Item: Altium Develop
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Altium 365

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Altium 365 as an easy way to collaborate on design work, interfacing between the electronics hardware and the mechanical hardware. It also offers a solid method for controlling, storing and backing up our designs.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Allows collaboration
Easy viewing of designs
Secure backup

Cons

Initial setup of a full workflow can take some time - it's easy to get it wrong and have to go down a longer process to "fix"
Altium 365 is expensive!

Return on Investment

We've been able to very quickly iterate on designs - boards can be fully designed in just a few days

Usability

Altium 365 is very easy to pick up and use. It's intuitive and there is very good documentation and tutorials. The guide in the help section in particular is really useful. The way nets can be viewed between schematics and layouts in particular is very useful for engineers debugging designs in the field.

Alternatives Considered

KiCad EDA

KiCAD is a good tool for an individual, but if you are doing collaborative work, or integrating it with other team members, there's a lot more manual work that needs to be done as part of the setup. The low cost (free) makes it seem appealing but in a professional environment, time is expensive and Altium 365 works out of the box.

Key Insights

Do you think Altium Develop delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Altium Develop's feature set?

Yes

Did Altium Develop live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Altium Develop go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Altium Develop again?

Yes

Other Software Used

draw.io, Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Slack, Notepad++

Likelihood to Recommend

For our multi-discipline engineering team, Altium 365 makes it easy to collaborate on designs. At the moment our team is small so it works well, however I think some more rigorous tools might be needed should the team expand significantly - such as tighter controls on who can make what changes.

Comments

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