Altium Develop Reviews

Summary: I've used Altium Develop weekly since May for R&D hardware work. It covers schematic and PCB layout well for a small team, and collaboration is noticeably easier than a file-based workflow. I rate it 4 out of 5 — the design experience is solid, but the limited automation, especially via MCP, is a real drawback.

Positive: Real-time collaboration is the biggest strength — our team can work in one cloud workspace with version history and comments instead of passing design files around. Sharing a design for review takes a link rather than an export, which saves time on every design review.

Negative: Automation is the weak point. Driving Altium Develop through MCP or scripts is difficult, so repetitive tasks still have to be done manually, which slows things down on larger projects.

Summary: At the moment, it is still OK for us to do the custom specified electronics design, especially when the Layout is large and complex. But still, the current business model, licensing pricing and so on brings many uncertainties to us. If other competitors like KiCad is dramatically improved over the next years, we will certainly consider other options.

Positive: a. versatile user-interface, rich set of tools.
b. built-in PCB 3d realtime illustration.
c. powerful quote function, lot easier to make customized selections.
d. harness and customized net color makes schematic design more efficient.
e. PCB Panel is extreme helpful.
f. very easy-to-use and handful draftsman.

Negative: a. graphics sometimes crash when the Layout design is large in size.
b. documentation for API-usage in Altium script is extremely poorly organized/written.
c. License purchasing+pricing+configuration and the whole SaaS business model is a pain in the axx.
d. Uncertainty of for how long can the project files still be opened correctly, thank to point c.

Summary: Overall, Altium develop is no different than Altium designer pro (their previous product). The value add is the cost dramatically decreased to where it becomes a no brainer to get seats for all your staff.

Positive: There are a lot of features that really help with design
built-in cross probing
hierarchy design
cost for add ons like PDN and SI are not expensive
differential pair analyses

Negative: - very little support
- uploading stuff to cloud allows Altium to take snapshots of your design*
- advanced toolsets are buggy (diff pair routing when overconstrained goes haywire)
- tools hidden under layers of menu contents
- should have a shortcut configure bar like in photoshop
- allow user defined keyboard shortcuts
- net aliases would be ideal so you can short different nets together (tying grounds together)

Summary: Overall, I am very satisfied with the software because of the one platform to oversee all processes: schematic, PCB, manufacturing and documentation.

Positive: It has many useful features, like the manufacturing part database, the harness design, and the variation. It improves my work and documentation significantly.

Negative: I am working with the Altium 365 database. I uploaded all our created parts to the Altium 365 database, but the system often slows down between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. Pacific Time. It delays my work progress. Also, the program required some learning trials, but they were manageable.

Summary: Very capable tool that can do a lot of things under the sun. Subsequently, complicated, with lots of opportunities for bugs. Overall though it's pretty reliable, and does some cool things.

Positive: The pour manager is much nicer to deal with. Very handy to enable/disable as necessary to declutter during design. Impedance planning in board stack is very helpful. The outjob process lends itself to automation MUCH better than PADS. Parameter manager is MUCH nicer way to review fields for all of the parts in your design, so you can tidy them up in a uniform way. The rules manager is very cool once you start digging into it. This especially does not always follow documentation, but setting things up can drastically cut down layout time once you set things up.

Negative: Learning curve is steep. Some features work in odd ways, or different than documentation describes (like modifying polygons, via stitching areas, etc.). Some of the preferences in layout aren't described very well, so behavior is often not as expected. Cross-probing is annoying: no shortcut key for it, and takes multiple clicks to enable/disable. Cross select is handy but will cause you to inadvertently delete or corrupt layout. Tuning differential pairs sometimes deletes tracks, and undo won't bring them back. Schematic and layout can get out of sync, and no matter what you do will not link the correct components and parts together again. Unique IDs for parts on both have to be enabled through some hacking. Differential pair length tuning is great idea but doesn't work nearly as well as just doing so manually. Many features appear to be arbitrarily moved from one version to the next, so many searches online will not help. Thankfully, online documentation from Altium is above average. Copy and pasting areas of layout to reuse them is painfully worse than PADS, however: lots of different ways to do it, but none of them work reliably.

Summary: I'm productive with the SW, but they could improve it and slim it down A LOT. I'm sure these features like PCB Codesign will get even better in a short time.

Positive: I like the server based library and integrated revision tracking. Design rules are fairly easy to implement. The PCB Codesign feature is great as well. A colleague and I can work on the same layout (separate portions) and merge almost without an issue. Integration with MCAD save me a lot of time as well.

Negative: There aren't enough components in the library. The wizard does make it easier to create a footprint/symbol, but KiCad has a much larger component library.

Summary: Altium is a very powerful tool and found it faster to build a model vs similar products on the market ie.. kicad

Positive: The over layout of the program is very intuitive for schematic design as well as PCB layout. The parts search feature as well as the BOM generation tools all streamline the process to get to a final design quicker. This was very helpful as a capstone project for my program can be on strict time constraint

Negative: Although the parts search feature is convenient, the library is not as extensive as I'd hope especially if you are trying to find a passive component like a switch. Furthermore the parts search do include discontinued models and is something that you have to watch carefully.

