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Comment by analognoise | Hacker News Reader

KiCad is rapidly becoming truly good; I strongly suggest anyone interested to give it a try. It isn't OrCad or Altium, but it's now very compelling, and it is already better than Eagle.

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For my hobbyist needs, KiCAD has far more features than I'll ever need. I love it and recommend that anyone with an interest pick up hardware design, I find it very fulfilling.

KiCAD could be improved in some areas (mainly parts management), but AFAIK every other equally capable EDA is the same or worse, so I can't complain.

How long until it is on par with Altium?

We got a long way to go. But at the same time it's about what you want to do for your workflow. Altium can do everything under the sun which most people don't need at all.

Altium also costs $13k/year per seat!!

It's 100% worth it for the support alone. Not to mention the workflow and features.

If $13k/year makes my design take half the time and cuts my chances of a fatal error in $26k of boards in half, I'll buy it every time.

Well, yes, for the full feature version. There is also a $500 version that doesn't have some of the higher-end features.

As someone who bought a license to Circuit Studio (the $500 version), I can't recommend it. Missing some of the higher-end features is being polite; while there is no agreement on what is high-end, I found that many general-use features from Designer were carelessly stripped out or left in a broken state. Then, of course, are the bugs and Altium's refusal to share a product roadmap for CS. Despite not communicating what they want to improve about the product, and when they plan to deliver it, they still want a subscription fee.

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