Altium Develop

Pros: 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.

Cons: 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.

Overall: 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.

Pros: 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.

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

Overall: 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.

Pros: 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.

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

Overall: 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

Pros: 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.

Cons: 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: 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.

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

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

Overall: 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.

Pros: 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.

Cons: 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.

Overall: 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.

Pros: 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.

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

Overall: 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.

Pros: 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.

Cons: 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!

Overall: 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.

Pros: 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.

Cons: 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.

Overall: 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.

Pros: 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.

Cons: 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.

Overall: 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.

Pros: 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.

Cons: 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: 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.

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

Cons: 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.

Overall: 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.

Pros: 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.

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

Overall: 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.

Pros: 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.

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

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

Pros: 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!!

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

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

Pros: 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.

Cons: 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.

Overall: 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.

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

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

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

Pros: 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.

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

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

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

Cons: - 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.

Overall: 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.

Pros: -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.

Cons: -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.

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