Altium Develop is a platform that unifies multidisciplinary teams across engineering, sourcing, and manufacturing to support seamless co-creation. It provides real-time visibility into designs, requirements, and supply chain data, enabling contributors to work together concurrently rather than in silos.
KiCAD and EasyEDA are much better for simple designs with only one engineer. EasyEDA works well especially if you are using a service like JLCPCB or LCSC since the integrate seamlessly and can be run in the web browser. That being said, they have a lot of limitations in …
Altium has the best feature set among EDA software suites, but it is a bit harder to use out of the box than EasyEDA. KiCAD is powerful, but it takes a lot more effort to get working well.
Verified User
Engineer
Chose Altium Develop
Altium is considered "professional" software and has a better narrative when delivering eCAD artifacts and projects to end clients.
Altium Develop gave the most cohesive experience compared to other platforms. Most others feel like several pieces of software kludged together (and often are). Altium Develop was clearly a unified system and felt like a much more modern piece of software. At the time it was …
Previously used both products listed. When selecting a product at this company, I decided upon Altium Develop as it appeared to be the most common platform utilized in this area by other companies. This would mean that new-hires were more likely to be familiar with the software.
Altium Develop seems like it will be much better for library management, schematic capture, and 3D file generation. However, it is not as intuitive and easy to use when creating layouts. We chose Altium Develop because we believe the time savings of the areas where Altium is …
There is no comparison between Altium Develop and Autodesk Fusion. Altium Develop is light years ahead of Autodesk Fusion in every aspect.
There is no way I would ever go back to Autodesk Fusion after switching to Altium Develop.
Generally, KiCad is missing the component management system that Altium has. It really is very useful.
Orcad is too dated, even the latest version, is quite more work to carry out certain tasks than in Altium. Documentation generation isn't so great either.
We were already using Altium Designer with all of the libraries andprijects in Altium, so it will take too much time to convert to other software at this point.
The advantage of KiCAD and EasyEDA versus Altium Designer is that KiCAD and EasyEDA are free. Even so, Altium Designer is more powerful than competitors in terms of integrability, easy of use and powerful tools. For example, in Siemens EDA software there is no tool for …
Other tools are open source and free to use, which often means its easier to use but has limited abilities. With using Altium Designer compared to the other tools I have found the review process a lot better and its workspace environment a big plus because I can find …
Altium Designer is a more mature, feature complete product. However, in 2025 it has become EXTERMELY expensive. KiCAD is quickly catching up and focusing on the core PCB design tools. We are likely to switch over in 2-3 years if things progress like they have.
For some reason Autodesk Eagle wasn't showing up, but personally the cross team aspect of Altium Designer is much better, as well as the schematic editing and PCB editing, especially on a board level with placing constraints and editing layers. Fusion360 with its new schematic …
I used Eagle for a long time, then switched to Altium Designer around 2014. Eagle was rather basic comparatively, but also comparatively dirt cheap and capable for modestly complex designs. But the future was clear - Altium Designer was required for stepping up my design game.
It's the most approachable "professional" package for small to medium-sized businesses, given the price point. It's fairly mature feature-wise and has improved stability enough over the last 5 years that it no longer constantly crashes. But it feels like there's a push to constantly increase prices until it's no longer an obvious choice. That, coupled with the insistence on subscription models and the terrible user experience when on poorly connected mobile data plans, means it's still my CAD package of choice, but I'm now a reluctant user rather than a fan.
It is difficult to create new components while reusing existing footprints/symbols. For example, reuse a 1206 package footprint, create a variant for resistors with an appropriate 3D model, and then a variant for capacitors with an appropriate 3D model.
The software's overall responsiveness seems slow, and it does not update properly in all instances. For example, clicking a component in the schematic will not always show its properties; it usually shows the properties of the last selected component. Clicking the blank space in the schematic first, then selecting the component, seems to load some of the correct data. But the 3D model in the properties view would still show the last EDITED part.
Saving components to the server would not always register correctly, requiring the component editor to be closed 'without saving' to close the part out, even though no changes were made since the last save to the server.
It is unclear where a list of footprints/symbols can be managed. For example, deleting a deprecated footprint so that it does not appear as a valid option in the future.
BOM part choice data has an NRFND component selected as in use, causing the status to be yellow. There is no apparent way to select a different manufacturer part as the 'in use' part to resolve the warning.
Updating from the library does not pull the most up-to-date symbol/footprint data for a given component. So far, there does not appear to be a way to do this, even though the component itself has been updated to use the correct references. This may be related to the general delays and consistency/reliability issues with the online link.
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.
I originally chose Altium Develop for its superior usability. All operations being handled in one cohesive platform greatly improves efficiency. When handling many different designs, project setup and component creation eat into every project's productivity. Templates, defaults and design reuse all speed up design. I hold back from a higher rating because development focus on those usability features seems to have stagnated a bit. Simple missing features requested seem to remain missing. New collaboration features, simulation and sourcing features are released, but I just want to be able to draw dashed lines! I think this reflects a general focus on the 10% of datacenter/AI/smartphone customers over the 90% of 2-4 layer designs. The lack of information available during the platform transition gave me significant pause before buying in as well.
In terms of collaborative work, Altium 365 is the easiest to use since KiCad nor OrCAD have sophisticated infrastructure for team members to interact with each other. By allowing features such as organizations and version control, Altium 365 is by far the best product for collaborative work. Additionally, electronics parts management and creation is better in Altium 365 than the other products. Actions such as importing schematic libraries, creating bills of materials, and conducting simulations are simply better in Altium 365.
