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Would recommend
March 07, 2024

Would recommend

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

Overall Satisfaction with Altium Designer

PCB and schematic work. Most products are under NDA, they range from animal detection systems to automotive aftermarket, agricultural drone accessories and industrial automation products. There are 2 of us who use it for drawing schematics, designing PCBs and then passing the designs over to mechanical engineers for designing enclosures etc.
  • Drag functions for all objects
  • Version control
  • 3D PCB viewer
  • Stability issues mostly related to the library importer
  • More options for managing floating panels
  • Autosave/crash recovery to minimize work lost from stability issues
  • Some issues with GIT checkouts when working across multiple computers
  • When resuming a PC from standby with Altium Designer, open the license is often no longer applied and functions are either greyed out or unresponsive with no explanation
  • Better, more usable mCAD outputs
  • Quicker BOM generation for quoting one off hand soldered designs
  • Decreased time taken to design boards
The learning curve was very steep. There are a lot of hidden menus and functions only accessible via keyboard shortcuts which are hard to find out about. The online documentation is invaluable in this regard.
Design processes have been streamlined mainly from improved ability to drag and drop objects to adjust wire and trace routing, etc. rather than having to redraw tracks and wires to get it right the first time.
As a primarily solo user within the organization it's hard to comment. I've found it invaluable for working across multiple computers however cannot really comment on the collaboration.
Overall Altium Designer is in another league compared to KiCad, especially the older versions. The whole design process works better in Altium Designer. The only thing I miss from KiCad is the disjointedness between symbols and footprints. Whilst less appropriate for production designs this made it very quick to draw one off PCBs with new parts as it wasn't necessary to recreate footprints.

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

Overall Altium Designer has been a very positive experience compared to other PCB packages I have used previously. My main reservations are down to the assorted crashes I have experienced where I have lost work.