Effective June 7, 2026, Autodesk will no longer sell nor support EAGLE
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We professionally design, engineer and manufacture accessible technology for disabled veterans and we are also developing robotic systems for industrial automation.
We have a half-dozen active projects running on Kicad and have been using it for almost 4 years now.
As with anything, there have been occasional frustrations with updates but overall, the tool consistently gets better over time.
The main decision to select Kicad was based on the plain text representation of project state which enables (1) improved workflows with Git, (2) scriptable bulk edits (3) simpler, sharable extensions / plugins and (4) easier continuous integration for build artifacts.
https://sschueller.github.io/posts/ci-cd-with-kicad-and-gitl...
Here's a dense four layer brushless motor control board I designed recently, which can be viewed online in the amazing Kicanvas viewer:
https://kicanvas.org/?github=https://github.com/Twisted-Fiel...
<3
I'm really enjoying watching the progress on your motor controller!
In the last several years, it’s really improved and I enjoy using it. If you haven’t picked it up in a while, give it a shot.
that is a cool website.
can you share designs privately with team members? it looks great for collaborating if it's got authentication.
Either way I know it is under active development so you could file a GitHub issue and ask about that! Link to the GitHub for it on the main page here:
Perhaps I'm not looking in the right place, but I can't find the button for it.
Anyway, this looks great.
https://kicanvas.org/?github=https://github.com/Twisted-Fiel...
I really like your description of patience in software. I think I'll borrow this for future things I want others to try.
My only complaint with KiCad is their library/BOM management is a bit clunky, but the fact you can automate things so much easier vs altium more than makes up for it.
I've seen Altium do decent at open EagleCAD. I've seen KiCAD do much better at opening EagleCAD. I assume KiCAD and EagleCAD work decently well with one another's file formats due to both being text based and documented.
That said, no matter how much someone paid for the software being converted from or to, I've yet to see a project that wasn't better served by starting from scratch and reproducing the design. Each tool just has a somewhat different paradigm (or default grid spacing or whatever) and like... EagleCAD symbols imported into Altium work they just suck. For example.
I've been dealing with this mess for a while. My colleague has decades worth of PCB designs trapped in OrCAD pre-cadence. I've been pushing him to EagleCAD, and have been pushing myself towards KiCAD for over a year. Now I'm telling him "hey, it's closer to orcad" and "the HTML BOM will make your life way easier training grad students" and "the package library is way more reliable" and these are legitimate honest-to-god features that are convincing to an experienced designer.
You see enough proprietary tools like this get the death knell and you learn to recognize the signs I guess. This one was pretty obvious and thankfully y'all have three years to download KiCAD ASAP, use it for every single project from here on out, gradually transition legacy documents in every CAD system to KiCAD. For once in my life I'll have some well-grounded confidence that my designs are safe and highly likely to still be usable in ten years when I badly need to debug them and create a new board revision.
I'm planning on making some very simple circuits, nothing fancy.
You have a schema capture tool (eeschema) and a board design (pcbnew). Start a new project, then start doing your circuit design in eeschema. I personally always disable move on zoom and install the solarized dark plugin, since it looks quite nice.
- Click and hold Middle mouse to move around the schematic / board view.
- P - places a power symbol (gnd / v+)
- A - add component
- E - edits parameters
- X - rotates on x axis
- Y - rotates on y axis
- M - move stuff
Basics are still there.
There are some good books out there too such as "Kicad like a pro" which come recommended by people I trust.
#kicad @liberachat IRC is still active too as well as other channels.
I haven't moved to Kicad 7 yet, I don't know how many tutorials have been updated to the latest version.
[0]:https://docs.kicad.org/7.0/en/getting_started_in_kicad/getti... [1]:https://github.com/ruiqimao/keyboard-pcb-guide
Covers all the bases: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEBQazB0HUyR24ckSZ5u05TZH...
