Altium Develop Verified Customer Reviews (2026)

Very good job Altium. Best software I have ever used hands down!
Been doing Electrical Engineering for 30 Years now and have used them all.

Well thought out.
Constantly improved.
Very good support.
Saves so much time.
Visually stunning, logical interaction, Simulation, Draftsman, library from suppliers, SolidWorks integration, Active BOM, Cloud Based, Auto routing, etc.

Panel Snapping is awful, not intuitive.
Some refreshing errors.
No group project instant messaging while working together on project!
Some file types not supported.

Great designing experience.
I'm yet to explore other parts as integrated simulators and CAD designers.

1) Easier for multiple engineers to work on.
2) Great visual for firmware engineers to know things.
3) Version Control is superb
4) Can't forget about PCB Compare and Schematic compare feature with the previous version.
Thank you for this!!

Making local libraries is a little hassle because we don't provide all the details regarding vendors and all links.

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.

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.

Very feature rich. Revision control, and collaboration with other team members. The extras like draftsman, and 3D export are great.

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.

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.

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.

- Central organized storage for projects and components
- Project history
- Component versioning
- Component templates
- Anyone with a web browser can view designs even in 3D!

- 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.

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.

The choice of which PCB design software to use can be very personal for people and they do not like to change. But if you're just getting started, starting with Altium will enable you to adapt to any other software out there since Altium is the amongst the most complex and powerful tools available.

- Altium is a very powerful tool. You can design professional-grade PCBs with any number of layers and Altium has a big enough feature set to enable you to do that. At the same time, I learned it as a student and still was able to grasp the concepts and use it easily.
- The 3D viewer is excellent and makes it really easy to visualize at each step.

- The price of this software makes it unfeasible for students and individual entrepreneurs. Period.
- No big community of contributors like KiCAD or eagle. Basically it is a premium software for industrial applications.