Altium Develop Reviews

Summary: Great designing experience.
I'm yet to explore other parts as integrated simulators and CAD designers.

Positive: 1) Easier for multiple engineers to work on.
2) Great visual for firmware engineers to know things.
3) Version Control is superb
4) Can't forget about PCB Compare and Schematic compare feature with the previous version.
Thank you for this!!

Negative: Making local libraries is a little hassle because we don't provide all the details regarding vendors and all links.

Summary: I have very positive feelings about Altium Designer and do suggest it to others for professional use.
Out of all the different PCB design softwares I have used Altium has been the easiest and the best one for getting in to a nice flow state while designing.

Positive: Easy to use and gets in my way the least of any ECAD software I have used.
Nothing in it feels needlessly painful and it works well for advanced, complex designs.
Good for multi-sheet design and schematic verification of those.

Official documentation is PUBLIC and not behind a login wall or in random pdf files.
It is indexed by Google and other search engines, so searching for solutions usually yields hits on up to date official documentation, not unanswered forum posts from 2006.

Negative: Pricing.
Can't afford it for personal projects at home, so it needs to be provided by employer or client. This is especially relevant if you want to keep your skills with it sharp or try new ways of doing things.
Sometimes opaque errors that are annoying to Google, but so far I have been able to eventually solve all except one issue just by googling.
For that I had to contact Altium support, which was able to solve it.

Summary: Using Altium was definitely a much-needed upgrade on my previous -mostly for personal projects- use of eCAD tools. 9.5/10 would recommend.

Positive: Easy to use, a plethora of educational videos, and a responding support team. Much more capabilities than some previously used eCAD tools.

Negative: Price for single users is a bit much, but I'm a student so I got the educational license.

Summary: I need to provide some simpler and more training materials, maybe more examples and demos to us for have a update level.

Positive: For designers, it's easy as a recommended electronic tool, for new bees, it's easy to understand and design new analog and digital circuits, for schematics and PCBs, AD can translate ideals into Solidworks 3D designs, and ultimately become a delightful and friendly product.

Negative: Version compatibility needs to be improved, and 3D footprints can be more accessible.

Summary: Overall it's an amazing product. I've also used other software, but Altium is the only one I enjoyed working with.

Positive: -Lots of options and gadgets to work with.
-You can add your shortcut keys to most of the commands.
-Cloud base library which makes part creation, editing, and history keeping very easy.

Negative: -On bigger projects which have lots of components and VIAs, it gets very slow.
-Sometimes crashed when it can't communicate with the server and doesn't let you save.
-Doesn't have PCB concurrent design ability between two (or more) designers.

Summary: A professional tool for developing the best possible PCB designs. They kept all possible features available to assist you in getting an excellent result. I’m really happy to have chosen it.

Positive: First of all the user interface is very intuitive and made for quick reference in terms of checking and testing your designs. The risk of doing something wrong has been reduced significantly. Also the possibility the Altium Concord Pro on 365 is a major benefit! Everything has been tweaked and adapted for a perfect end result. I’ve been using other PCB design software but Altium Designer is absolutely top notch and generates the most professional results.

Negative: Haven't found any while using it for now, but maybe in the future. But to be honest I doubt it.

Summary: My favorite EDA tool since some years, I like working with AD, even its not perfect and completely bug free.

Positive: AD has many helpful features and great ideas (my favorite is the Multichannel sheets feature), which abbreviate some PCB design tasks.

Negative: Often, you may think that some feature are not completed properly. It has some mysterious bugs, but it's going to be better during time.
AD needs lot of good organisation and preparation, if you don't invest some time in preparation, you will fail to use AD as a nice and helpful tool. If you are new in AD, you should definitely get help from better skilled AD users, or you should forget it.

Summary: The easiest design software (for me), Full of features and possibilities, 3D preview of your project with 3D STEP files, custom components are the reasons why I use this software for design PCB.

Positive: Every thing is easy to understand in this app and has a lot of features.
every one can use this, like students or professional users.
and I think it's the most compatible software for PCBs in companies and factories.
After 18 version it has a more beautiful design environment
But most of all in this app, I like component libraries. you can easily create your own component library and use for your projects.

Negative: It's a little bit hard to find resources and tutorials for this software like YouTube videos.
But at least there's documentation.

Summary: State of art. Even compared to Catia, Cadence and Mentor still manages to keep up. Very few things could be improved.

Positive: Everything, from interface, resource usage, compatibility with other apps, easy tool access, intuitive design functions.

Negative: As small business, the price. Quite out of the range of most hobbyists.

Summary: The choice of which PCB design software to use can be very personal for people and they do not like to change. But if you're just getting started, starting with Altium will enable you to adapt to any other software out there since Altium is the amongst the most complex and powerful tools available.

Positive: - Altium is a very powerful tool. You can design professional-grade PCBs with any number of layers and Altium has a big enough feature set to enable you to do that. At the same time, I learned it as a student and still was able to grasp the concepts and use it easily.
- The 3D viewer is excellent and makes it really easy to visualize at each step.

Negative: - The price of this software makes it unfeasible for students and individual entrepreneurs. Period.
- No big community of contributors like KiCAD or eagle. Basically it is a premium software for industrial applications.

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.