My workflow (I'm a hobbyist, take what I say with a grain of salt):
- Installed "library loader" which Supports kicad
- Sign up for componentsearchengine.com
- Find parts I need on mouser.com/mouser.de (I'm in Germany) and look them up on component search engine, download the cad files; library loader picks them up automatically
- Use them in the schematic view, get your schematic finished FIRST
- Then "Update PCB from schematic". This imports all of the individual footprints and stuff you need to wire together.
- From here, should be like most other CADs; wire up your rats nest, do your ground fills ("Fill area" tool on the right), etc.
- Export Gerbers and drills after googling "jlcpcb export kicad 6" (they don't have a 7 guide yet but doesn't matter) just to double check the settings, then upload to jlc and they arrive about a week and a half later.
- In the schematic view, go to tools and then Generate BOM. It takes some finagling but you can usually massage the CSV it generates to upload to Mouser's shopping cart page to get an exact amount of parts you need, including the ability to specify multiples. Note that usually upping the amount of small components results in more for less overall cost (yes, really) so play with the quantities. Resistors can be purchased for a few bucks at the 500 to 1000 quantity, and are usually cheaper to do that than to order 5 or 10. Anyway, then you order your parts.
The "use footprints from other people" thing is contentious, I know. Most serious engineers make their own footprints. I don't have the time, personally, since unless I'm missing something it requires freecad for me to get the measurements right, and kicad doesn't have the required constraint solving tools to allow me to make sure I've got all of it right, so the workflow is CRAZY inefficient (lots of importing drawings from freecad, manually creating pads, then using multi-select and align tools to get them where they need to be...).
Kicad with a constraint solver like freecad's would be a ridiculously huge improvement IMO, but hopefully this is enough to get someone tinkering. Kicad devs if you're reading... pleeeeease. I know it's a lot of work.
Is there any reason for this to be the norm? Surely that means that “serious engineers” are just duplicating a shitload of effort?
Many are low-effort and untested. They were manually created by people who don't give a shit because they're not the ones using them.
Some are wrong. It's easy to get mixed up and number them wrong, usually upside down. Even when the issues are known, they rarely get fixed in published models and libraries.
Sometimes you need an engineered design. Pads can be designed for manufacturing, thermal, electrical, and mechanical considerations. Hardly any published pads were made by people who know how to do those things in the first place. Either way, they're not designing for your specific board.
In summary, it would be insane to spend money manufacturing random garbage from the internet, and a "good" pad may not be the right good pad for that board.
Redraw the circuit in Kicad, then redraw the PCB. See how close you can get to the original.
That way you're climbing the "learn how to use Kicad" learning curve, without having to climb the "learn how to lay out a PCB and circuit diagram" learning curve :-)
But okay, I have ten different resistor values but they're all the same symbol and package. Is there a field you know of where I could put a list of validated part number options for a given refdes? It sounds tedious but if it were connected with a search engine it would be no worse than altium.
I don't use Windows, I don't want to, I've used Fusion 360 and it was slow as heck, didn't have constraint based solving that worked, was written in some awful system that made it require an internet connection, and they want me to use an EagleCAD-themed editor that they've hacked in?
I switched to using KiCAD for all new projects a year ago. It was a little bit of a learning curve. I started with designing a flexible heater PCB, which was good for a learning project because it had so few components. Now I'm making PCBs with four layers, inner ground and power planes, custom design rules, using fancy add-ons, taking full advantage of the HTML BOM plugin when teaching grad students how to solder, and I can be 100% sure that even if it gets worse I can still get the old version to work (probably).
Even the part library is more coherent and higher quality (!) than the EagleCAD one. I literally refused to use the built in EagleCAD libraries because the quality was so variable, sometimes it's fine, sometimes I ruin an entire PCB because their version of SO-8 had a weird width. KiCAD is way better, it's closer to OrCAD and lets me make the schematic, assign the footprints, and if I don't like a footprint I can just edit it on the fly for that document or to just save a new version of the footprint forever.
I've even got it set up to use Dropbox to share designs between computers (no issues) and that includes downloading STP 3D models and adding them to my footprints.
