KiCad will be even more relevant going forward as Altium quality inevitably craters (ever so slowly) under Renesas leadership. That said, KiCad has a lot of work to do[0] to prepare for that transition period and start wooing Altium customers. Otherwise someone else will have to step in.
Altium quality turned to crap the moment you could have libraries that you couldn't extract the data from.
The single thing Altium really had going for it was that it had sort of become a lingua franca of sharable designs. And engineers, being the lazy shits they are, would simply pack up the library and ship it with the schematics. Consequently, you got an actual, engineering validated symbol and layout when a company gave you schematics.
Once Altium changed such that you could ship a library that couldn't be extracted from, they lost the only thing that really set them apart from the competition.
All the cloud and parts management crap was just insult to injury after that.
KiCAD is good enough for all but the most demanding commercial use at this point. It has some quirks, but all CAD programs do. Every major release has been a big step forward. Version 7 was a huge step up, and they're about to release Version 8.
The biggest issues with KiCad would be using them for very complex designs: huge numbers of length-matched busses (think desktop computer motherboards), weird flex designs that need combined electro-mechanical CAD, so many signals that you need a complex autorouter, extremely advanced inventory management, etc.
The step backwards you see Altium regarding not being able to freely export/import is the result of a nut job named Henry Potts, who also formerly ruled Mentor with an iron fist. He did not bring about positive change, quite the opposite.
He did the same thing regarding locking down import/export with Expedition circa ~2006 or ~2008(?) specifically to tie people into a Mentor flow, breaking years of tools people had written that enabled footprint / schematic import/export capability.
In an a "Jack Welch" kind of way, somehow he attained industry envy from the other EDA companies and Altium hired him, even though, like Jack Welch, he's not someone who actually did positive things.
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.
We switched from Altium to kicad and it has been great so far. Haven’t found a feature that existed in Altium that we are missing now. For support we subscribe to kipro[1], which is a lot cheaper than an Altium license and their support blows Altium support easily out of the water. If you report a bug to them which is easy enough to fix, the next minor release will have it implemented. Altium has (or at least had) bugs that persisted for years and reporting them did nothing. We build power electronics, so this isn’t RF stuff or Gigabit communication. So I cannot speak for that.
Similarly to many other open-source design apps, KiCad has a fairly horrid UX and lacks some enterprise features (especially around collaboration on larger projects), but it's definitely being used for complex projects at a good number of companies.
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.
The gap is closing, and that should be deeply embarrasing to Altium, given the difference in resources. But Altium has completely squandered their efforts on stuff that isn't actually particularly useful for most of their users, while failing to fix bugs or otherwise improve the usability of their products for ~90% of their users. Altium today is about as useful to me as Altium 10 years ago. KiCAD has improved by leaps and bounds in the same timeframe.
I was once at an event, and a guy had some beautiful mixed signal something at a booth. Somehow I asked "so this is actually done in like KiCad..." and he kind of cut me with "well I have Altium subscription actually" and that, sufficed. Quality and feature set difference between these products is that obvious at mid-high ranges.
Altium cratered in quality about 10 minutes after it ceased being Protel, first because of their braindead attempt to turn it into a generic FPGA layout system, then by their insistance on making it cloud based.
I absolutely loathe cloud based tooling. It really sits wrong with me that to do any kind of development you start off with shipping your IP to another party, who may or may not have their security done properly.
It's a weird feeling knowing that Altium isn't a pure ECAD company anymore. Like sure, the team is all the same and will build an EDA tool, but somewhere higher up, there will be a skew towards the automotive industry.
I used Altium in my previous job in high voltage and we were amonst the first to use the Creepage feature. It reminded me that there's niche features to be developed for every industry, and there's a future where they resource heavily on automotive. On one hand, $6B seems like enough to go around for everyone but on the other hand, Renesas would only spend $6B if they saw it making/saving them $10B+.
I'd like them to speak more on the long term vision and focus of the product; I think they've done a good job at serving EEs so far and if they'll still hold that position or get pulled away into one loud market. Regardless, that's like in 5-10 years time; I'd be impressed if anything changes in the next 2 years.
