Altium Designer Reviews & Ratings 2024

Altium Designer is an end-to-end PCB design software for engineers and designers. Altium Designer aims to enable a unified design environment, uniting teams worldwide with every aspect of the PCB design process.

Altium Designer Features

Supported: PCB CoDesign
Supported: Constraint Manager
Supported: Manufacturer Part Search
Supported: Multi-Board System Design
Supported: Schematic Capture
Supported: Supply Chain Intelligence
Supported: ActiveBOM®: Displays BOM cost and part availability
Supported: Interactive Routing with a rules-based routing system

Altium Designer Screenshots

Screenshot of 3D Collision - Altium Designer's 3D PCB editor offers the ability to perform 3D collision testing as well as catching general component-to-component collisions. The user can position one component under another, or test if the loaded board fits correctly into the enclosure.

Screenshot of ActiveBOM - A Bill of Materials management editor that brings BOM management tools together with Altium Designer's part information aggregation technologies, helping to manage the component selection challenge.

Screenshot of PCB Layout - Altium Designer presents a unified data model to make circuit board design and layout easier. The user can design schematics, use schematic capture to create a new PCB, route printed circuit traces, and prepare for PCB assembly in the program. The PCB layout design features also make component placement and routing easier.

Screenshot of Schematic with Properties Panel - The Interactive Properties panel for schematics includes several functional improvements as well as productivity enhancements. The layout focuses on efficiency, icons and graphical previews have been improved over previous versions, and there is now a smart parameters filter both for schematic lists and components.

Screenshot of Routing Differential Pairs - Differential pair PCB routing is a design technique employed to create a balanced transmission system able to carry differential (equal and opposite) signals across a printed circuit board. Typically this differential routing will interface to an external differential transmission system, such as a connector and cable. Altium Designer ensures that differential pairs are coupled together whether entering or leaving a pad or just navigating around obstacles on a board.

Screenshot of Cross Probe - Cross-probing allows users to jump between and select objects in both the logical schematic and physical layout domains.

Altium Designer Video

Altium Designer's new features

Altium Designer Integrations

XJTAG
PDN Analyzer
JTAG MAPS

Altium Designer Competitors

Altium Designer Technical Details

Deployment Types	On-premise
Operating Systems	Windows
Mobile Application	No

Altium Designer Downloadables

Frequently Asked Questions

Altium Designer is PCB design software for a variety of industries.

Altium Designer starts at $355.

Autodesk Fusion 360, Siemens PADS, and KiCad EDA are common alternatives for Altium Designer.

Reviewers rate Usability highest, with a score of 6.7.

The most common users of Altium Designer are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).

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March 07, 2024

Best ECAD Program In Existence

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Electrical & Electronic Manufacturing Company, 1-10 employees

Score 8 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Altium Designer to create turnkey electronic hardware for our customers. As a design services company, Altium Designer allows us to have a single program and cloud workflow to manage every aspect of our customers designs - securely and seamlessly from concept to delivery. We also use Altium Designer to manage component selection and changes.

Pros and Cons

Create design and output job templates for consistent handovers and project packaging
Easily create new components with symbol, footprint editor
Develop design rules for PCB layout to achieve various design constraints

Bug fixes and random crashes
Importing and converting legacy and competitor design files
Altium Vault component footprints are not consistent in their creation

Likelihood to Recommend

Altium Designer is well suited for designing rigid and flexible PCBs with low to medium complexity. It also does well in supporting both analog and digital layout/routing. It is probably less appropriately for very large, dense digital designs, for example, for large FPGA and ASIC dominated designs. Typically, these types of design work better using Mentor Xpedition which have a more hierarchical design approach vs a flat design approach. But the beauty in Altium Designer is in its immediacy. You can go from schematic to output files very quickly.

Return on Investment

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.

Usability

Altium Designer is, by far, the easiest to use ECAD program in existence - and we’ve used a lot (OrCAD, PADS, Xpedition, EAGLE, etc.). Altium Designer has a very intuitive user interface and easy to understand and navigate. Even our project management team, who may not have technical backgrounds, can use Altium Viewer for the purposes of reviewing and handoff to our customers.

Design Efficiency

Altium Designer’s project workflow and multiple integrations (ex: MCAD) allows us to encapsulate multiple design tasks into a single program - streamlining our product development and quoting for our customers. For example, we can have a board outline and enclosure as customer inputs and quickly ideate on a concept for their design. We also can import other 3D models and content to show mechanical interactions and test for fitment.

