Altium Develop Reviews

Summary: I have been using Altium Develop for about a year now, on a daily basis, for schematic design and PCB layout in an industrial environment. With around 20 years of experience as an electronics engineer, I have had the opportunity to work with different PCB design tools over the years. Altium Develop has proven to be a very complete and professional solution that fits well with my daily engineering activities. I use it extensively for both schematic capture and PCB routing, including relatively complex industrial designs. After one year of regular use, my overall experience has been very positive, and the software has become an important part of my design workflow.

Positive: The main advantage of Altium Develop is its completeness. It provides a very wide range of tools for schematic design, PCB layout, routing, design rules and overall project management, all within the same environment. The integration between the different stages of the design process makes the workflow efficient and helps reduce the need to switch between different tools. I also appreciate the depth of the features available, which makes the software suitable not only for simple boards but also for more complex professional and industrial projects. For an engineer working with PCB design on a daily basis, having such a comprehensive toolset available is a significant benefit.

Negative: The main drawback is the cost. Altium Develop is a professional solution and its price can be relatively high, especially when compared with some free or much less expensive PCB design tools that can cover many of the requirements for less complex projects. For individual users, students, hobbyists or small teams with limited budgets, the cost may therefore be difficult to justify. That said, for professional users who work with PCB design on a daily basis, I believe the additional features, integration and overall capabilities can make the investment worthwhile.

Summary: Overall Altium Develop is a cost effective tool that is the industry standard for good reasons. It has all the functionality we need to develop advanced electronics.

Positive: Altium Develop is the next generation of Altium PCB design software. The integration with Altium 365 makes version control and collaboration easy. New pricing structure is transparent and makes it easy for smaller teams to get started and scale up.

Negative: When working with complex PCBs Altium Develop can hang or crash. It is recommended to save often.

Summary: If you do PCB design professionally and boards are how you make money, its still the most complete package out there and the time it saves justifies the cost. If you're a hobbyist, a student, or a two person shop, the price is going to hurt and KiCad has closed a lot of the gap.

Positive: Everything is in one program. Schematic, board layout, parts library, BOM. I'm not jumping between three tools and hoping nothing gets lost in between. Drawing traces feels good once you learn the shortcuts, and the tool pushes other traces out of the way instead of just blocking you. It also warns me when a part is going out of production before I send the board out, which has saved me from having to redo a design. The 3D view makes it easy to check the board fits the enclosure.

Negative: The price, subscription renewals have gone up every cycle and its hard to justify for a small team when the competition is free or a few hundred dollars.

Summary: Overall I think Altium is headed in the right direction with Altium Designer Develop. I know many in the industry were upset to see the Altium move to a subscription model vs. permanent license ownership, but I think this improves the user experience since the Altium user base will all be working with the latest versions of the product.

Positive: The price of the Altium Designer Develop seat is better than an Altium Designer seat alone and includes a wealth of useful features. The BOM health assessment and adaptive cost estimator has been particularly useful to our org. The integration with Altium 365 cloud infrastructure has also been really nice when moving between workstations

Negative: There were some issues with licensing when we first moved to Altium Designer Develop (2 year license expired after only 1 month), but this was corrected quickly and I don't think it's a systemic issue with the platform.

Summary: Excellent ! Liked the way its has been designed. Before i used to go to 10 different places just to design one PCB but now i can do it all in one place. Its a bit of storage eater i get it but i can surely ignore that issue for its phenomenal performance.

Positive: The best thing about this software is its all in one quality, like you do not have to go to 10 different apps just to build one PCB its all in one and that the reason its famous in industry level manufacturing or in other areas as well. really liked it.

Negative: a little bulky, but what can you expect from a PCB design suite. still better than others.

Summary: Overall experience was great actually, except the custom footprinting part.
Has a steep learning curve but actually fun to learn when doing a project side by side.

Positive: As a beginner, this is great to learn because of the course Altium provides with this. The cloud support is genuinely great to use and having version control is amazing as well.

Negative: Custom footprint seems to have a lot of friction.

Summary: Since moving to Altium, the speed in which we can prototype a design has gone from days to hours. Being able to integrate it with Solidworks using MCAD co-designer means that both electronic and mechanical can work side by side without waiting for each other.

Positive: Component libraries and manufacturer parts search means we can find the components we need with manufacturer approved footprints and have them in our design in seconds.
ActiveBOM is also an excellent tool for helping us pinpoint which components are facing obsolescence or shortages so we can plan accordingly

Negative: It is a costly tool with concord pro, and to get everything set up with templates is quite a long and difficult. But the overall benefit is worth it

Summary: Overall the Altium Design CAD package is a great tool for small or large businesses. Altium is a popular CAD system so most if not all 3rd parties will be able to view and work with any file outputs you generate.

I have been using Altium for about 2 years and in comparison to the other CAD systems I have had experience with Altium Trumps them all.

