I personally direct people who do small boards, or hobby level boards to Diptrace. But that's really the focus of Altium the big scale, corporate style PCB design jobs (this is of course my opinion). But Altium makes large scale projects easy to manage and has an insane amount of features to make the process of designing large projects less troublesome. I haven't been making boards for super long just over a year part-full time. Altium has a learning curve, but once you get around that it's a very powerful piece of software. It cost me about $150 or so, I wanted access mainly to become an experienced user for later on in my career. So last winter I purchased a student license (cause I'm in university). One of my college professors was an Altium user and I also knew that it was extensively used in industry for PCB design. Now, when I purchased Diptrace I knew that I would eventually move over to Altium. But I did find it more cryptic then Diptrace. I'm not saying that KiCad is crap, I haven't spent enough time with it to make a statement like that. It pretty much made me turn around and never look back. I spent maybe 15 minutes (mind you I had already become very familiar with Diptrace's interface) of being is pure frustration with the interface. Diptrace does a really good job of keeping it simple and straightforward to use. I decided to purchase a commercial version of Diptrace to design board. I read lots of good things online about KiCad and Diptrace when I was looking for design software. I've installed, played with and immediately uninstalled KiCad. Speaking of outputs, the ability to specify target build quantities and automatically get a volume-costed BOM when using supplier links. Output job settings to automate the release process of project outputs. Support for complex board shapes and component clearance checks.Ĭustom grids, including polar coordinate grids (Alas, it lacks the ability to easily rotate-object-to-tangents!!!) Manual routing is assisted by auto-routing and glossing as you route - making it easier to keep things neat as you go. Shortcuts keys are (once you get used to them), mostly sane and really speed things up. Supplier-search mechanism makes it easy to find parts on Digikey and plop that down into my design, bringing in critical parts details and links to the datasheet which can be quickly recalled within Altium.Ĭross-selection between schematics and PCB, in conjunction with filters, object masking and dimming, makes it easier to perform edits on precisely what you want. The things which makes Altium work well for me: I don't KiCad, so take this with a grain of salt.
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