Necroposting, but for a good and historical cause...
How things have changed since them? I'm now forced to use Cadence and I find it very powerful, but now I laugh about myself when I complained about
- How messy was Eagle:
* It has TONS of annoying quirks in the UI part.
* I somewhat liked the cli concept despite being quite underdeveloped to my taste (I would love to be like zsh). I'm a mix of an *NIX cli + streamlined GUI fan and I find both emacs & vi(m) too weird.
* It has a really crappy autorouter to the point one made in the spare time of a retired Zuken developer was a lot better. No offense, I'm quite sure he's quite good at it, but he's only one person compared to a development team, but maybe 10000 Lemmings are less than 4 geniouses.
- How weird and "transitioning phase" KiCad is:
* Please kill Legacy canvas insanity ASAP and make GAL usable with at least all the features of the former one. I'm sure many of their devs agree with that, but I understand KiCad needs a big overhaul in order to become a robust project so groundwork needs to be done before.
** They are slowly improving and making menus more sane, that's nice.
** It remembers me a bit like a weird OrCAD, but more messy to use in certain aspects.I don't used so much other EDA packages, no idea about the differences in GUI and UX.
* They are getting internationalization, that's great and a killer app compared to mainstream software!
** I think their next goal should be to i18n their site and make a lot more stronger community, instead having a bunch of segregated and uncommunicated communities.
*** KiCad.jp looks promising and deserves more nexus points by some good bilingual people. The others seems relatively non-existent from my point of view, or at least not enough organized to be visible. It's true many tech people are getting very used to English, that makes them less interested in their local community and become international
* There's the good news: They are starting to get a bit more sane. They are making a stronger and slowly more organized team and the result is surprising, volunteers are appearing from nowhere!
** I think the current oligopoly and the support from CERN is a great opportunity.
** I think they should get 1000x more resources, but I understand that's difficult.
** They should concentrate at education and small companies/freelancers/hobbyists, but big smart nerds like CERN are a great opportunity to provide many good features too.
** I think interoperability ought to be a priority that needs to be really organized and scientifically measured!
*** Electronics is an extremely very hostile and vendor lock-in oligopoly world, they'll make it very difficult to a newcomer and specially one that might hurt their profits of their extremely overpriced and inefficient software (they are very featured, but ridiculously bloated and lots of nonsense, I laughed when found Firefox inside Allegro!).
**** That happened with Microsoft Office vs OpenOffice. SUN and Oracle just wanted it as a way of branding, but now LibreOffice is getting momentum (now it sucks less, despite it requires more love in the math part and stop taking hard drugs to copy newer Microsoft Office versions), The Document Liberation Project concept ought to be transitioned to EDA/CAD/CAM world too.
Here's an Altium vs Cadence opinion from 2012, but very detailled. I don't know if thingschanged since then.
What about Fritzing and Circuit Wizard? They are nice too!