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.
$1,990
per year
SOLIDWORKS
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Dassault Systemes offers SOLIDWORKS, a computer-aided design (CAD) system for education and manufacturing supporting 2D or 3D design, electrical design, simulations, and product development with collaboration tools.
$1,295
per year
Pricing
Altium Develop
SOLIDWORKS
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Solidworks Annual Subscription
1,295
per year
Solidworks Standard
3,996
per standalone license
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Altium Develop
SOLIDWORKS
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Altium Develop is offered as an annual subscription starting at $1,990 per year, which includes one Altium Designer ECAD Design Author and a shared workspace for projects, libraries, and collaboration. The subscription provides unlimited workspace users at no additional cost, enabling broad participation in reviews, commenting, task management, BOM access, and change workflows.
Teams can add up to four additional Altium Designer ECAD Design Authors for $995 per Author per year, allowing organizations to scale active design capacity while keeping contributors and collaborators included at no extra charge.
OrCAD was used at our company for years before we switched over to Altium Designer. Usually, moving all projects from one software can be a pain and time-consuming. Altium Designer made it very streamline to move all projects over, including all component libraries. In …
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.
Altium Designer is a CAD tool like the others. In comparison, Altium is chosen for its ability to make electrical circuits, its wide capacity, and its shared mode, which facilitates configuration and improves work time on projects.
Verified User
Engineer
Chose Altium Develop
Overall Altium Designer is in another league compared to KiCad, especially the older versions. The whole design process works better in Altium Designer. The only thing I miss from KiCad is the disjointedness between symbols and footprints. Whilst less appropriate for …
Altium Designer is the industry standard for a reason. While KiCad can be used for complex and capable designs the software will fight you along the way. Further, the constantly breaking backward compatibility makes KiCad hard to maintain current versions and up to date with.
Altium Designer is far easier to use and has a simplified pricing model for use to forecast project costs. Altium Designer also has many value-added features such as Altium 365 and MCAD integration which we can use for no additional costs. Other vendors charge by feature. …
It is certainly easier to get designs up and running with great support and constant software updates. The ability to work with or without the cloud is a great feature. The only downside to Altium Designer is that it does have a cost to it that is not cheap. Overall I think it …
I prefer Altium Designer because it makes collaboration easy, and I have had a more enjoyable time using it. Altium Designer runs better on my computer than other software, and I have never run into a problem while using it. It allows me to really get into my work and focus on …
We originally used Autodesk, but we switched to SOLIDWORKS a few years ago primarily because of the slightly better ease of use, more readily available support and training from 3rd party resellers local to us, and what seemed to be more engineers with experience using …
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.
As a mechanical engineer, it is one of the best tools to just start modeling and engineering with. The UI tools are intuitive and engineering analysis such Mold Analysis, FEA, are great! Other 3D CAD modeling tools have a longer learning curve to master. All in all, if you're not planning to design an entire airplane with large assembly files, then Solidworks is your tool!
The collaborative work environment is a cool and useful feature where groups of people can work on the same model at the same time, and SOLIDWORKS ensures that you don't overwrite each other's work.
The ease and amount of customization options are very useful for creating a personalized and intuitive user interface, whether SOLIDWORKS is your native CAD package or not.
It is very easy to quickly edit a model you have already created. The software allows sketch and feature editing without having to take the time to actually enter the sketch/feature environment.
The use of configurations and configurations-specific dimensions in the same sketch is very useful for creating different forms of the same part
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.
Save DWG 2D files in inches or metric easily, defaults to metric and has to be manually converted to inches
When using the sketch feature, the ability to disable ALL references. If I don't know the exact shape and I want to draw/adapt my design, it harshly interprets the references which have no value to me. The easiest exact is to think about when you have a Microsoft Word document that has a lot of formatting, photos, tabs, etc. If you accidentally hit the "enter" key, you can explode the formatting and everything goes crazy. SW does this to me, I just want to "doodle" my sketches, edit/delete/etc and not be bound by arbitrary references.
For the sketch feature, ability to use a DraftSight plugin of some sort. I'm super fast in DS, if I could draw using the commands in SW then I would probably never open DS again and convert to SW full time. Currently, I only use SW as a way to convert 3D files so I can build everything in DraftSight.
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.
I have been using SOLIDWORKS for around 12 years as of writing this review, so have learned where most things are and how they work. When first starting out it was quite daunting, but the interface is well laid out with like functions near each other which made finding new functions relatively easy.
We have an unusual arrangement. We don’t pay for support, but we’re partnered with a VAR for second-tier support.
I work with other users if I have questions but when we’ve had to ask the VAR, they always have answers. It appears that all of the VARs have access to a support platform from DS SOLIDWORKS that helps them answer most questions.
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.
Onshape is a direct competitor. It has great entry level pricing and it is easy to access with no installation required. Being a web based app there is sometime some lag being based in NZ. Management also have concerns over where the data is stored on the cloud. With SW we can control where it is stored