Altium 365 Integration

We can share design files with customizable permissions to customers through Altium 365. Those files become available locally on their machine after handover. We also use version control to track changes and change order effort as a record for billing costs. Altium 365 also allows us to store our component libraries in a single place for reuse or modification at a later date, without having to manage them locally or on a shared server.

Alternatives Considered

Siemens PADS, OrCAD and Zuken CR-8000 Design Force

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. Altium Designer has no hidden costs.

Other Software Used

AutoCAD, SOLIDWORKS

March 06, 2024

ALTIUM DESIGNER all electronic circuit design in one place!

Jose Perri

Director of Engineering and Product Development

Alarmas Marshall (Electrical & Electronic Manufacturing, 11-50 employees)

Score 9 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

ALTIUM DESIGNER is the most appropriate tool for the design of electronic equipment, it covers all parts of the process, that is, from conceptual creation to mass production. We can use ALTIUM DESIGNER for the creation of electronic schematics and from there generate the PCB of components, finally, it allows us to generate a list of materials "BOM" for the acquisition of the electronic components.

Pros and Cons

Generate the schematic design of the electronic circuit.
Make the PCB motherboard based on the schematic design.

The development environment can be intimidating for new users due to its complexity.
I would prefer a more atomized user interface since some functions can be accessed from different menus generating unnecessary complexities.

Likelihood to Recommend

In a professional environment of design and manufacture of electronic equipment, without a doubt, ALTIUM DESIGNER turns out to be the best option! However, the high cost of its license makes us consider the option of using lower-cost alternatives. In the case of small companies or independent developers, free options turn out to be more appropriate, although some functions are not implemented and require more work from the designer.

Most Important Features

Facilitate the design process.
Minimize development times.

Return on Investment

Although I am not currently using ALTIUM DESIGNER, it is only for the price of its license. However, the use of the platform reduces work times, generating a positive impact on the associated costs.
When working with colleagues in other countries, ALTIUM DESIGNER is the tool taken as a reference, its use is very useful when exchanging information and files.

Alternatives Considered

My relationship with ALTIUM DESIGNER is from the time I was a student of the Electronic Engineering career, at the university, it was the official tool to carry out the electronic practices and simulations of the circuits studied in class. Then I used ALTIUM DESIGNER as an independent consultant, however, at present I am using KiCad EDA as a design tool since it is free and open-source, although I have a high rating for KiCad EDA, it's a choice over ALTIUM DESIGNER is only because of its economic aspect.

Users and Roles

The ALTIUM DESIGNER tool is used by our electronic engineering department for the development of new products. Furthermore, given its wide use in companies around the world, it allows us to easily request quotes supported by the generation of reports and BOM (Bill of Materials) lists. With ALTIUM DESIGNER our workflow is agile and efficient.

Support Headcount Required

Our engineering department is small and compact. It is made up of 1 electronic engineer and several support technicians. However, we have third party vendors that use ALTIUM DESIGNER, which allows for an excellent workflow. ALTIUM DESIGNER is a reference tool in the field of electronic product design, so it should be the first option to consider for any company in the segment.

Business Processes Supported

Design of new products.
Modifications to existing products.
Modifications to existing products.

Innovative Uses

The simulation capabilities were surprising.
The multiplication of reports and lists has allowed us a better interaction with suppliers.
3D visualization tools allow you to see in advance what the electronic board would look like before being finalized.

Future Planned Uses

We hope that ALTIUM DESIGNER will allow us to interact through its reports with CHINA suppliers, eliminating ambiguities presented by the language barrier.
We would like to access more global component suppliers using the BOM tool.
Let's delve into the use of simulation tools.

Likelihood to Renew

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.

June 27, 2023

Altium

Verified User

Engineer in Research & Development

Information Technology & Services Company, 11-50 employees

Score 8 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it for our Electronics PCB development. We create our own electronics and Altium is used for creating the schematic capture and PCB Layout, as well as the production files.

Pros and Cons

Powerful program with quite some features for relative complex PCB design
Quite easy to generate output production files, so this helps with consistency and reproduction.

Some features are only supported in Altium 365, and because of our business and policy we are not allowed to store data outside the company, so can't use this features.
From time to time strange behaviour / crashes occcur. Sometimes functions won't behave correct and a restart of Altium solves the issue.
Design rule management. Desing rules are crucial for generating correct PCB layouts and fabrication data. Currently there is not method to verify changes made in the Design Rule during the development.

Likelihood to Recommend

Powerful tool for CAD design. Some features (Altium 365 only features) do require to store data in the cloud, which is not allowed in our company. From time to time strange behaviour and a crash / not responding anymore. Restart of tool might overcome this.