I know it's going to take me a while longer to be nearly as adept as I was at EagleCAD, and I'm going to miss that autorouter (the KiCAD one is very good for what it is, but it's a hard problem). There's a lot of keyboard shortcuts that you internalize after 20 years of using a program.
But it will be worth it, and frankly already is worth it. I've had to make like four custom footprints because the default library is just so well organized that I can actually find the one or maybe two versions of WSON-10 or whatever instead of having to guess which library has the version that matches my mechanical drawing.
PS: The part I selected seemed to be a generic brand and did not get any info to clarify the dimensions.
I personally don't think I'm good enough at KiCAD to draw one from scratch. I could probably make it okay, but it wouldn't be professional quality. Life goal is to be able to meaningfully contribute to the project library globally, they have high standards.
I managed to draw a USB port that was probably the trickiest one I had to do. It was really the same as eagle, I had to place pads, give them proper numbers, define through holes (it let me do slots, even with an offset which was way better than Eagle), and then it just let me connect it to a USB-C symbol in my schematic no questions asked.
But making a custom symbol was also the same as Eagle. Same process, label pins, define directions, place labels...
The only difference maybe is that footprints and symbols aren't forcibly associated, and connections are done via the pin/pad numbers.
With a datasheet of that low of quality you're better off measuring by hand though, I don't know a way around that one.
The reason I picked a particular SD card was because it was low cost. My country has crazy import fees and because of this I am forced to select low cost parts which usually have bad datasheet and documentation.
If it would weigh anything, this alone would be worth its weight in gold.
I've wanted to add this stuff (and hopefully push upstream), but haven't been able to find the time.
These are basically table stakes in every commercial offering.
Combined with a keybind (6 or 7 or 8 - one of the tuning binds), getting the length of a trace is about 1-2 clicks.
Perhaps now, Kicad devs can get even more support to make it better.
If they could bring in better signal integrity tools and Altiums outjobs, it would be a no brainer to use KiCad for hobbyist to small business applications.
I guess if I wanted to route something like big keyboard with a bunch of leds, but overall routing PCB is just such small overall part of the project that I just play some podcast in the background and play the PCB puzzle/sudoku challenge.
But then I like going back and forth and even changing schematic a bit to make routing nicer.
- [1] https://hackaday.com/2023/04/14/kicad-autorouting-made-easy/
I would love to be able to do pcb design on my main Linux desktop rather than having to fish an old windows 7 work laptop with a copy of altium.
However, let me tell you my altium work flow with autoroute and small boards. Recently For example I was designing a Qfn44(7*7mm) to dip 44 adapter board. As simple as it gets really.
After drawing my rectangle board setting the only chip in the middle and two rows of pins.I just let the autoroute do it's job on default settings(it already has my minimum trace distance and thickness set) , I rip it all down, tweak few settings(trace neckdowns near pads), run it again. Repeat once more and the board is done all in under 5 minutes.
When Autodesk claim Fusion 360 has the same functionality as Eagle and can replace it, that is a lie. It does not work on Linux so it is not a valid replacement.
It's been well known internally that it makes an atrocious amount of RPC calls since the Carl Bass days. If I had to make a guess, I'd say that historically most of what you've seen with slow startup relates to authorization more than anything else. You could probably mitmproxy it if you really wanted to, the last time I checked they weren't doing any certificate pinning. Hell, at one point Little Snitch even wanted to know if I wanted to access a staging server.
Fusion 360 is so slow and bloated it's an embarrassment on Windows. Takes minutes just to start. Loading it in VMware is a joke (my best computer is Ubuntu). I was willing to put up with it for doing 3D board renderings, but no. Not for actual work.
I cannot open an app inside a badly written and slow program with excessive DRM with a subset of the features of the program I've used for 20 years. It's just not happening. I will switch to KiCAD first, it's not nearly as big and uninteresting a transition. If I made MCAD + ECAD stuff more, maybe, but seriously how many people do that. It's a dream. It's super cool when and if it works.
