Basic Altium Designer review from longtime user
May 06, 2025

Basic Altium Designer review from longtime user

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

Overall Satisfaction with Altium Designer

I am both a solo EE and work with a small consultancy, [...]. Our main business is pcb design work, and we use Altium Designer and Altium 365 extensively.

Pros

  • Altium 365 interface is fantastic
  • Documentation has gotten very good
  • mech engineering interoperability

Cons

  • more models in mfgr component search
  • draftsman is quirky and inconsistent with UI in main app
  • still crashes occasionally
  • have a read-only mode for opening Altium 365 projects
  • Altium 365 is great for presenting and collab with clients - they're always impressed
  • We've used Altium Designer for 10+ years so there is nothing to compare it with business-wise
Overall, great. But: still occasionally crashes; sometimes very slow loading even not huge projects; really want a way to open projects read-only; the 'homepage' tab with info about webinars and tricks and new features is great; Altium Designer continues to push forward with improvements and new features
Having comments and Altium 365 has helped with design reviews and client presentations / co-working / bug fixing / etc. We don't try to have more than 1 engineer working on a project at once though.
Altium 365 is the hub that our little company revolves around, it has been great. Please continue to enhance it. We have people in disparate timezones and it helps tremendously with design handoff, library management, etc. Clients with technical sophistication like being able to navigate projects on their own.
I used Eagle for a long time, then switched to Altium Designer around 2014. Eagle was rather basic comparatively, but also comparatively dirt cheap and capable for modestly complex designs. But the future was clear - Altium Designer was required for stepping up my design game.

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

Yes

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?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Altium Develop again?

Yes

Well suited for all design work. Less appropriate if doing smaller designs, or work that is not for "top tier" clients. Eagle / Kicad / etc. are quite capable and much cheaper, but you don't land big projects with them.

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