For even moderately complex work, Altium and KiCad aren’t even comparable. I don’t think the size of this gap is obvious to the average hobbyist, but professional packages like Altium have a depth and breadth of features that will take years or decades to replicate in the open source space. There’s a reason professionals and organizations are paying huge amounts of money for Altium licenses still.
If the feature set of KiCad fits your needs, then it's a great choice. It does quite well at simple boards and it can be made to work for certain minimal high-speed or RF boards if you have enough space and know how to make it work for you.
However, I'm surprised you haven't found any features that you're missing. Even common settings like design rules are missing frequently-used features in KiCad. I immediately miss some of the more fine-grained design rule settings of the more powerful packages every time I use KiCad.
And the reasons why professionals and organizations are paying huge amounts for specific software are often less enlightened than we tend to assume. Inertia is a huge factor. Many universities train students to use Altium, for example, so it's often the path of least resistance. Plus, when you have processes and teams built around a tool that was cutting-edge a decade or two ago, it can be hard to switch. Especially for niche software like this, interoperability tents to be poor, every vendor invents their own UI and terminology from first principles, etc.
But KiCad and Altium are not the only choices. There are affordable "serious hobbyist" products with much better UX (e.g., Diptrace) and there are higher-end commercial tools that leave Altium in the dust.
No doubt there's a lot of complexity in F1 electronics, but they certainly have more space, cooling, reasonable environment, etc. to work with than some industries.
(Not to disagree that it was dismissive and a lot of serious work gets done with Altium Designer, and for that matter Kicad, of course.)
I duuno man, at a startup I worked at, the graybeard EE was doing 2.4GHz RF design on software cheaper and more rudimentary than Altium, let alone Cadence.
So I'm always rolling my eyes when someone uses the world "real" as some sort of macho flex with vague meaning like "real men", "real work", "real engineering", "real software development", as if only their particular example makes the world go round and scoff at everything else like it's unimportant child's play.
When you start working with very high speed things like DDR4/DDR5 on 14 layer boards you could do it with simpler software, but I don't see why you would. The time saved with the design tools and signal integrity simulations would likely be worth much more than the licensing cost, especially if you're bigger than a small hobby shop. Not to mention the money saved on having software that can identify mistakes early on when the PCBs alone can cost thousands.
And then there's all the other bits like conforming to standards, providing deliverables in a format that the next place down the line deems "acceptable" (or they're just picky), as interoperability with other teams, because sometimes you're just one small part of the design process.
Altium has good support for high speed design features. (Source: Have done many high-speed designs in Altium and Allegro)
Altium is quite common at tech companies. I think maybe the parent commenter was being sarcastic?
> I think maybe the parent commenter was being sarcastic?
Yeah, see my direct reply to them (before my comment above), I honestly don't know.
Mostly I was refuting:
> There’s a reason professionals and organizations are paying huge amounts of money for Altium licenses still.
Uh, no. They're not actually paying huge amounts--that's part of the reason Altium got bought. Professionals use professional tools--Altium doesn't qualify. I really do not understand what Renesas thinks they are going to get from this.
The autorouter is terrible. The constraint mechanisms suck. Co-design with mechanical CAD is poor. Large designs slow it to a crawl. Design sharing is incredibly weak. Source control and database integrations are laughably bad. I can go on and on and on.
There are solid reasons why professionals pay an order of magnitude more money for Xpedition and Allegro over Altium.
Sure, I have designed high-speed digital as well as high-GHz RF designs in weak PCB products (including both Altium and KiCad)--that's not a badge of honor, though.
When time and efficiency actually matters, you put on your big boy boots, suck it up and cough up real money for real tools.
> Altium is quite common at tech companies.
This is fine. As is using KiCad. 99% of companies are not doing anything complex enough for it to matter.
> Anybody who needs real PCB features isn't using Alitum
and:
> 99% of companies are not doing anything complex enough for it to matter
in the same breath - it really doesn't do your argument any favors. I can't see a world in which only 1% and "anybody who needs real PCB features" are congruent statements.