It's like VR though. It has three real use cases -- checking interferences, shifting component positions to address interferences, and making accurate panel cutouts. That's all I've found. The first two are simply enough handled with IDF. Or a STP export from KiCAD which works fine. And a panel cutout can be addressed with a STP export too.
It's cute, Fusion 360, in that it tries to be MCAD, ECAD, etc all in one place. It, like most things of that nature, does badly at all of them. Features should be optional, let me explore MCAD-ECAD integration when I decide it would be an advantage rather than because of software limitations.
If you meant in the other direction (and bidirectional) that looks good enough that I'd use it instead of Fusion in the I guess two situations it would come up -- creating a PCB outline from a larger model, or moving parts on the PCB to avoid interferences and have it show up in the layout software. Fusion 360 does do both of those.
Easy is to just export stp from KiCAD which works great for most situations but I hope this tool gets added to the kicad startup window soon.
We're already up to a schematic editor, layout editor, library editors, the best gerber viewer I know of (I have my coworkers install kicad just for the gerber viewer that I know is just gerbview but they use windows so this is way easier), and the calculator tool is amazing for calculating stripline impedances and RF attenuation and so on. A 3D tool that interfaces with the layout tool makes perfect sense to add.
edit: As an option and a standalone program with an interface rather than a unitary blob like Fusion ;-)
EAGLE is the first PCB design app I learned (and had a harder onramp than React) so this is sad, but it is important to note that most hobbyists have already switched over to KiCad: https://www.kicad.org/
In other news, the "free" version of their Fusion 360 loses functionality to the paid version on a regular basis. Wonder if it will suffer a similar fate, or if the free version will end up to forever suffer as some emaciated skeleton of the real app.
Based on what I see in the Chinese electronics communities, pirated Altium seems to be quite popular too.
The big advantage that Altium had for a while was that they were an available, portable format for parts libraries. Everybody was producing and giving away their symbol libraries in Altium format so you could always take whatever design you were given, extract the parts, fix any bugs or weirdness, and get on with life. Since those libraries accompanied the design, you knew those parts symbols had been proven out on at least one real PCB somewhere.
Then Altium went and closed those library formats so that you couldn't tear the parts out anymore. I dropped Altium right then, 100% for KiCad. I had already been doing about a quarter of my designs in KiCad, but I went all in when Altium did that.
When I was into 3D printing 5 years ago I learnt Fusion 360 and it seemed like one of the better free-for-hobbyist tools, but even then it was buggy on Windows (didn't properly support 4K) and features were slowly being moved behind the premium paywall. SketchUp is also quite popular, but people stick to the old version that can be run offline, as the newer web based versions don't have the same features.
https://lwn.net/Articles/924953/
https://ondsel.com/blog/freecad-approach-to-software-develop...
I am a huge fan and can easily recommend it.
Maybe in the past, FreeCAD wasnt good, but today its just CAD software. Sure it might not have a wire harness tool that gives you a report about different wires, but I've used enough CATIA to know that CATIA doesnt work either. (maybe hyperbole, but basically Catia tools were so bad, my company ended up writing our own checks).
Bonus points that there is already google indexed support for every question you can imagine. Can't say that about niche Catia stuff.
Because I did basically that with a parallelogram yesterday on a nvidia 3060 laptop(45*16=720 shapes) on a curve. It took like 5 minutes to compute it.
No joke, I am afraid of this model and I was happy to export it as a .stl and move on.
KiCad 5 had just launched, and so I flipped a coin to decide if I should make it in Eagle or Kicad. I ended up choosing KiCad. Looking back five years later, I could not be happier.
Now almost on a monthly basis I hear about Fusion360 receiving some kind of update that strips features away in lieu of running them exclusively in the cloud, or they just arbitrarily change things and make it qualitatively worse for the end user by upselling them features. I don't want anything to do with that and so HP isn't getting a dime of my money.
Has anyone had time to try Horizon and/or LibrePCB and compare them to KiCad?
I paid for a full solidworks license for a year (before discovering the makers license) and grumbled only mildly.
Maybe Assembly, but I can always download the Assembly3 plugin.
