Altium Designer

More productive team

Improved collaboration

Helped create product we sold 1M in revenue of last year

Found problems with product early, saving ~100k

Improved design reliability - less respins.

Larger collaboration with others - Reduced time to market

Without a doubt, Altium Designer is a highly productive tool, which serves our company very well.

We find the pricing structure at Altium Designer to be abhorrent. We are continually sent reminders telling us about price increases on an already expensive product. When looking at the markets, it can be seen that Altium is already an extremely wealthy company. We "only" have 3 licenses, and if we wish to retain a subscription, we must pay for three, at a cost of around 3,000 dollars each, just receive small updates and faster (in theory, but not always in practice) support.

Altium has stopped offering upgrades. If we have purchased an older version (we have 2 licenses for earlier versions), Altium will not let us upgrade these for a reduced price but only sell new licenses. This practice was only introduced by Altium a few years ago, and we believe this to be a sign of an unethical company that is mainly interested in revenue and not the customer's pocket.

Quick turnaround on boards that normally we would have outsourced to a PCB layout house.

Accurate schematic and solid DRC.

Accurate 3D cad for housings.

Our company has been able to enter new areas because of altium.

Altium has allowed for rapid prototyping, saving time and money.

Better, more usable mCAD outputs

Quicker BOM generation for quoting one off hand soldered designs

Decreased time taken to design boards

Confusion on basic functions continue to slow design

Frustration with tools makes it difficult to start and maintain engagements. I often throw up my hands and stop working due to frustration with tools

Significant changes with prices, in my experience, with pushback resulting in drastic reductions in prices makes me trust your org less

Reduction in usability over time

Better file management

Improved and quicker designs to market

Ease of reading and reviewing designs

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.

The 3D models have reduced mechanical mistakes

The provided libraries have reduced time to develop parts internally

The error checking has reduced errors at least 50% over previous layout package

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.

We have been able to design over 10 different types of boards for our satellite and have been able to iterate on designs an endless number of times.

Our internal communication has significantly improved as we have been able to immediately see each others designs via Altium 365.

Onboarding new members can be difficult as the process of learning Altium Designer can take a few weeks and can be discouraging. I would recommend allowing users to go through designing a PCB when first opening the program, if they don't have experience already.

I'm an engineer, not involved in the business development.