Positive: The availability and scope of Altium tutorials and Support documentation is a great help when getting started with Altium. Altiums Support Ticket system team have are fast and efficient when responding to our issues.

Altium Provides great Collaboration Tools. The Ability to review, provide feedback and share design data with ease to Colleagues and external parties is very efficient. Altium 365 Enhances this even more.

Altium provides an abundance of tools and features that can be used to design complex HDI PCBs. The tools for impedance control, length tuning and Blind and Buried vias are easy to set up and use.

Negative: The Panels menu which contains all the design menus can be clunky when working on multiple monitors.

If using Altium 365 with Altium there are additional features which are being introduced and locked behind a paywall, Including a 10gb limit on server space. This is upsetting when you have payed a significant amount for Altium Pro licences.

Summary: Overall, this offers the best trade off between cost and usability that I have used, having tried many other software, such as OrCAD, KiCAD, Proteus, etc.

Positive: Ease of use, A365 feature, cloud connectivity, ability to view designs via a browser. Advanced features to allow for great PCB design

Negative: Having to pay extra for some features such as harness design

Summary: We've used a few tools over the years and Altium is easily a mile ahead, both in feature set and ease of use.

Positive: The feature set is extensive, and we are able to produce designs very quickly indeed. The routing tools are also incredibly powerful, and it just makes the job so much easier overall.

Negative: The only thing that could have been better is more transparency in that once you purchase a pro license, all subsequent licenses need to be pro as well.

Summary: I really recommend this software. I have used it in both really big companies and in very early-stage startups and it has always been invaluable. It easily pays off itself by enabling us to design PCBs more effectively. Collaboration with Altium is very easy, and a lot of places are starting to use it as their defacto software. I really recommend it if you haven't tried it!

Positive: I like how Altiun is integrated very well unto one tool, allowing you to design the schematic and the layout from very simple PCBs all the way to complex, multi-pcb system. I have used Altium since Altium 14.0, and they have come a long way in terms of abilities and usefulness. They are my favorite ECAD software for PCB design.

Negative: The licensing can get a little complicated with all the versions of Altium available, but that has been simplified in some part with Altium 365.

I also wish there was more accessibility for hobbyists and for personal use, but Altium does provide alternatives to Altium Designer aimed at that market. I wish their shortcut scheme was the same though, as the time of this writing I have tried some of their other offerings aimed at hobbyists and after 10+ years of using the software it is hard to bot miss that the hobbyists offering's keyboard shortcuts are different enough to be a little confusing. But I guess this is a very niche point. The hobby software is still very good for being free

Summary: I would definitely recommend Altium for either small and big businesses. Also, from an industry point of view, Altium is considered a must when it comes to Electronics Engineers' CVs.

Positive: Easy and intuitive UI.
The library set and its management.
A comprehensive DRC set of features and its interface.
The community that uses Altium.
A standard in the electronics industry.

Negative: The price is always an issue when it comes to software, although there are even more expensive packages that are not as good as Altium.

Summary: I began my PCB design journey using two other software but had an upcoming major design project that consisted of 2-3 high voltage PCB designs. As this was going to be a serious project that lasted more than 6 months I wanted to use a software that I would be happy to put on my resume and was actually used and recognized in industry. I ended up choosing Altium Designer because they offered access to me while I was in school and also provided me with the Altium PCB design course for beginners. I took the course and was honestly blown away by how much better Altium was than my other experiences and was very pleased by the feature set. Ultimately, I would recommend Altium and Altium education to anyone who is looking to get started with PCB design as its the easiest fully featured and industry recognized PCB design software there is in my opinion.

Positive: *Fully featured PCB design software
*Easiest to learn while retaining lots of features
*Altium Education

Negative: *Could have provided more than 1 educational project
*Integrated Component Search is not the best

Summary: Overall experience has been very positive.
Altium is feature rich, uses a modern user interface, has tons of help videos and documentation, provides excellent technical support, and provides regular product updates.
Great combination that is orders of magnitude better than the PADS Standard we previously were using.

Positive: => Live BOM information with Part Obsolescence and Part Availability
=> Revision controlled central Components library and Board design repository with Where Used traceability from Components to Brds and vice versa
=> Project Templates to promote consistency and get new board designs stared very quickly
=> ECAD/MCAD integration for doing quick fit checks with the Mechanical team who use Solid Works

Negative: => Number of "paper cuts" in the SW where things work differently from menu to menu or annoyances that you get used to working around. Rather than adding more features, would love to see Altium address more of these User Interface annoyances
=> With all the benefits of the integrated revision controlled OnPrem server, comes the downside of it running somewhat slowly. Would love to see Altium work at speeding it up

Summary: I would say that there is a lot to learn but help and documentation is plentiful. I am able to do anything I want with these tools.

Positive: Features, documentation and the fact that it is widely used. Many chip products use Altium to document evaluation boards.

Negative: Complexity and cost. There are many ways to execute features. The cost is high although you get a lot for your money.