance. Plus, when you have processes and teams built around a tool that was cutting-edge a decade or two ago, it can be hard to switch. Especially for niche software like this, interoperability tents to be poor, every vendor invents their own UI and terminology from first principles, etc. But KiCad and Altium are not the only choices. There are affordable "serious hobbyist" products with much better UX (e.g., Diptrace) and there are higher-end commercial tools that leave Altium in the dust.
tverbeure 3y ago
How does Altium compare against Cadence Allegro?
rcxdude 3y ago
The gap is closing, and that should be deeply embarrasing to Altium, given the difference in resources. But Altium has completely squandered their efforts on stuff that isn't actually particularly useful for most of their users, while failing to fix bugs or otherwise improve the usability of their products for ~90% of their users. Altium today is about as useful to me as Altium 10 years ago. KiCAD has improved by leaps and bounds in the same timeframe.
numpad0 3y ago
I was once at an event, and a guy had some beautiful mixed signal something at a booth. Somehow I asked "so this is actually done in like KiCad..." and he kind of cut me with "well I have Altium subscription actually" and that, sufficed. Quality and feature set difference between these products is that obvious at mid-high ranges.

bsder 3y ago

Altium quality turned to crap the moment you could have libraries that you couldn't extract the data from. The single thing Altium really had going for it was that it had sort of become a lingua franca of sharable designs. And engineers, being the lazy shits they are, would simply pack up the library and ship it with the schematics. Consequently, you got an actual, engineering validated symbol and layout when a company gave you schematics. Once Altium changed such that you could ship a library that couldn't be extracted from, they lost the only thing that really set them apart from the competition. All the cloud and parts management crap was just insult to injury after that. KiCAD is good enough for all but the most demanding commercial use at this point. It has some quirks, but all CAD programs do. Every major release has been a big step forward. Version 7 was a huge step up, and they're about to release Version 8. The biggest issues with KiCad would be using them for very complex designs: huge numbers of length-matched busses (think desktop computer motherboards), weird flex designs that need combined electro-mechanical CAD, so many signals that you need a complex autorouter, extremely advanced inventory management, etc.

vrinsd 3y ago
The step backwards you see Altium regarding not being able to freely export/import is the result of a nut job named Henry Potts, who also formerly ruled Mentor with an iron fist. He did not bring about positive change, quite the opposite. He did the same thing regarding locking down import/export with Expedition circa ~2006 or ~2008(?) specifically to tie people into a Mentor flow, breaking years of tools people had written that enabled footprint / schematic import/export capability. In an a "Jack Welch" kind of way, somehow he attained industry envy from the other EDA companies and Altium hired him, even though, like Jack Welch, he's not someone who actually did positive things.

1letterunixname 3y ago

Altium could always get worse. Renesas could be bought by a private equity firm.

m00x 3y ago

Do you have any data to back up that take or are you just spewing FUD for no reason?