Full disclosure, I'm now working at flux.ai but I don't think that doesn't really changes the news for me; I understand Altium is still used by many EE companies who I can still sympathize with, and we're humbly comin' after them :P
Looking at Wikipedia, Autodesk tried to buy them for less some years back. Altium's clearly been looking for buyers, and if I was their customer, I'd be happy my main PCB design tool wasn't gobbled up into the Autodesk empire.
I'd be far happier if they weren't gobbled up at all. It's pretty rare than an acquisition ends up being a positive for the customers that made the company into what it is in the first place.
This is off-topic but I disagree with this comparison. Microsoft Game Studios has consistently been a great producer of video games going all the way back to when they first started. Blizzard has been destroyed from inside with Activision and their leadership left as a result of that to open up new studios. I’m optimistic about a return to form under Microsoft, but I am also aware we can’t step into the same river twice and it’s not the golden age of blizzard games anymore.
Which is weird because modern Zuken tools look really intelligent designed. I haven't tried them since they ran on Sun workstations but CR-8000 looks impressive.
Indeed, Zuken is still a large player in Japan, and has a leg up with IC packaging tools which the big players (Cadence, Mentor) have that Altium doesn’t.
Altium’s play has always been to segment the market at the hobby+small enterprise+startup level, with aim to push further up to larger enterprises as those companies grow. They’re taking aim at the next gen EE/design engineers as the graybeards age out of the industry. Let’s see if this strategy holds out with Renesas positioned above.
Why do I get the feeling this is an information raid. Renesas buys Altium, does lots of analytics on users to find industry trends, and then splits Altium off again. Meanwhile, Renesas' products suddenly get a lot more in-tune with customer needs.
Readit News
0: https://www.reddit.com/r/diypedals/comments/14bz17c/comment/...
The single thing Altium really had going for it was that it had sort of become a lingua franca of sharable designs. And engineers, being the lazy shits they are, would simply pack up the library and ship it with the schematics. Consequently, you got an actual, engineering validated symbol and layout when a company gave you schematics.
Once Altium changed such that you could ship a library that couldn't be extracted from, they lost the only thing that really set them apart from the competition.
All the cloud and parts management crap was just insult to injury after that.
KiCAD is good enough for all but the most demanding commercial use at this point. It has some quirks, but all CAD programs do. Every major release has been a big step forward. Version 7 was a huge step up, and they're about to release Version 8.
The biggest issues with KiCad would be using them for very complex designs: huge numbers of length-matched busses (think desktop computer motherboards), weird flex designs that need combined electro-mechanical CAD, so many signals that you need a complex autorouter, extremely advanced inventory management, etc.
He did the same thing regarding locking down import/export with Expedition circa ~2006 or ~2008(?) specifically to tie people into a Mentor flow, breaking years of tools people had written that enabled footprint / schematic import/export capability.
In an a "Jack Welch" kind of way, somehow he attained industry envy from the other EDA companies and Altium hired him, even though, like Jack Welch, he's not someone who actually did positive things.
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.
[1] https://www.kipro-pcb.com/
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.
I used Altium in my previous job in high voltage and we were amonst the first to use the Creepage feature. It reminded me that there's niche features to be developed for every industry, and there's a future where they resource heavily on automotive. On one hand, $6B seems like enough to go around for everyone but on the other hand, Renesas would only spend $6B if they saw it making/saving them $10B+.
I'd like them to speak more on the long term vision and focus of the product; I think they've done a good job at serving EEs so far and if they'll still hold that position or get pulled away into one loud market. Regardless, that's like in 5-10 years time; I'd be impressed if anything changes in the next 2 years.
Full disclosure, I'm now working at flux.ai but I don't think that doesn't really changes the news for me; I understand Altium is still used by many EE companies who I can still sympathize with, and we're humbly comin' after them :P
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Altium’s play has always been to segment the market at the hobby+small enterprise+startup level, with aim to push further up to larger enterprises as those companies grow. They’re taking aim at the next gen EE/design engineers as the graybeards age out of the industry. Let’s see if this strategy holds out with Renesas positioned above.
https://horizon-eda.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
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