Help us manage our multiple PCB Designs, by keeping track of the different versions. It also helps us make sure the mechanical fit of multiple boards is as expected. Finally, collaborations is pretty much seamless where as long as you remember to commit you changes anyone else on the team can pick up where you left off.
Pros
CAM Software
Automation with output jobs
Keep track of changes, restoring previous versions
Cons
Conflict resolution
Import from different formats
Better component management
Likelihood to Recommend
Where multiple people in the team need to work on the same perfect and you need to keep track of multiple versions of your designs.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Engineering (Telecommunications company, 11-50 employees)
Altium Develop is used to design, analyze, and manage printed circuit board assemblies from the schematic capture and component selection phase through library part creation and management to layout and routing to DFM (design for manufacturing) and bill of materials/obsolescence management and exporting to manufacturers. Our use case is as a hardware developer and manufacturer, we build complex electronics (cellular base stations) that contains many printed circuit boards. Altium Develop is where we collaborate (mainly through Altium Designer and Altium 365) to create those printed circuit boards.
Pros
Schematic Capture
Layout
Routing
High-speed signal analysis
Design for manufacturing
BOM management
Cons
Library part management
Cloud integration with PDM
Likelihood to Recommend
Best suited for complex projects (especially multi-layer board designs) with multiple personnel collaborating. Best for startups and mid-large companies that have complex, multi-board assemblies and complex manufacturing workflows.
Alternatives
Allegro X Design Platform and Mentor
Altium Develop is more user friendly and allows enterprises to quickly set up their design workflow on one pane of glass.
Altium 365 help our engineering team to share schematic and pcb files to easy access and check with all coworkers that are involved with the project. They can benefits from search features and parameters in a web brower without any pre-requirement install. A great point is that you can check the schematics without needing of a old windows server concept to share pdf/readonly files over "shared folders". The version control is much easier.
Pros
search and highlight on PCB
controll access for specific projects
history of changes with great gui interface
Cons
parameters variant control
telemetry of files accessed by who, when, where, how long
block printscreen features for confidential control
native integration with azure devops
more features to control access between users and groups
Likelihood to Recommend
share pcb viewer without any pre-requirement installation and without lock a full license only for a viewer purpose.
unappropriate for measurement pcb parts or to check BoM parameters.
unappropriate to cross compare different versions of the same project.
unappropriate to check detailed schematic information like PIN variant names.
Alternatives
Adobe Acrobat Reader, Foxit PDF Editor (FoxitPhantom) and KiCad EDA
Altium 365 is lighter and fast to use then other softwares.
Allow you to use pcb/gerber view without loosing the syncronism between schematic/pcb.
much easy to let users access the files and let you change or remove access, there is no ctrl+c ctrl+v of old files that could let users to misunderstood the right document.
I am using Altium mainly to design PCBs. There are 4 HW engineers in the company, and we are also reviewing our work from Altium365 platforms. It made it so much tidier and more accessible to follow for us. I think it addressed the problem of taking screenshots and editing them in PowerPoint with text and then pasting them somewhere in a structured way. The other thing that 365 addresses is a collaboration between HW and SW engineers. Conveniently, we can look at the exact schematics simultaneously on the web. Every change I made appears directly on Altium 365.
Pros
Easy access to the design by every team member.
Reviewing with comments on the design is particularly very helpful.
Graphical interface.
Cons
It would be good to have maybe a conversion tool for gerbers and other PCB design software formats on Alitum365.
