Altium Develop Verified Customer Reviews (2026)

Overall experience was great actually, except the custom footprinting part.
Has a steep learning curve but actually fun to learn when doing a project side by side.

As a beginner, this is great to learn because of the course Altium provides with this. The cloud support is genuinely great to use and having version control is amazing as well.

Custom footprint seems to have a lot of friction.

Overall Altium Develop is a cost effective tool that is the industry standard for good reasons. It has all the functionality we need to develop advanced electronics.

Altium Develop is the next generation of Altium PCB design software. The integration with Altium 365 makes version control and collaboration easy. New pricing structure is transparent and makes it easy for smaller teams to get started and scale up.

When working with complex PCBs Altium Develop can hang or crash. It is recommended to save often.

I have been using Altium Develop for about a year now, on a daily basis, for schematic design and PCB layout in an industrial environment. With around 20 years of experience as an electronics engineer, I have had the opportunity to work with different PCB design tools over the years. Altium Develop has proven to be a very complete and professional solution that fits well with my daily engineering activities. I use it extensively for both schematic capture and PCB routing, including relatively complex industrial designs. After one year of regular use, my overall experience has been very positive, and the software has become an important part of my design workflow.

The main advantage of Altium Develop is its completeness. It provides a very wide range of tools for schematic design, PCB layout, routing, design rules and overall project management, all within the same environment. The integration between the different stages of the design process makes the workflow efficient and helps reduce the need to switch between different tools. I also appreciate the depth of the features available, which makes the software suitable not only for simple boards but also for more complex professional and industrial projects. For an engineer working with PCB design on a daily basis, having such a comprehensive toolset available is a significant benefit.

The main drawback is the cost. Altium Develop is a professional solution and its price can be relatively high, especially when compared with some free or much less expensive PCB design tools that can cover many of the requirements for less complex projects. For individual users, students, hobbyists or small teams with limited budgets, the cost may therefore be difficult to justify. That said, for professional users who work with PCB design on a daily basis, I believe the additional features, integration and overall capabilities can make the investment worthwhile.

Excellent ! Liked the way its has been designed. Before i used to go to 10 different places just to design one PCB but now i can do it all in one place. Its a bit of storage eater i get it but i can surely ignore that issue for its phenomenal performance.

The best thing about this software is its all in one quality, like you do not have to go to 10 different apps just to build one PCB its all in one and that the reason its famous in industry level manufacturing or in other areas as well. really liked it.

a little bulky, but what can you expect from a PCB design suite. still better than others.

Overall, I am very satisfied with the software because of the one platform to oversee all processes: schematic, PCB, manufacturing and documentation.

It has many useful features, like the manufacturing part database, the harness design, and the variation. It improves my work and documentation significantly.

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.

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.

It works fine and has fixed some of bugs that previously existed. Better collaboration tools for cross discipline reviewing.

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.

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.

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

- 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)

Overall I think Altium is headed in the right direction with Altium Designer Develop. I know many in the industry were upset to see the Altium move to a subscription model vs. permanent license ownership, but I think this improves the user experience since the Altium user base will all be working with the latest versions of the product.

The price of the Altium Designer Develop seat is better than an Altium Designer seat alone and includes a wealth of useful features. The BOM health assessment and adaptive cost estimator has been particularly useful to our org. The integration with Altium 365 cloud infrastructure has also been really nice when moving between workstations

There were some issues with licensing when we first moved to Altium Designer Develop (2 year license expired after only 1 month), but this was corrected quickly and I don't think it's a systemic issue with the platform.

If you do PCB design professionally and boards are how you make money, its still the most complete package out there and the time it saves justifies the cost. If you're a hobbyist, a student, or a two person shop, the price is going to hurt and KiCad has closed a lot of the gap.

Everything is in one program. Schematic, board layout, parts library, BOM. I'm not jumping between three tools and hoping nothing gets lost in between. Drawing traces feels good once you learn the shortcuts, and the tool pushes other traces out of the way instead of just blocking you. It also warns me when a part is going out of production before I send the board out, which has saved me from having to redo a design. The 3D view makes it easy to check the board fits the enclosure.

The price, subscription renewals have gone up every cycle and its hard to justify for a small team when the competition is free or a few hundred dollars.

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.

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

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

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.

=> 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

=> 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

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.

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

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

I spend golden days in Altium training. It given me intense pleasure when working with it. Moreover, I got a some industrial experience. I learn to mail to officials in a decent language.

I fall in love with Altium 365 while playing with
projects. The professor, who came came for us is quite friendly. He not hesitated while clarifying and repeating the previous classes topics.

For us classes timings are little bad. Moreover, my licence is deactivated. I want my licence to be renewed to practice once again.

The entire process from creating a symbol to generating Gerber works seamlessly. I also had a look at the Simulation tool, which is quite impressive as well.

I have worked on multiple CAD tools throughout my career. Compared to some of the other CAD tools I have been using, Altium provides an excellent user interface. The 3D view is another commendable aspect of this tool. You can turn on the single mode option and analyze each layer in detail.

I have been using this tool for more than 12 months and haven't found any major concerns yet. My only suggestion would be to add more simulation models (SPICE/IBIS) for parts from leading manufacturers in to the database.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Having to pay extra for some features such as harness design