Altium Designer
Ratings and Reviews

As an engineering undergraduate we have to design lots of printed circuit boards. When I am using Altium designer I could easily design foot print according to the component I chose to use. In altium designer we can easily import the changes we made on the schematic . If we did any changes on the PCB design layout which are not on the schematic those changes also can be export to the schematic. We can customize the design rules such as track width, pad sizes, clearance and etc as we needed. That will help us to have the perfect PCB. When its comes to routing, auto-routing option in the Altium is perfect. We only need to adjust routing rules according to our work then Altium will do the routing part. We can easily generate files that are need to print PCB for an example if need to generate gerber files we only need to go the option that let us create gerber files and select the required layers and formats.

If you are new to PCB designing it will be little bit difficult to learn altium at the first place with the time we will get familiar to the altium designer. If you looking for footprint for free in online sources it will little bit difficult.

Altium Designer has thousand of advanced features to design PCBs. I really like the ability to make files of the PCB to send online PCB manufacturing service . Altium supports 3D view and we can clearly see how to fit PCB on my CAD design. Altium has thousands of flexible design rules and auto routing options.

Altium has few bugs when exporting designs. instead of that default components library has only very few essential components. Even I find component footprints or library from internet I have to go through number of steps to add them to Altium every time.

The best thing about this software is that it is a complete suite that includes Circuit simulator, Schematic Capture, PCB designer, MCAD for 3D modelling, and many more functions required for an electronics design process. The best thing about this software is that it is the oldest EDA suite therefore, it has the largest component library covering every electronic part and a lot of help is available for this software online.

It is the most expensive Electronic design automation (EDA) software, therefore, a small firm cannot afford it.

The amount of features packed into Altium Designer is almost more than imaginable. The software is great for people who know what they are doing.

The learning curve that comes with Altium is a bit steep. Because of how many features and advanced options in Altium, it would take months, if not years to feel like a master at Altium.