Outside of having to download a plugin, FreeCAD has never limited me.
Using the Solvespace solver is an interesting problem: it would switch up the FreeCAD licence from the LGPL to the GPLv3. The FreeCAD folks don't want to do that: it's fine from a licensing point of view, but they don't want the additional constraints.
Does that Solidworks makers license still exist? Does it include the CAM stuff for CNC machines?
https://www.solidworks.com/solution/3dexperience-solidworks-...
Getting solid pricing information from that is impossible. "Contact Sales" is a dead stop in this day and age ... sorry.
Fusion 360 is $545 annually even for commercial usage. It's right on the first damn page.
As for the "maker" edition, that edition of Solidworks nominally stops if you make $2,000. Most people will blow past that in a hurry. Most woodworkers pass that on one piece of furniture.
Also not at all a fan of Autodesk though, having used Fusion 360 from shortly after it came out. It's lack of working 5-axis CNC support (in any tier) was a turn off, especially when I was building a 5th axis for my (very hobby level) CNC system.
Then they moved CNC into a newly created commercial tier, then they put the 2&3 axis CNC stuff back into standard hobby tier, but leaving the 4&5 axis stuff in commercial tier.
No idea if their 4&5 axis stuff even works properly yet, and I've personally lost interest in the "maker" side of things in the meantime.
Kicad though, 100% its not perfect, but its good enough for anything i'm doing.
We try to go open source to prevent stuff like that as much as possible. I would say we are around 80% there so far (excluding obviously manufacturer-specific stuff like STM Cube IDE). KiCad, Gitea, drawio, Python(and thank heavens for pyvisa), Octave, OpenProject. Next up is probably Eclipse Capella. The only stuff we currently can't get rid of are Simulink and SolidWorks.
Well, maybe in the future.
FreeCAD and Solvespace are both aiming at mcad, but neither are yet. FreeCAD could get better if they spend a year focusing on usability and consistency improvements.
https://docs.flux.ai/Introduction/eagle-to-flux---migration-...
Once they improve their library management system, it will surpass Altium in nearly every way possible.
But yeah saying it is as advanced as Altium is a stretch.
"Good enough for all but the most advanced high-speed stuff" is probably better description.
Also — the common open source refrain “there’s a scripting interface” is just another way of saying “the feature isn’t implemented, but you can implement it yourself.” It’s not terribly helpful.
I struggle with the quirks of FreeCAD happily to avoid putting a penny in Autodesk's pocket. Too bad CAD is such a complex, niche product category.
Only the companies, organizations and products that fail to earn can be morally good.
Interestingly, it is also the case that the failures are usually caused, not by any fault of the failure itself but rather by the antagonistic, evil behavior of the successes.
(yes yes its not necessarily the same people.
But often enough it is! :)
Nobody has a problem with companies that make money by offering a solid product that people buy. The anger comes from companies gaining money by other means. Any of these might qualify:
- Selling my data.
- Buying out the competition and letting the products die.
- employing manipulative tricks to get extra money from people (especially children).
Autodesk: "Oh no no no, you didn't BUY this software CD in a shrink-wrapped box. You just rented a 'perpetual license' and how dare you attempt to recoup that if you end up not using it."
And Autodesk managed to finagle a ruling that utterly tramples a consumer's right under the Doctrine of First Sale:
"The first sale doctrine, codified at 17 U.S.C. § 109, provides that an individual who knowingly purchases a copy of a copyrighted work from the copyright holder receives the right to sell, display or otherwise dispose of that particular copy, notwithstanding the interests of the copyright owner."
But somehow Autodesk is exempt from this. WTF.
I know because they pulled this shit on me when I put an unopened copy of Inventor or 3DS Max on eBay. Their lawyers contacted eBay and threatened them, so of course eBay instantly folded and took down the listing. This violated my rights under the Doctrine of First Sale:
"The first sale doctrine, codified at 17 U.S.C. § 109, provides that an individual who knowingly purchases a copy of a copyrighted work from the copyright holder receives the right to sell, display or otherwise dispose of that particular copy, notwithstanding the interests of the copyright owner."
