Altium Designer

Pros: Component libraries and manufacturer parts search means we can find the components we need with manufacturer approved footprints and have them in our design in seconds.
ActiveBOM is also an excellent tool for helping us pinpoint which components are facing obsolescence or shortages so we can plan accordingly

Cons: It is a costly tool with concord pro, and to get everything set up with templates is quite a long and difficult. But the overall benefit is worth it

Overall: Since moving to Altium, the speed in which we can prototype a design has gone from days to hours. Being able to integrate it with Solidworks using MCAD co-designer means that both electronic and mechanical can work side by side without waiting for each other.

Pros: The availability and scope of Altium tutorials and Support documentation is a great help when getting started with Altium. Altiums Support Ticket system team have are fast and efficient when responding to our issues.

Altium Provides great Collaboration Tools. The Ability to review, provide feedback and share design data with ease to Colleagues and external parties is very efficient. Altium 365 Enhances this even more.

Altium provides an abundance of tools and features that can be used to design complex HDI PCBs. The tools for impedance control, length tuning and Blind and Buried vias are easy to set up and use.

Cons: The Panels menu which contains all the design menus can be clunky when working on multiple monitors.

If using Altium 365 with Altium there are additional features which are being introduced and locked behind a paywall, Including a 10gb limit on server space. This is upsetting when you have payed a significant amount for Altium Pro licences.

Overall: Overall the Altium Design CAD package is a great tool for small or large businesses. Altium is a popular CAD system so most if not all 3rd parties will be able to view and work with any file outputs you generate.

I have been using Altium for about 2 years and in comparison to the other CAD systems I have had experience with Altium Trumps them all.

Pros: Ease of use, A365 feature, cloud connectivity, ability to view designs via a browser. Advanced features to allow for great PCB design

Cons: Having to pay extra for some features such as harness design

Overall: Overall, this offers the best trade off between cost and usability that I have used, having tried many other software, such as OrCAD, KiCAD, Proteus, etc.

Pros: The feature set is extensive, and we are able to produce designs very quickly indeed. The routing tools are also incredibly powerful, and it just makes the job so much easier overall.

Cons: The only thing that could have been better is more transparency in that once you purchase a pro license, all subsequent licenses need to be pro as well.

Overall: We've used a few tools over the years and Altium is easily a mile ahead, both in feature set and ease of use.

Pros: I like how Altiun is integrated very well unto one tool, allowing you to design the schematic and the layout from very simple PCBs all the way to complex, multi-pcb system. I have used Altium since Altium 14.0, and they have come a long way in terms of abilities and usefulness. They are my favorite ECAD software for PCB design.

Cons: The licensing can get a little complicated with all the versions of Altium available, but that has been simplified in some part with Altium 365.

I also wish there was more accessibility for hobbyists and for personal use, but Altium does provide alternatives to Altium Designer aimed at that market. I wish their shortcut scheme was the same though, as the time of this writing I have tried some of their other offerings aimed at hobbyists and after 10+ years of using the software it is hard to bot miss that the hobbyists offering's keyboard shortcuts are different enough to be a little confusing. But I guess this is a very niche point. The hobby software is still very good for being free

Overall: I really recommend this software. I have used it in both really big companies and in very early-stage startups and it has always been invaluable. It easily pays off itself by enabling us to design PCBs more effectively. Collaboration with Altium is very easy, and a lot of places are starting to use it as their defacto software. I really recommend it if you haven't tried it!

Pros: 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.

Cons: 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.

Overall: 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.

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

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

Overall: 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.

Pros: Easy and intuitive UI.
The library set and its management.
A comprehensive DRC set of features and its interface.
The community that uses Altium.
A standard in the electronics industry.

Cons: The price is always an issue when it comes to software, although there are even more expensive packages that are not as good as Altium.

Overall: I would definitely recommend Altium for either small and big businesses. Also, from an industry point of view, Altium is considered a must when it comes to Electronics Engineers' CVs.

Pros: *Fully featured PCB design software
*Easiest to learn while retaining lots of features
*Altium Education

Cons: *Could have provided more than 1 educational project
*Integrated Component Search is not the best

Overall: I began my PCB design journey using two other software but had an upcoming major design project that consisted of 2-3 high voltage PCB designs. As this was going to be a serious project that lasted more than 6 months I wanted to use a software that I would be happy to put on my resume and was actually used and recognized in industry. I ended up choosing Altium Designer because they offered access to me while I was in school and also provided me with the Altium PCB design course for beginners. I took the course and was honestly blown away by how much better Altium was than my other experiences and was very pleased by the feature set. Ultimately, I would recommend Altium and Altium education to anyone who is looking to get started with PCB design as its the easiest fully featured and industry recognized PCB design software there is in my opinion.

