Our situation is a small company with a number of engineers who have experience in PCB design but are not fixed to one particular package. We tested quite a number of packages and compared them on cost and ease of use and functionality (commercial terms of use). To anyone still following this thread, I can provide the information below. It is on my plan to try it again (looks like, you can get the professional version for 7000 USD, the basic / standard one for 3000 USD): I heard about the others, but I am not sure how good they are - for example I heard a lot about KiCAD getting better and also I read some positive feedbacks about DIP trace.īTW: Cadence is also getting better. However, I need to be honest, from the list I have only tried Altium CS / CM and Eagle.

In case they may be considering to move to Altium Designer later or they are planning to design more complex boards in future, I would probably go for Altium CS. If they are planning to design simple boards only, maybe consider Eagle (it's not expensive and has big community) or use a free software (if it allows commercial use) Hi RobCrittenden, depends on how complex the board is, what their budget is and what their future plans are: I am leaning towards Eagle as it seems to have the largest community support but I'm not sure about things like licencing etc ( I will be looking into that over the next few days)įrom my perspective I want to be able to produce boards that are of professional quality but not very large and not involving fast CPUs or memory access and I would like to do it with as little change over as possible from traditional altium designer. The guys want to use it commercially so the licence needs to allow that but the boards are unlikley to be larger than 100x80mm (I think), and I would happily give circuit maker a go but I think they are a bit nervous about the forced open source. I was wondering if anyone had any experience or thoughts on which of these it might be easier for me to use (coming from altium) to produce professional grade work that can be simply re-ordered in the future. There are many others but that's the short list we are down to at the moment. They have asked my to recommend what alternative software they should get that I could best use to lay out their boards.

My friends can't afford Altium at this stage (perhaps later) but they would like to do things legally and over a time longer than a 30 day trial. I have agreed to help some friends who are operating a start-up business, with some PCBs they wish to get designed and manufactured.

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