Increasingly Expensive with building feature bloat
May 06, 2025

Increasingly Expensive with building feature bloat

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Altium Designer

We are a small business who does consulting that involves PCB design. We have 1 primary user and 2 secondary users of Altium Designer. We do not have a librarian or a huge enterprise development process.

Pros

  • Schematic capture
  • PCB Layout
  • PCB Routing
  • Altium 365 cloud storage

Cons

  • Version control (revert to previous version)
  • Program stability
  • Focusing on core functionality (Schematic capture, layout, routing)
  • Quick and easy simulation
  • Sharing multiple projects via folder without splitting multiple workspaces.
  • Positive: Allows a small, talented team to perform at the level of a large company
  • The recent enormous increase in price was a shock to our budget at a time when our industry (medical research) is under attack.
Requires a decent amount of training to be proficient and work around the quirks, but works well when you get used to it.
We already work in very small teams, so our design process was already efficient. Additional "process" oriented tools often get in the way or clutter things up.
It has had a medium impact. The inability to share a folder (only individual projects) with external partners is a constant frustration. Multiple workspaces do not allow for a shared library across workspaces, so are useless to us.
Altium Designer is a more mature, feature complete product. However, in 2025 it has become EXTERMELY expensive. KiCAD is quickly catching up and focusing on the core PCB design tools. We are likely to switch over in 2-3 years if things progress like they have.

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

No

Are you happy with Altium Develop's feature set?

Yes

Did Altium Develop live up to sales and marketing promises?

No

Did implementation of Altium Develop go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Altium Develop again?

No

Altium Designer has gone back on its word, eliminating perpetual licenses and forcing higher-tier annual licenses with ZERO added utility for our small business. When A365 came out, we were told there was no storage cap. Then, a couple of years later, we get a call from sales saying we MUST upgrade our services and spend a significant amount more just to maintain the functionality we had. Due to this, we were forced to make hard decisions on our spend plan and are looking at lower cost options.

As a consulting company, working on cutting edge technologies, we are constantly talking with larger firms about what tools they should use internally. The answer used to include Altium Designer. Because of the recent price structure changes, it no longer does.

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