| Favorably. Obviously, it's free and open source, with no board size / layer limitations.
On the other hand, Eagle is still much more widely used in the DIY community, and most my-first-PCB-like tutorials are Eagle-based.
Kicad has for years suffered from the binary release being really, really outdated.
Kicad development feels pretty fast-paced. It has most or all of Eagles features, and some nice advanced features Eagle doesn't have. Especially it's PCB routing support is much better. For example, it supports push shove routing[1] and automatic trace length matching. It also shows the netname on pads (in Eagle you have to use "show" all the time). On the schematic side, It has had hierarchical sheets for many years now, whereas Eagle only gained hierarchical design support earlier this year in version 7. Things like that. There are minor workflow differences in some places. For example, it uses key combinations instead of typed commands. There's a netlist generation step between schematic editing and board editing, so going back and forth between the two isn't as straightforward as it is in Eagle. [1] If you're used to Eagle, this may blow your mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C02D0_kNQeM |