CircuitStudio Reviews

Summary: While it is a good starting point at a great price, having just moved to its big brother Altium Designer, it lacks quality (data loss/crashes) and lacks features that are invaluable if you are doing professional schematic/PCB work.

Positive: Circuit Studio is easy to use once you get up the learning curve, which took a couple of days, maybe a week. It uses a graphical ribbon across the top for many functions, similar to many Windows applications. Once you understand the flow and where things are located, it provides adequate tools to design circuitry, add components, generate BOM's and prints, etc. The file format is identical to Altium Designer, so compatible with other Altium users. The price is very attractive at $495 for a perpetual license, so great to get started. I only use it for schematic capture, not PCB layout.

Negative: It soft-crashes periodically, causing the system to pause for several seconds then giving an exception error. However, reporting the bug never works, so you just carry on hoping nothing was corrupted.
It recently lost most library links to the schematic components. This had worked in the past, then after generating a schematic with 600 components I went back to do global changes to footprints by changing the library parts, and the update tool said "No Components to Update" despite there being literally a hundred of one part! Checking the parts showed no link back to the library despite having been placed in the schematic from the library.
There are severe limitations such as minimal component management tools, lack of global tools to easily make a universal change on selected components, hidden EDIF generation for the project (you have to use the search bar to find and use it, as there is no toolbar button), no conversion tools for other formats, etc.