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One of the Best PCB and Schematic Editors
March 11, 2024

One of the Best PCB and Schematic Editors

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

Overall Satisfaction with Altium Designer

We have several engineers who use Altium Designer continuously. Some of us use other similar programs at home, but all (with the exception of one) think that Altium Designer is by for the best. We only used the schematic and PCB editors. Due to the cost of separate licenses of which we have three, a bottleneck sometimes happens when more than three people use Altium Designer simultaneously.
  • The schematic editor not only produces smart-looking drawings but can also be used to make some good-looking non-technical documentation. Optically, far better than any competition product.
  • Where to start? In my opinion, technical support, with or without a subscription is at best random. Several questions have remained unanswered.
  • I find that the interactive routing is more difficult than with the earlier Protel versions. There are so many snap options, that it is continually necessary to change a particular snap setting in order to perform a particular operation, otherwise, the track end will jump where it is not wished.
  • Without a doubt, Altium Designer is a highly productive tool, which serves our company very well.
  • We find the pricing structure at Altium Designer to be abhorrent. We are continually sent reminders telling us about price increases on an already expensive product. When looking at the markets, it can be seen that Altium is already an extremely wealthy company. We "only" have 3 licenses, and if we wish to retain a subscription, we must pay for three, at a cost of around 3,000 dollars each, just receive small updates and faster (in theory, but not always in practice) support.
  • Altium has stopped offering upgrades. If we have purchased an older version (we have 2 licenses for earlier versions), Altium will not let us upgrade these for a reduced price but only sell new licenses. This practice was only introduced by Altium a few years ago, and we believe this to be a sign of an unethical company that is mainly interested in revenue and not the customer's pocket.
With practice, Altium Designer is quite straightforward to use and capable of producing excellent-looking schematic drawings and PCBs regardless of the complexity. What we do not like is that dozens of settings are only accessible by going up to the system setting preference menus. If a particular function needs to be switched off or changed for a single operation, going up to the setting preference menu, making a temporary change, doing the work, and then going back to the menu again to change it back is tiresome and often disturbs the workflow.
In my opinion, Altium Designer has not improved our design efficiency.
We had two licenses, purchased at a time when Altium Designer products were affordably priced. I can't remember how much they were, but they were not at a price where we even had to think about it at all. We wished to purchase a 3rd license a couple of years ago, actually, because we wanted more, but the price had risen so considerably that we were asked to test some less expensive alternatives, which we did. Suddenly, the pricing structure skyrocketed, and when more than one license and more than one subscription are wished, then it becomes serious money. However, we decided to continue with Altium Designer, as none of the alternatives matched up to it.

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?

Yes

Did implementation of Altium Designer go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Altium Designer again?

Yes

It is possible to draw excellent-looking schematic diagrams in any personal style and transfer these to the PCB editor without problems. The library editors are quite easy to use, and as there are many available STEP models for the majority of components, 3D views are also easy to generate. The built-in 3D editor is, however fairly limited and even when fully mastered can only produce rudimentary images.