Altium Develop
March 25, 2026

Altium Develop

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Altium Develop

We use Altium Develop for developing PCB's, specifically boards that are usually 2-8 layer and typically less than 100mm x 50mm. It provides an good platform for managing components, drawing the schematic and laying out the board. Documentation generation is also (mostly) straightforward to use and it used frequently. We do not use the multi-board or harness solutions.

Pros

  • Component management
  • Schematic drawing
  • Good user experience with layout

Cons

  • Draftsman could do with some improvement - it doesn't flow or react as well or as quickly as the schematic designer or the pcb layout.
  • Updates tend to break more things than bring features or improvement to features. I recommend longer testing periods for updates.
  • Stop adding new features and go back and address a number of the bugs in bugcrunch
  • Positive - using Orcad before it has sped up the time it takes to design a PCB
  • Documentation quantity and quality has improved drastically as it is easy to create
It's generally got a good user interface, but there is a number of things that are hidden and I was a fan of the Altium 17 properties panel rather than the properties panel that snaps to the side of the program, where you really end up resizing it a lot to get it right.
As said before, it does indeed streamline our PCB design process due to the ease of many of the functions.
We don't use this.
  • KiCad EDA
  • OrCAD
Generally, KiCad is missing the component management system that Altium has. It really is very useful.

Orcad is too dated, even the latest version, is quite more work to carry out certain tasks than in Altium. Documentation generation isn't so great either.

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

It's generally well suited to any PCB or schematic/wiring diagram drawing requirements. I can't speak about the harness design or the multiboard features because I haven't had a need for them. There is a number of features like those (and the wirebonding feature) that are quite niche, which is why I would prefer less time was spent on niche features and more on the stability of the program for the standard features most people purchase your software to use.

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