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Comment by b1gtuna | Hacker News Reader

Would anyone use Kicad/Eagle these days if he/she has access to Altium Designer?

Would anyone use Altium, KiCad, or Eagle if they had access to OrCAD, Allegro, or PADS?

Having used all of those tools, I can say that KiCad and Eagle will remain relegated to the low layer count, and at most moderately populated PCBs. Altium still has issues with large designs, but it's got its advantages, it's very easy to work with industrial designers within the Altium ecosystem. Altium also supports some decent auto-routing and DFM tools but does not have a simulator of any kind.

Cadence's OrCAD and Allegro offerings, and Mentor Graphic's PADS suite have tools for everything from designing with microvia (laser etched single layer vias) to highly configurable constraint management tools that allow for configuring some very powerful auto-routers and interactive tools. The big two tools also have simulators like PSICE, and integration with RF design tools like Keysight ADS, Genesys, Momentum, Hyperlynx, and HFSS. If your design has any RF components or high speed buses like DDR, PCIe and USB, you need to run your designs through these tools to verify your design. Eagle, and KiCAD are great for breakout boards. Altium can be used for some pretty simple products. But I'd never use anything but Cadence or Mentor Graphics tools for anything that had a signal that operated at more than 50MHz.

I think your Altium experience might be a little stale. Microvias in Altium are really easy since at least three or four years ago. It also supports basic SPICE simulation, but I've never used it. I use external SPICE and RF tools for most of my simulation needs. I've had good success designing RF boards in Altium and the only reason I would want to use Mentor Graphics would be if I had some massive digital design with high speed buses everywhere. You get what you pay for, but Altium is a solid tool at a decent price.

KiCad also has support for microvias and blind/buried vias in this release. There are a few high speed design tools (trace length tuning and differential pair routing) that were added and I expect more RF support will come in the next release or two.

I recently switched from Altium Designer to KiCad, because while I do have access to Altium Designer, I wanted it to be more accessible.

KiCad is quite good, once you get the hang of it and the differences between Altium. I was able to put together reasonably complicated boards (OSH Park level tolerances) without a problem. If you want to do stuff like DDR routing and the like I don't think it's up to par, but most hobbyist projects (well, most projects in general) are very suited to KiCad.

I even designed an entire PCB on it from my Novena, which was pretty neat (2nd generation open source hardware!)

The oddest thing is that there's no built in standard part creation wizard, there's an online tool for it but it's a bit less than ideal.

As somebody doing this as a hobby, I'm not willing to sacrifice software Freedom for possible workflow efficiency improvements. Even if I was designing commercially I'd be reluctant to subject myself to the vendor lock-in of proprietary software. And for the kinds of boards I make, KiCad is more than powerful enough, especially with the new push/shove router.

In a word: yes. "Has access to" needs to be defined. Is it at work? At school? Your own purchase?

I like to think long-term and be independent. I'd hate losing access to an essential tool because I change jobs or finish school.

If I purchase something myself, I also think long-term. What if I progress to larger or more complex designs (EAGLE becomes expensive quickly)? What if I don't want to pay upgrade fees?

So yes, there are legitimate reasons to use KiCad even if you "have access" to a more mature commercial package. I don't think there are any reasons to use EAGLE, though.

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