[frankplow]

KiCad is by far the best. It is not as powerful as commercial tools: a lot of its high frequency design tools are simple calculators, and so a lot of manual work is required where you would simply set constraints in other packages. It has a neat design rule scripting language which you can use to ensure your requirements are met though. I’ve done a couple boards with frequencies up to the UHF band and don’t think I’d want to go any higher in KiCad. That being said, for simple boards it’s plenty powerful.

[huppeldepup]

  up to the UHF band and don’t think I’d want to go any higher in KiCad

Didn’t Michael Ossmann create the HackRF on Kicad?

[junon]

You can do anything in kicad; altium isn't doing anything special to make something possible that's not possible in kicad.

The problem is that it's exceedingly tedious to do in kicad some of the more advanced things that altium and others can do.

Think C vs C++. Nothing C++ does is inherently impossible in C (in terms of observable side effects). For example, RAII is a one liner in C++. In C, it's two lines and some extra thought about control flow. Not impossible, just a bit more mental overhead.

[frankplow]

Yeah it’s certainly possible, it’s just personally I found it tedious.

[huppeldepup]

ah ok, I read it in the "I recommend" sense.