1. Home
  2. PCB Design Software
  3. Altium Designer Reviews
  4. User Review of Altium Designer
Best ECAD Program In Existence
March 07, 2024

Best ECAD Program In Existence

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Altium Designer

We use Altium Designer to create turnkey electronic hardware for our customers. As a design services company, Altium Designer allows us to have a single program and cloud workflow to manage every aspect of our customers designs - securely and seamlessly from concept to delivery. We also use Altium Designer to manage component selection and changes.
  • Create design and output job templates for consistent handovers and project packaging
  • Easily create new components with symbol, footprint editor
  • Develop design rules for PCB layout to achieve various design constraints
  • Bug fixes and random crashes
  • Importing and converting legacy and competitor design files
  • Altium Vault component footprints are not consistent in their creation
  • 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.
Altium Designer is, by far, the easiest to use ECAD program in existence - and we’ve used a lot (OrCAD, PADS, Xpedition, EAGLE, etc.). Altium Designer has a very intuitive user interface and easy to understand and navigate. Even our project management team, who may not have technical backgrounds, can use Altium Viewer for the purposes of reviewing and handoff to our customers.
Altium Designer’s project workflow and multiple integrations (ex: MCAD) allows us to encapsulate multiple design tasks into a single program - streamlining our product development and quoting for our customers. For example, we can have a board outline and enclosure as customer inputs and quickly ideate on a concept for their design. We also can import other 3D models and content to show mechanical interactions and test for fitment.
We can share design files with customizable permissions to customers through Altium 365. Those files become available locally on their machine after handover. We also use version control to track changes and change order effort as a record for billing costs. Altium 365 also allows us to store our component libraries in a single place for reuse or modification at a later date, without having to manage them locally or on a shared server.
Altium Designer is far easier to use and has a simplified pricing model for use to forecast project costs. Altium Designer also has many value-added features such as Altium 365 and MCAD integration which we can use for no additional costs. Other vendors charge by feature. Altium Designer has no hidden costs.

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

Yes

Are you happy with Altium Designer's feature set?

Yes

Did Altium Designer live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Altium Designer go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Altium Designer again?

Yes

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.