Summary: Except for learning curve and price it is a great design software out there with a good support team behind it.

Positive: Lots of features discovering something new every day.
Great integration with cad design.
Great component library.

Negative: A very sharp learning curve so it takes a while to get used to it.

Summary: Good product if big FPGA and high speed design is not your main line product. Ideal for a PME and for product with mechanical integration

Positive: Very good product quality/price for all "standard" PCB.
Feature for mechanical integration are magic and work very well.
Rules table and Altium in general are easy to learn and to understand.

Negative: High speed design, matching a bus and very high density PCB are not ideal in Altium

Summary: I've been designing PCB circuits for about 30 years, 13 of them at Siemens, and I determined to use Altium Designer for all my projects. Test it yourself, you are going to like it.

Positive: About Altium Designer I like very much the ease of use, and that is a very complete and integrated tool to design any kind of PCB. For example, the database approach for component libraries is very good and fast.

Negative: What I don't like, as any other PCB tools, is the need to make component libraries at all, with risk of mistakes. When is it going to be a universal format for all CAD software, to define all data of a component (schematic, pinout, 3D mechanics, models, parameter data,..)? This way the manufacturer could offer an already tested format of its components for the professionals.

Summary: Altium is our go-to design package for a reason. Despite the instability we can experience with it, the ease of working inside the tool (when it's working well), the power of it's component /BOM management integration, and it's flexibility make it a strong choice for any EE designing new products.

Positive: Altium is a truly integrated design solution. Schematic, layout, BOM management & design release are all encompassed in the same tool. They're really focused on continuous-improvement, adding new features every year to make designing PCBs easier. Altium is super user-friendly, and I love the ease of EE/ME collaboration that it promotes. It's really focused on playing well with others, as long as those others aren't direct competitors.

Negative: Altium falls short in two ways. The first is that other platforms do super-complex, high speed designs better. Altium thrives in <8 layer boards, designs where simulation can be handled in a different tool, and designs that are physically smaller (less than 1ft long). Anything above that, things seem to take a lot longer for Altium to process, which can result in some instability.

The second area Altium falls short is also one of its strengths - it continues to add new features, but doesn't always take the time to stabilize old ones. "Altium is tired and needs a nap" is a common phrase around our office. Translation is: it's starting to get buggy, and you better save and restart Altium before it crashes on you. These bugs can range from minor things like Altium accidentally snagging 2 licenses for the same instance of Altium, to large annoyances like it freezing for 2 minutes when you try to move a trace, to more potentially catastrophic issues like the all of my net classes getting deleted by the tool and needing to be rebuilt many times over, resulting in mis-poured polygons.

Summary: Great. Altium is very feature rich and mostly robust (it manages to crash on occasion). Because it is so feature rich, upstanding where and how to accomplish something can be frustrating. Sometimes the documentation doesn't match the software.

Positive: Very feature rich. Revision control, and collaboration with other team members. The extras like draftsman, and 3D export are great.

Negative: Learning curve can be steep. Some difficulty in navigating help. There needs to be more 3D view controls - like snapping to front, back, top, bottom etc. Better/easier Gerber view and editing tools are needed.

Summary: Nice idea in general.

Perhaps there should be a fallback method like a local vault at customer to replicate the A365 data just in case the internet won't work today and there is a board that should be designed.
Documentation should describe "all the things that can go wrong" and not the training example where everything just works.
Customer support should have a way to provide video / screen recording to describe issue. Now time is lost trying to describe what happened in a text-only email.

Positive: - Central organized storage for projects and components
- Project history
- Component versioning
- Component templates
- Anyone with a web browser can view designs even in 3D!

Negative: - Cannot always guess what is going to happen e.g.
- content cart --> my colleague could load content cart and "drive it home" but he could not put the parts in the proper folders
- change in component template did not affect only new components - it modified existing components, too
- MCAD - ECAD sync has not always worked
- library importer(? the older one) somehow left the components under the original library so the parts may not turn up in Components search or they are missing footprint and Where-Used info is not correct
- Cannot always undo easily
- Recently A365 has been sloooow.
- One project got corrupted so that it works OK from AD but it cannot be viewed with web browser.

Summary: The Altium Develop experience is simple and affordable but it is frustrating now being able to trust the free trial experience

Positive: The core functionality for 90% of Altium features are present in Altium Develop. It has the main schematic capture, layout, etc features and the additional things like cloud storage and sharing with 365 which is convenient to share designs with non EEs.

Negative: The free trial of develop provided codesigner functionality that was removed after purchasing the license. The documentation and information from our Altium rep was very unclear when purchasing so we tested everything in the free trial before making our decision. After signing up, the workflows that we tested and documented as working fine, suddenly stopped working.

Summary: It was very difficult to even get Developer working. Altium had many snafus trying to migrate our workspace. In the end it became a one year stalemate.

Positive: It works fine and has fixed some of bugs that previously existed. Better collaboration tools for cross discipline reviewing.

Negative: Altium is trying to phase out the perpetual licenses and once you make this jump you're going to be paying annually FOREVER. Licenses and projects are not shareable outside of your geographic area so international coordination is not well supported.