Altium Develop Reviews

Summary: Altium is a good tool, we are kind of stuck with it now, since we committed on it a few years ago and have all our designs in Altium, including a complex component library.
if i would chose again from scratch, i'd probably go with kicad and spend the license money as donation for that project.

Positive: Industry standard in power electronics, basic functions work without any problems, overall very stable and we design all our PCBs with this software

Negative: We bought a perpetual license in spring, a few months later this license model was cancelled without any warning. very frustrating experience.

Summary: I've been an Altium customer since it was Protel 1.0 and have recommended it to my customers & startups for just as long. Now its mainstream but I honestly can't say I find todays offering much more productive for banging out schematics or PCB designs though it does offer a lot of bells & whistles. Altium in later years including AD24 offers some expected improvements ie for high speed bus routing that are worth getting comfortable with but things like library work is still a clunky chore. Have no idea if the other mech-EE & PCB mfg. types of features like wiring harness EDA or CAM type setups are good because I haven't had the need nor made the time to learn how to use those features.
In todays work environment there's little training & high demands so really wringing out ideal functionality will take some self imposed educational homework because the tool offers little to no help to learn them on the fly (mid project). I welcome a future addition of AI power steering ie library wizardry and logical auto-place of parts etc as small examples because the sooner it learns how/what we do over & over and over again the sooner it can help enable that....for now its all too manual & slow.

Positive: The News & Updates feed is excellent. Other pros Keeping things that are as simple as they were going back to even Protel are welcomed.

Negative: Workflow UI is too complicated and options are buried & scattered. Finding where an option or control is becomes an exercise in endless googling & guessing. Can't find a list of HOTKEYS (In Protel Days we got mouse pads showing them off). In general one is almost better to start from scratch & bite the tutorial bullet than try to apply past Altium experience to using newer versions,