Altium 365 is an agile electronics development platform that brings together all aspects of electronics development. Altium 365 is designed to remove silos and inefficiencies in the hardware development process. Engineers can connect to the platform directly from their familiar design tools without changing how they work.
$0
Solid Edge
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Solid Edge is a software solutions for product development — 3D design, simulation, manufacturing, data management, and cloud collaboration. Solid Edge aims to combine the speed and simplicity of direct modeling with the flexibility and control of parametric design.
$110
per month
Pricing
Altium 365
Solid Edge
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Design and Drafting XaaS
$110.00
per month
Foundation XaaS
$267.00
per month
Classic XaaS
$335.00
per month
Premium XaaS
$481.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Altium 365
Solid Edge
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Full access to Altium 365 is included with an Altium Designer subscription. The Altium 365 applications suite includes access to apps such as Assembly Assistant, Advanced MCAD CoDesigner, and more for free or at an additional cost. Various other paid and free connectors are available based on needs. Contact Altium for specific pricing.
Altium 365 is fantastic for students learning about PCB design and for large team-based PCB projects. Because this product is relatively easier to use than other ECAD software and it enables collaboration, students and professional engineers would greatly benefit from having this software in their skill set. In other words, Altium 365 is great for academic and industry purposes.
It has very good user interface in classic or ordered environment.
In 2D or drafting, you can give any Geometric tolerancing and symbols to any dimension. There is a wide range of options available.
You can convert any files in step file (.stp) and can open it in other designing applications easily.
After converting 3D drawings in 2D you can make changes in 2D drawing by converting it in the draft. You can also add details like cross-sections and detailed view.
You can directly make threads without creating holes.
New component creation, the silly script file system never works
I want to grab a new component off the web and instantly import into my designs, no hassles
Naming schemes need to be structured as well, so I can find parts fast and use them in my designs
For example, if I could check a couple boxes for a capacitor, and have the database filter on those choices, I could very quickly get the right part into the design
Wire harnesses are still a pain and hard to visualize
Being used to 2-key and 3-key commands from the keyboard, it would be nice if this was more robust in Solid Edge. The capability of programming keystroke commands exists in Solid Edge, but it would be more user friendly in that regard.
Editing hatches can be a challenge.
I'm not a fan of the ribbon bar, but that seems to be a feature across software platforms in Windows.
All its features provide the possibility to improve the work together and also to improve the associated documentation in a practical way to better understand the implementations that are made in various projects, such as presenting a product to a potential customer or evaluator.
As mentioned previously, Siemens Solid Edge is not the most user-friendly of products at all. It requires intense training to make sure that the basics are understood, and after that, there are numerous other training interventions needed to be able to perform expert-level CAD functions. The GUI is not intuitive, as many other packages are, and the features built-in are not well defined. The process to use many of these features is counter-intuitive and requires a mind-shift.
I have been involved with support and training of Solid Edge for 24 years. Given that I based my business model on support, and have been successful for all these years, I know excellent support. Siemens support for Solid Edge, "GTAC", is the definition of support for a product in every aspect.
Altium 365 can not be compared to open source programs for doing the same function. The open source programs like KiCad does the simple job but Altium 365 has a lot more tools to offer. Its multi project is one of them. The shared vault is better and allows more people to collaborate together. Its interface and usability is also better.
FreeCAD is often better than Solid Edge 2021 when converting files, but I hope this changes with 2023 NX is overall more powerful, but that is to be expected (and you cant add it above because it is too short for whatever reason).
I can not say much about it. It is not a cheap service, by the way. It is useful for being remote and working on the same design from anywhere—that's very collaborative. I don't know how much it impacts our financials compared to its benefits. I am an HW engineer. I don't usually take these into consideration.
It took about 20 hours of use to get the basics of Synchronous Technology, and with just a basic competency I was able to make useful changes to the design. One of those changes was impossible to do our other CAD program.
My use lately has mostly been on personal time and self-driven, so learning other aspects and features of Solid Edge has been slower. Creating a drawing for a part required a few hours to learn and do the first time, but luckily there were YouTube videos for examples. With practice, I would expect the time to reflect what it takes in SolidWorks (about 30 minutes).
