Altium Designer Reviews

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, it's a solid offering and my favorite product in the industry. Please keep it efficient and up to date. Also ensure better integration with tools and automation like Python.

I like Altium the most by far. Allegro is not user friendly at all and is very slow. I like how intuitive of a tool it is. Even new hires can pick it up and figure it out.

Altium is getting bigger and bigger in terms of program size and slower to work with. If they want to stay ahead, they need to take some time to slim down and improve the overall system performance.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I will not say that this software does the absolute best for all PCB designing projects. However, it has all of the features and feel of what a good, professional software package should have. While some competitors might have specific expert level features for certain applications, they lack in a lot of other places where Altium has improved and excelled at.

Altium should be considered the minimum standard for the industry in all of it's features and design, and it really shows when using anything else how they might focus on one aspect of their software rather than providing a whole integrated package. Unless you have some specific requirements that force you to use some other package, I would currently recommend Altium as the first choice.

Excellent UX design with modern look and feel.
Great customization options for workflow.
Uses the same tool for all PCB design tasks.
All of the basic features and most of the advanced ones.

Occasional crashing and stability issues when working with large projects.
Still behind on some of the expert level features.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

A pretty good application, i am writing the rest of this part cause the writing requirements.

The designing and the features, hella a lot more but i am too lazy to write it i am writing this part to due to the writing requirements.

The pricing, and nothing else i am writing the rest of this part cause the writing requirements.

I've been using Altium for over 5 years after using other CAD products and find it to be a very powerful and easy CAD software. It has advanced capabilities, is easy to customize and perform batch operations to ensure uniformity and consistency across a design.

First I will say Altium has great online resources. If there is anything you are trying to do or having trouble with, you can find help online. Customer support is responsive if needed. Next I will say Altium is a powerful tool and I have yet to find a limitation that keeps me from my intended design. Convenient and easy shortcuts make execution smooth and advanced capabilities that make all kinds of designs possible without being limited by CAD software. 3d circuit and variant managing is incredibly useful. Stackup design and impedance calculators, customizability for viewing, batch operations (such as teardrops and removing unused pads on inner layers) and design rules that can be detailed/very specific but are easy to create make it easy to execute the desired design with confidence.

Sometimes Altium becomes unresponsive or unable to perform certain tasks. Restarting the program usually helps, sometimes I need to restart my computer. This may be an issue with my computer, not Altium, but I'm not sure.
No real complaints, otherwise!

Throughout my career, this has been an excellent tool which has allowed me to achieve my goals with ease. It is the tool of choice in the area of the country I live in and considered the standard for PCB development.

I would use no other software for schematic capture/PCB development and maintenance. Altium offers powerful, intuitive PCB design tools with a unified design environment.

The expansive library of components, real-time collaboration, simulation and analysis tools make it easy to develop from concept, through production and well final product end of life.

There is a bit of a steep learning curve - which is lessened by the availability of in-person and online training courses.

In addition, it is a bit pricey, but I guess you get what you pay for.

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.

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.

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.

I have built up such a knowledgebase in Altium that I shudder to think about ever needing to change to a different platform. There are small frustrations at times, but those are made up for when the product just generally works.

I have been using Altium daily since ~2007. The evolution of the main program, especially the web/365 integration, release process and parts control, searching and creation make 2007 look like the stone age. Highly recommended.

Support has been hit or miss lately. Getting through to a chat person who has the knowledge needed to answer questions is very difficult. Cases are routinely answered pretty quickly, though.

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

-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.

-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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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