Changing from Kicad to Altium

[eTobey]

Hi,

since Kicad gets really annoying and crashes at least once a day, im thinking about switching to another software.

Is it possible to migrate the kicad files to altium?
Has anyone done this?
What are the problems when migrating if any?
Is there the testversion of altium working without timelimit? Does it need to have a internet connection? Are the functions sufficient to design a proper PCB?

Cheers,

Toby

[thm_w]

https://www.altium.com/documentation/altium-designer/kicad-import
https://resources.altium.com/p/moving-altium-designer-kicad

"testversion of altium without timelimit?"
uhhh that would mean no one would have to license altium then. You can get the Summer 09 viewer with no time limit, but that has no editing functionality.

If the only issue is crashing, any way to figure out what is causing it? Could be as simple as a graphics driver, RAM issue, etc.

[berke]

Note that some KiCAD versions are crashier than others.  I'm still using KiCAD 6.0, crashes do happen but are rare.
Sometimes it's corner cases in your design, see if it crashes on a specific project or with a specific symbol/footprint/plugin.
Do not hesitate to file a bug report with the KiCAD team, I did it once and the bug was fixed within hours.
Finally it could be bad RAM.  I was wrongly blaming Teams for being a piece of crashing trash when in reality I had bad RAM on my laptop.  Teams was just using excessive amounts of memory poking the bad bits.

[cearlobe]

"testversion of altium without timelimit?"
uhhh that would mean no one would have to license altium then.

If it existed, "without time limit" doesn't mean "full version without time limit". There are other ways that trial versions of CAD software are crippled:

• some features not enabled
• limits on PCB size or number of layers
• inability to generate outputs
• inability to save edits
• etc...