Altium Designer vs. Tacton Design Automation

For general PCB design, rigid flex PCB design, and multi-layer PCB design, Altium Designer is the best software to use on the market. The simple movement between board layers and easy component placement are what sets it apart from other similar software. When designing our PCBs for industry, it is easily capable of suiting all of our needs.

Incentivized

For design automation for SOLIDWORKS, I feel Tacton Design Automation is the best solution out there. It's simple to develop and implement for the design/engineering department. But can be implemented within the sales team as well with Tacton CPQ. When a company has products that are modular and/or have many sizing updates, this is where Tacton excels. If you have products that are completely customized, then Tacton or even design automation isn't the best suited for that.

Incentivized

• BOM management - with just a little bit of extra care any designer produces a usable bom along with their pcb design ready to be ordered
• 365 - being able to view and review (placing comments) projects without the need to have the software installed locally
• Multi-pcb projects

Incentivized

• Tacton has a non-linear solver, meaning it can solve lots of equations without them being is a particular order. This enables the software to be incredibly flexible.
• Tacton has a great interface to set up configurators for people to use. No knowledge of programming languages is required. The configurator uses equations similar to Excel equations to control what the users options are.
• Tacton has the ability to easily add lists of data like product lists, beam or pipe sizes that because available for user selections or for calculations.
• The Tacton configurator also automatically builds the user interface as you set up user inputs making it much easier to set up then competitor software.

Incentivized

• The tools organization section has too many tools that are easy to lose.
• Save settings for multi-projects and reuse settings from other projects in new ones.
• Better import final designs into multiple formats (details are often lost when imported into CAD formats).

• Layout mode is probably the most lacking aspect of the software (within Tacon Design Automation Engineer). Something so powerful as having modular parts should be more heavily supported. Although, I've heard Tacton is focusing on updating this with better functionality.
• The constraint editor does not display complex/lengthy constraints very well. I end up using Excel to visually break out in cells the different aspects of the constraint.

Incentivized

ALTIUM DESIGNER is the reference tool in the electronic circuit design sector, its use is widespread worldwide. Although there are other alternatives, some of them free do not rival ALTIUM DESIGNER in terms of features and reliability. It is also very practical to request quotes with ALTIUM DESIGNER BOM reports since all suppliers are accustomed to using the tool.

Incentivized

Like any complicated program, it will always need some room for improvement. For example, it would be nicer to have other shortcuts than just the numpad Asterisk as the layer shift shortcut, or easy to shift layers via other ways. Some programs use a space bar instead, or similar. It would also be nice to manipulate or make 3D items better

Incentivized

Not very stable. Sudden lack of functionality when the license expires is not indicated clearly and can lead to loss of work.

Incentivized

I use the educational Program. And so far is the best technical support. Every time that I need one or I have a question. They respond so far and with excellent advice.

Incentivized

easy to follow, Good technical materials. good videos The platform is easy to use.

Incentivized

Overly complex, not designed for small organizations, core functionality poorly implemented to focus on flashy features.

Incentivized

We had two licenses, purchased at a time when Altium Designer products were affordably priced. I can't remember how much they were, but they were not at a price where we even had to think about it at all. We wished to purchase a 3rd license a couple of years ago, actually, because we wanted more, but the price had risen so considerably that we were asked to test some less expensive alternatives, which we did. Suddenly, the pricing structure skyrocketed, and when more than one license and more than one subscription are wished, then it becomes serious money. However, we decided to continue with Altium Designer, as none of the alternatives matched up to it.

Incentivized

Drive Works is the main competitor for the TactonWorks module of Tacton. We actually discovered DriveWorks and purchased it before we discovered Tacton and started to use it. Once we discovered Tacton we liked it so much better we dropped using DriveWorks and switched to Tacton. I think you could accomplish what you need to in DriveWorks, but it is easier to setup in Tacton and Tacton has alot of features that really can make your product configurators nice

Incentivized

Because, in my opinion, usage for small organization is poor, it is difficult to set up initial configuration to support scaling.

Incentivized

• It has enabled us to turnaround customer designs quicker. Because of this, our gross profit grew 79% YoY.
• We can identify and mitigate supply chain risks with unified component management and sourcing views.
• We can closely estimate total BOM and solution costs.

Incentivized

• Time to produce submittals went from 1-2 weeks down to a couple of days. Then, once approved, normally to produce the fabrication drawings (70+ unique parts) it would take from 4-6 weeks. We can get it down to as little as a few days.

Incentivized