[SeasonalEnnui]

KiCad is good now. That might seem like a flippant comment however it is indicative of the progress that KiCad has made in the last 3 years. I have moved from a firmly entrenched position with a proprietary EDA (which felt like a pair of comfortable shoes) to KiCad for the majority of projects.

To any KiCad dev reading this - thank you.

[15155]

Until you need to route DDR (or any other parallel bus nets.) Or use any significant amount of impedance control. Or use blind/buried vias. Or tent specific sides of vias.

Kicad is great, but there are very solid use cases that are substantially more painful than other commercial EDA offerings.

[mips_r4300i]

I've watched the growth of kicad since 2013. Far more usable now, though it was very poor at the beginning.

In its current state I could recommend it for most hobbyist stuff and some simpler commercial PCBs. Far better than Eagle ever got.

Meanwhile I will continue to use Altium for everything just because I'm fast with it. When time is money and $8k is just another expense it's well worth it.

[eternityforest]

What kind of projects doesn't need all those things, but yet is still too complex to just do in LibrePCB? To me the nicer and less keyboard driven UI(last I checked, haven't tried KiCAD in years) makes Libre worth it.

[SeasonalEnnui]

Agreed! The gap is getting smaller, I can imagine feature parity in another few years. Some fellow nerds doing that kind of stuff in $$$-EDA say it isn't exactly smooth sailing in those EDAs - regular crashes and so on.

[MagerValp]

What’s the issue with blind vias? You had to enable them manually earlier, but as of 7 I think they’re always enabled.

[15155]

The level of UI polish and control Altium gives you over the construction of HDI vias (and just in general, the properties pane) is substantially greater.

[sponaugle]

Indeed KiCad is much improved in many different areas, and the devs deserve accolades for making those things happen. The self-destruction of EagleCad was certainly a good source of motivation to focus efforts on making something open-source better.

For a number of years I have been using DipTrace for personal projects and it is quite easy to use. It is one of the easiest and fastest tools for doing PCBs for the non-PCB engineer. I have recommended it to a number of non-engineers and they were quickly successful in getting a design up and running.