Pros: => Live BOM information with Part Obsolescence and Part Availability
=> Revision controlled central Components library and Board design repository with Where Used traceability from Components to Brds and vice versa
=> Project Templates to promote consistency and get new board designs stared very quickly
=> ECAD/MCAD integration for doing quick fit checks with the Mechanical team who use Solid Works

Cons: => Number of "paper cuts" in the SW where things work differently from menu to menu or annoyances that you get used to working around. Rather than adding more features, would love to see Altium address more of these User Interface annoyances
=> With all the benefits of the integrated revision controlled OnPrem server, comes the downside of it running somewhat slowly. Would love to see Altium work at speeding it up

Overall: Overall experience has been very positive.
Altium is feature rich, uses a modern user interface, has tons of help videos and documentation, provides excellent technical support, and provides regular product updates.
Great combination that is orders of magnitude better than the PADS Standard we previously were using.

Pros: Features, documentation and the fact that it is widely used. Many chip products use Altium to document evaluation boards.

Cons: Complexity and cost. There are many ways to execute features. The cost is high although you get a lot for your money.

Overall: I would say that there is a lot to learn but help and documentation is plentiful. I am able to do anything I want with these tools.

Pros: UI is very easy to learn. Like the cloud service and manufacturer part search. Easy to create new components and generates BOM

Cons: Some crash here and there but better than it as been before

Overall: I'v been using Altium since 13 years and I still love it! All the additional features like EMI-EMC simulation, and other new features make it a must to design PCBs

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

Cons: 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,

Overall: 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.

Pros: 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.

Cons: 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.

Overall: 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.

Pros: 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

Cons: 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.

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

Pros: Altium Designer has basically everything you could possibly need in an ECAD, while still managing to be easy to use. It has amazing simulation software, easy to use footprint and schematic models wizards, and integration with major MCAD programs to allow you to design cases/ mechanical components around your PCB. The documentation is amazing, and they have tons of free resources on how to design better circuit boards.

Cons: I can't speak to this too much yet because I have free access to Altium Designer as a college student, but Altium Designer costs a lot. The price matches its utility, but for smaller companies it may cost more than they can afford. In addition, the file UI and a few other UI elements could be improved. For example, I was working on updating on old PCB design and Altium added all of my generated documents to separate folders, which I was unable to combine for some reason. It took me a while to figure out the problem, mainly because there were multiple UI options that were named similarly.

Overall: I am currently an electrical engineering student in college, and I've used quite a few ECAD programs, but Altium Designer is hands-down the best. It has amazing utility, a great community, tons of resources, and very intuitive design (apart from the UI).

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

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

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

Pros: - The software itself is modern and sleek, each action is very fast as well. If processing time is required, there is always an active indicator.
- Every feature one could need for PCB designing is available, with countless articles and videos tutorials for them. There have been many instances where I looked up how to do something, discovered a better way to do it, and had many resources to help me accomplish it.
- There are very detailed error messages whenever some issue arises. If the software itself doesn't tell you a solution, there is an official article showing how to resolve it.
- Hundreds of lessons available to help guide a new PCB designer learn best practices, and seasoned designers ease into a new tool.

Cons: - Making a change to a library element is tedious. I may have not found a better way to do it, but the only way I have found is long.

Overall: I have used Fusion360, Eagle, and KiCad to design PCBs, but Altium reigns supreme. There is not a better PCB designing software that is as well maintained, documented, and supported. The engineers are constantly improving the designers workflow and the ease of access is incredible.

Pros: The built in advance features for PCB design like 3D view and parametric design puts Altium a step above Kicad.

Cons: There is a sharp learning curve. After learning the basic features some of the more advance stuff takes a while to learn.

Overall: I think Altium is one of the best PCB design softwares on the market and it’s my go to choice for both professional work and personal projects.

Pros: Online documentation is plentiful and covers many of the basic needs to navigate the many tools at your disposal. The training courses are very thorough and well laid out to cover basic flows all the way to complex circuit design.

Cons: So many features that it can almost be hard to scratch the surface on a lot of them

Overall: Altium has been a very useful tool for importing external designs via DXF/DWG and making customizations as needed. Robust features allow for ease of use when starting from schematic to layout in order to make the designers time much more efficient