I had the last laugh, however.
Meanwhile, Autodesk also attacked a kid who had put up a 3DS Max fan site, offering tutorials and tips. They seized his domain.
Autodesk was the vanguard of anti-consumer, trash software and media companies that have continued to take advantage of hopelessly ignorant judges and legislators to rip people off.
- former Autodesk employee
I have a decent computer with plenty of hardware for simulation as long as I'm willing to wait for the results... like a half hour or more in even simple cases. But because Autodesk wants lots and lots of money, they removed the ability to do that from the software. Fusion360 could already do it, but not any more.
Interestingly, in the time frame between when Fusion360 went pay to play for more than very basic features and now, Autodesk (ADSK) lost almost 40% of their corporate value.
Sadly, there are few alternatives to it, and I have decided to subscribe to it because there's nothing else at that price level that's got the CAM features I need.
That said, the version I can afford doesn't have lots of features I want, including the 4/5 axis stuff, and I'd love to be able to use the simulation features, but that's too expensive also.
So I use it for CAD/CAM for now, and I hope something better comes along at some point... while I learn to hand program 4th and 5th axis stuff and use open source FEA programs to try to learn some simulation.
https://www.solidworks.com/solution/3dexperience-solidworks-...
A contractor told me he can get OrCad for a few hundred dollars per year but I never see the actual price being listed on its web site. It looks like those "if you need to ask the price you cannot afford it" software. My gut tells me it is one of these, seeing it is from one of the big EDAs.
And OrCad looks atrocious on the HiDPI screen the contractor is using... UI scaling is all screwed up.
The one thing that most surprises me about Altium is that they've yet to get into meaningful simulation territory (post-layout PCB extraction). This is the biggest feature holding them back from competing with the enterprise tools in my opinion. I was hoping for some continued collaboration with Simberian after the impedance calculator came out but have yet to see anything further.
OrCad itself is relatively inexpensive, I believe the initial license is in the $2k/seat ballpark and the yearly maintenance support renewal is $500/seat.
ie if I stop paying it won’t lock up and stop me opening my projects.
I don't want to lock myself into EasyEDA, and trying KiCAD a few years ago wasn't the easiest switchover...
v7 is quite good. There are a couple UI irritations remaining but the core feature set is awesome.
One of the big drivers for which EDA tool suite hardware companies choose is integration/compatibility with their Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) tools. My understanding is the bigger tools have better solutions for this than Eagle.
EAGLE was barely maintained for years, until Autodesk bought it and started making a lot of improvements, but the changes were often buggy and broke existing workflows. They also changed the pricing structure and many pro customers were unhappy about that too. But while a lot of people grouched about it, it's not like EAGLE was ever been a shining beacon of good UX.
It seems like EAGLE is being merged into Fusion 360 instead, so you have a unified electronics/CAD environment.
Altium has this, but coming from the software side of things, holy hell is it poorly implemented and clunky.
Everything is stored as a plain text file. It's just text. Hell, it's practically human-readable, if you're a fairly nerdy human.
You can store them in git, or any other source code repository. You can email them or stick them up on a server, without them getting mangled, because they're just text.
You can run scripts on them, or just plain open them in a text editor and do search-and-replace on them.
You can even write code to write files for you - take a bunch of stuff and programmatically design footprints and components, any way you like, because it's just plain text files, describing lines and co-ordinates and stuff.
Can't get any less locked-in than that!
For smaller hobby project it's really good and has all you need.
that said, it's too bad they don't open source it. maybe they will.
now i use orcad. there was a price and mindshare war going on and orcad was offered for $400. it was something of a bronze age for EDA at the time.
Reminds me Macromedia Fireworks vs Adobe Photoshop situation - Fireworks had been acquired, good parts transplanted to Photoshop, then killed.
need I say more?
Still salty that Altium destroyed CircuitMaker with low-quality updates with show-stopping bugs, and absolutely failed to incentivize me to upgrade to CircuitStudio because it is wildly different from CircuitMaker.