Xilinx tools are only free for certain chips and feature sets. If you want tools like ChipScope (which more than pays for itself) or to use any Vertex chips you

Xilinx tools are only free for certain chips and feature sets. If you want tools like ChipScope (which more than pays for itself) or to use any Vertex chips you need to buy their software. For their lower end chips (All the Spartan series, the larger of the 6 series are still quite useful) they straight up announced an end of development on the main toolchain (ISE) with no plans for support on their newer one.