Altium Designer

Altium Designer is very good for medium to large-sized engineering teams. Sharing projects is easy which makes design reviews very straight forward.

Altium Designer is well suited for medium to large companies. It is not as well suited to small companies due to the licensing cost for the platform. If a company manages more than 3 or 4 hardware products, Altium Designer can help managed the schematics, supply chain, error checking, and help deliver working electronics assemblies better than the competition.

It just works. What more can I say?

We do mostly four layers or less, so this tool might be a little bit overkill for what we do here.

It is possible to draw excellent-looking schematic diagrams in any personal style and transfer these to the PCB editor without problems. The library editors are quite easy to use, and as there are many available STEP models for the majority of components, 3D views are also easy to generate. The built-in 3D editor is, however fairly limited and even when fully mastered can only produce rudimentary images.

Best professional software I've used. Easy and feature complete.

Well suited for professional use at a company less suited for hobbyists.

Altium is well suited for high-speed/ RF PCB design cases. I think it may be a good idea to add design rule templates based on specific use cases or industries, such as an Automotive industry rule check that includes the standards for developing PCBs for use in cars or trucks.

Overall Altium Designer has been a very positive experience compared to other PCB packages I have used previously. My main reservations are down to the assorted crashes I have experienced where I have lost work.

Well suited: focuses on Enterprise with dedicated users for library management, schematics and layout. Poorly implemented for smaller organizations where engineers do their own board design.

Well suited for: designing electronic products of medium to high complexity boards and designs.

Less suited for: Simple designs that do not require the capabilities of Altium Designer and the price of Altium Designer.

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.

Almost all board layout situations Altium Designer is very usable and has loads of features that make the PCB layout efficient. There is a learning curve that comes with it, but I do think an engineer will quickly get the hang of the main features.
For hobby use, I would recommend a cheaper/free market alternative, but for industry use, Altium Designer is very good.

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.

Altium Designer is incredible for organizations with a large team working on similar projects as it provides for incredible collaboration. Altium 356 is unparalleled in how easy to navigate and incredibly useful it is. Though hard to learn, it is good for begineers to learn Altium Designer as it does a good job of teaching the basics of PCB design and allows for transferable skills. Altium Designer might not be good for an individual designing their own PCBs for a project as the cost can be extremely high and there are no options to get a more basic version with less features.

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.