[robomartin]

We said goodbye to Altium Designer when KiCad 6.0 was released. Altium’s focus and resources shifted towards trying to turn AD into a cloud-based tool. As a result the software people actually wanted to use suffered. Every release introduced a plethora of new bugs. Nobody really cared for cloud EDA. Altium thought they would be able to sell the company to Autodesk. This almost happened. In the end that did not happen.

KiCad 6.0 easily covered 95% of PCB design needs, if not 98%. With 7.0 things are better yet. At this point, I can’t see people paying thousands of dollars per year for maintenance on tools like AD. It makes no sense at all.

[fest]

> It makes no sense at all.

Don't underestimate the inertia of processes at established companies. If a company maintains a part library, if the company has more than a few EEs- it can be a multi-man-month effort with potential for costly mistakes.

I like KiCad very much, I use it professionally but I also was the one that mandated AD to be the tool everyone at $WORK must use for production designs a few years ago- solely because it was the common denominator CAD that all EEs at the company/time knew to some degree. The cost of having production designs in a mixture of CAD tools was definitely larger than a few Altium licenses.

Now, if that was a new/my own company, I would mandate KiCad or GTFO.

[snovv_crash]

Absolutely, a couple years ago KiCad wasn't ready for production use, even just a day a month of hitting some obscure issue would have paid for the AD licences, never mind the better part libraries etc. Now of course you'll need the AD licences to work on old designs anyways so it's tricky to transition.

Over the weekend I put together a toy project with a few ICs and maybe a dozen passives in KiCad and I was amazed to see how easy everything was. And now with a new release they're probably fixing things I hadn't even been annoyed by yet.

Hopefully having an open codebase means we start seeing some nice autoplacement and autorouting trickle in from hobbyists and academia, like we've seen in the 3D printer slicers world.

[fest]

It wasn't even feature parity or stability- I was very happy with KiCad and had been using it personally for a couple of years.

But when faced with a situation, where some parts of the product were in Altium, some were made by a contractor in Eagle- introducing the third CAD tool made less sense than just settling on the one which majority of team was familiar with.

[robomartin]

> Don't underestimate the inertia of processes at established companies.

I understand. The approach we took was to start new designs on KiCad and leave prior work on AD, unless a port is absolutely necessary.

All of our libraries are created using custom tools we wrote nearly 20 years ago. The good news is that these tools can be updated to regenerate the libraries for KiCad. That’ the power of a part description data structure that is independent from the EDA tool.

Starting with KiCad version 6.0 I saw no compelling reason to throw money at AD for the shit job they have been doing maintaining their software. At the end of the day people vote with their wallets. For me this isn’t about free at all. It’s about tool quality and other parameters. We are donating money to KiCad because it is going in the right direction. Altium is not. We were with them for over 20 years. They took us for granted. Goodbye.

[claxo]

>I can’t see people paying thousands of dollars per year for maintenance on tools like AD. It makes no sense at all.

I started to use Kicad at v5. Some interesting projects in v4 did not load clean. v6 was released, it had some problems to load v5 projects. And now v7 seems to not load some v6 projects.

If the AD story for support loading old version projects is good then I think they will do fine.