Maybe not quite taken to the absolute extreme, there may be a point there about actually needing more advanced tools at some level, but.. plenty of real world serious work gets done with all sorts of tools including Kicad.
I feel like there's this sort of reverse Dunning-Krueger effect where people who are sufficiently advanced in a particular subject area lose track of just how much can be accomplished without operating at, and using tooling at, that same level.
Case in point, it still blows my mind that HN runs on a single process on a single server. Surely one of the tech world's most well known news aggregators would have many servers behind it, with advanced autoscaling for when different time zones come online, a database that's sharded by discussion thread, some super advanced caching solution, ...
But no. HN hums along just fine without any of that fancy stuff.
The truly enlightened, in my opinion, know how to look at the world through the eyes of those less experiences than themselves - and to see how much there is to see when one takes off one's expert glasses for a moment.
A better comparison would be Canva. Can I do everything in Canva that I can in Illustrator? Not by a long shot. Is it still good enough for 80% of the things I need to do? Absolutely. Is it a delight to work with despite its comparative simplicity? You bet.
So I agree that time and pain saved is hugely important, but that's an orthogonal axis to how advanced a tool is. The two only really correlate when you're doing things that need that advanced tooling in order to avoid a lot of manual work.
And I feel it's a Dunning-Krueger effect that people who don't know more powerful tools can't understand why you might benefit from using them.
I assert that you've lost track of how much you can accomplish programming in Notepad and it would be enlightening to look at the lens of how people accomplish that. Now do you understand why you might want to use more powerful tools?
Or, perhaps in a more concrete sense, not every woodworking shop needs a $150K CNC machine--the $10K ones work great for 99% of the shops. However, the ones that do need that $150K CNC are producing a LOT of product.
> 99% of companies are not doing anything complex enough for it to matter.
There seems to be very few professionals in the industry then.
1. Data mining the usage of competitor products
2. An avenue to shovel their chips. Even though they are massive assholes to work with and don't want to talk to you if to you aren't buying millions of chips per week.
3. Semiconductor manufacturers seem to see "buying software" as some diversification scheme. looks at Broadcom
I'm just surprised I haven't even heard of them before (I've heard of Cadence but not confident about Allegro) - though I did manage my quasi-EE degree I think without ever touching PCB design! (I've done so before and since, but just Eagle, Kicad, and.. I think it was called CircuitWizard at school.)
As a massive tangent, I've repeatedly since thought that CircuitWizard or something like it (or whatever it's called) would actually be great for the sort of Arduino hobbyist/newcomer - it had a really good built-in component library, but quite small, and (crucially for that audience IMO) no or little choice, so really simplified. Like I need a mux of this size, or I need 4 NAND gates or whatever, and you just place that part and it lists the BOM - you're not bogged down with an overwhelming choice where to a newcomer it probably doesn't matter, or at least there's an obvious non-specialised choice.
Ironically, It’s only when I started doing hobby electronics that I learned about the existence of Altium.
(That’s not a value judgement of Altium, I honestly don’t know how they compare.)
In general, Mentor and Cadence packages are where the serious electrical engineering happens where you are talking about routing gigahertz signals and simulating it. Even thermal simulations are a big deal in those suites.
I won't be as snide as bsder, but I will say Expedition and Allegro let you handle some crazy complex designs, which are much more of a challenge with Altium. Things like DDR3/4/5, 10+ layer PCBs, complex design rules, etc. Personally I think Expedition is much much easier to use than Allegro ; for the curious it was actually created by a company called 'Veribest' that Mentor later acquired.
Having using Altium (all the way back to when it was Protel 98/99SE) it's gained a lot of impressive capability but it never shed a number of weird UI oddities.
I'm really happy to see the direction KiCad is going, having used it circa v3 era, it's MUCH more usable.
Allegro IMO does have a pretty steep learning curve, I think it's UI is quite archaic, it really hasn't see any serious improvements in over 20-years.
I'd suggest Kicad if you wanted to do anything personal.