[robomartin]

This is the step we were waiting for to start plotting a path to eventually abandon Altium Designer and migrate to KiCAD. We'll do that in 2022 with new projects as it becomes possible. Also starting to donate towards future KiCAD development.

[e-_pusher]

Out of curiosity, what feature of Altium was holding you from switching to KiCad until now?

[robomartin]

Sorry for the late reply.

It isn't so much about Altium features being that gating element. Given what was coming in KiCAD 6.0 I made the decision to make the transition with that version. Altium has turned into a complete mess. Bugs keep piling up. They release hot fixes and create new bugs. The company seems to have focused on attempting to migrate the user base to a cloud-based subscription model and, in my opinion, made a complete mess. They may have been targeting acquisition by Autodesk too, which never happened.

At $2000 per year per license, it is very hard to justify Altium Designer except for the very low percentage of boards that might require specialized features. KiCAD is good for probably somewhere in the range of 90% to 95% of the boards anyone makes. Let's put it this way: I've created multilayer gigahertz-range controlled-impedance boards with far worse tools than KiCAD...not sure what the $2K per year/per license gets me in the case of Altium Designer any more.

And the best part of this is that KiCAD will get better and better over time. We plan on contributing both financially and with development of either plugins and more. We all win.

I see this as the GIMP vs. Photoshop case. At some moment in time GIMP became good enough. After that it became better and better. For most users I think I can say that they would not feel like GIMP lacks anything important these days when compared to Photoshop. KiCAD is definitely headed in that direction.

[khruangbin1831]

Totally agreed with all your points above. I don't think a lot of EEs grasp yet how powerful KiCad 6 has become.

I have been mulling about creating a startup for helping EE teams transition from Altium to KiCad.

In essence, it would remove the friction points around maintaining both Altium and KiCad in the engineering teams. A small number of Altium seats would be used for the few boards that need specialized features, and everything else would be KiCad. Tons of $$$ would be saved.

Would love to chat about whether you think a service like above would make sense from your standpoint. My contact info is in the about field.

Thank you!

[ruslan]

We abandoned Cadence three years go in favor of KiCAD. We miss online DRC a lot, now with 6.0 this issue has to be solved.

[robomartin]

I fully expect companies with hundreds of seats of Altium Designer to very seriously consider KiCAD these days. I am having trouble seeing why this might be a bad decision.