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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

I haven't used Altium but I have use Kicad and the experience was pretty bad. It's very unusuable software. I don't think Altium has anything to worry about at all from Kicad.

However, I did recently discover Horizon EDA, which uses the Kicad core, but is way way way way saner and easier to use. Give it a decade and it might be worthy competition. Though surely Altium is only really targeted at FTSE500 companies who need really advanced features and can easily afford $10k licenses. I don't see them using open source alternatives.

Anyway, I just want to big up Horizon a bit more because it's so so so much better than Kicad:

https://github.com/horizon-eda/horizon

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EAGLE/Altium is kind of the cheapest level for connecting a CPU to RAM with length matching. So as soon as you're an ambitious hobbyist, you'll need something comparable.

For example, Chinese hardware startups selling through aliexpress tend to use Altium. But I don't think they'll buy many licenses. And I can't afford to. I really have no idea who would buy it, except for people who have old Altium files that they absolutely need to open.

>I haven't used Altium but I have use Kicad and the experience was pretty bad. It's very unusuable software. I don't think Altium has anything to worry about at all from Kicad.

We've greatly revamped the experience in KiCad v6 available as the current nightlies. Meanwhile I agree 5.1 and older are awful.

Hmm maybe I will try it again, but last time I even went as far as asking about the terrible UX on the mailing list and was met with lots of "it's fine; we're not dumbing the interface down for noobs" (though two people privately emailed me to say they strongly agreed). So I'm not holding my breath!

Well done if that attitude has changed though!

Altium is mid-range. Like Solidworks for mechanical enginieering.

There's another tier of PCB design tools above Altium with matching cost per seat, e.g. Mentor Graphics Expedition. Unigraphics, for mech Es.

Both of the above owned by Siemens! They certainly know how to charge large sums of money!

I wouldn't say Solidworks is mid range. I have used Solidworks and NX extensively and they're very very similar. I haven't used Altium but the companies I've heard using it aren't "mid range" companies and everyone describes Altium and Mentor as basically the two "pro" options.

Altium is definitely mid-range on the price point. Mentor and Cadence are 10x.

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