Altium Develop Reviews

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: 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.

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,