Altium Develop Verified Customer Reviews (2026)

Overall this software is vey good, a little bit expensive. It was much better if we could access to cheaper version with less feature.
Support is good.

Not very hard to work with without knowledge.
The libraries are available.
A lot of YouTube videos to help.

There are many complicated menus and features.
There is no help or explanations in the menus to help to understand.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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,

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!

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.

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

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.

- 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.

- 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.

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!