Altium Develop is the best for small teams.
March 16, 2026

Altium Develop is the best for small teams.

Petros Petrou | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Altium Develop

Altium Develop is our PCBA design platform. It serves as the single point of truth for PCB design. component library management, supply chain management, cross-functional design reviews, and MCAD collaboration. The platform solves the problem of bringing together electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, procurement, and other disciplines on a single, easy-to-manage platform without requiring multiple licences, viewers, or file exports.

Pros

  • Cross functional design reviews.
  • Component Library management.
  • Built-in component libraries.

Cons

  • MCAD integration with Onshape is missing.
  • The built-in component library is inconsistent sometimes (symbols not standardized).
  • Reduced number of licensed viewers.
  • Reduced time to design components.
  • Reduced time to get from design to manufacturing release.
Very easy and very good documentation, but it does take experience and practice to find all the tips and tricks that solve common problems. Usually, if I get stuck with a problem, the solution is just a Google search away. I would like a better way to manage non-standard pad shapes with non-standard footprints.
With the provided component libraries, it is faster than ever to go from an idea to a design ready to route. That is usually the bottleneck in the design time. Then, at the Gerber release stage, the ActiveBOM manager also saves a huge amount of time by producing a purchasable BOM or a file formatted exactly the way your PCBA provider wants.
Altium365 is a game changer. It has never been easier to share designs with the rest of the team and run reviews using the built-in comment function. I would love an integration with Jira as well to raise comments directly as tasks/bugs.
By far the easiest and most user-friendly design suite out there.

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?

Yes

Did implementation of Altium Develop go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Altium Develop again?

Yes

Teams starting from scratch will find it very easy because of the built-in version control system and component libraries. Then the feature that stands out is the web-based design viewer, which enables easy cross-functional reviews without the need for extra licences or viewer installations. Onshape users, however, will miss the MCAD codesigner integration.

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