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Altium Designer Review
February 26, 2024

Altium Designer Review

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Altium Designer

I use Altium Designer to design PCBs and other electronic components and validate and iterate upon my team members' designs for my University's satellite design team. We are participating in the CSA's (Canadian Space Agency) CubeSat design challenge and won the competition last year. We are currently redesigning boards to make them space ready.
  • Incredible integration between teams. I love using Altium 365 and how I can view, edit, and comment on my team members designs. It is an incredible platform and makes collaborations very easy.
  • Makes it easy to move between different projects, either local or public. I love how I can move between the PCB and schematics of different projects with no downtime.
  • The UI is clean and works well once someone has learned how to use it. Everything makes sense and the integrated shortcuts make it particularly simple and nice to work with.
  • I really love how I can search for any part in Altium Designer. I can source any part and place it exactly onto my PCB, allowing me to use the 3D model feature to see precisely what my designs will look like in real life.
  • The learning curve for Altium Designer is very steep. I believe what scares people is how much learning and practicing you need to do to understand Altium Designer and create your own projects from scratch. I would recommend a suggested tutorial at first open that teaches you how to design a PCB.
  • It can be hard to work on many projects at once. While switching between a few different projects can be very seamless, once you start to open many the program can start to slow exponentially.
  • I believe adding a feature where users can pay for certain features may be beneficial, as not all features of Altium Designer are used by all organizations. This could help startups and other small companies achieve better margins.
  • 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.
It is very simple and easy to use once a person has understood all the intricacies and shortcuts the program has, but to someone new it can be a significant barrier to entering the world of PCB design. Being new, you will not be able to navigate Altium Designer and will constantly find yourself googling tutorials, shortcuts, or finding how to do simple tasks, like design a round PCB.
Our efficiency has been incredible while using Altium Designer, as I have mentioned before, Altium 365 makes collaboration and design iteration easy. One of the biggest ways Altium Designer has improved our efficiency is with design control in Altium 365. Being able to revert to a previous design after you or a team member have saved an error to the server, allows for less time spent correcting a mistake.
It is incredible. I can easily talk to my teammates and ask them about certain design choices and their thought processes. It has allowed us to easily iterate on each others designs and if a bug is saved to the server, fixing it is even easier. Just revert to a previous save and you can start all over.
I prefer Altium Designer because it makes collaboration easy, and I have had a more enjoyable time using it. Altium Designer runs better on my computer than other software, and I have never run into a problem while using it. It allows me to really get into my work and focus on what matters, not whether or not the application will crash.

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

No

Are you happy with Altium Designer's feature set?

Yes

Did Altium Designer live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Altium Designer go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Altium Designer again?

Yes

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.