Need help deciding on toolchain / workflow - A365 vs. AllSpice + Git

[BA_ED]

I'm looking to improve processes within the startup I work at. The current situation is that different engineers have personal component libraries (or just attach schlib files into project folders), and projects are stored on personal PCs until 'release' versions are uploaded to google drive.

We have a handful of engineers but plan to grow the team over the next few years. Our board projects have a single engineer working on them rather than multiple. I'd like to get a way to allow all engineers to contribute to the component library - we're way too small to have a budget for a dedicated 'librarian'.


I'm planning to introduce the use of a central company component database and proper revision control and I think there's a couple of main modern options available:

Option 1:
Altium 365 to manage component database, collaborative editing, version history, obsolescence alerts etc. Design review commenting system. Projects stored in A365.

Pros:
+ Single interface for everything
+ Built right into Altium
+ Integration with things like Octopart
+ Component lifecycle management, component revision history etc.
+ Collab tools for mech eng work
Cons:
- Vendor lock-in with Altium tools is even worse if we start using A365, what if they make it a paid addon to licenses rather than being bundled?
- Concerns about getting all users onto the same A365 workspace - e.g. can contractors who have their own copy of Altium work with us on our boards?


Option 2:
Component database (hosted in AWS?), use of GitLab for version control with AllSpice for diffs & design reviews.

Pros:
+ AllSpice looks like a promising tool
+ GitLab is probably nice for revision control
+ More 'portable' in the sense of working with people who have different types of Altium license
Cons:
- More complex setup of component libraries, building database structure from scratch?
- Have to manage hosting etc. - e.g. AWS security options as set up in the Feranec vid seems to need us to whitelist IP addresses for accessing the database?

I've followed Robert Feranec's tutorials/guides on setting up component libraries and A365 usage:

Code: [Select]

Robert Feranec on How Other Companies Implement Their Hardware Design Process - [url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oRSN_CvoWA[/url]
Should You Use Altium 365? This can help you to decide - [url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iw_mbdf4-g[/url]
Altium - File Versioning - Step by Step using Git (GitHub) - [url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsV_OWtB2EA[/url]
How to create & setup Altium Database Library - Step by Step Tutorial - [url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2BxPHTeHC4[/url]
How to Create & Use Components in Altium 365 - [url]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7p-VeVCl3QI[/url]

Whichever option we go for, it seems there will be significant initial work/effort to just get the barebones structure of a component library set up before we start seeing any benefits. Either component lib interface is pretty clunky (at least until I get used to its quirks).

The videos are great but after several hours of research and watching, I'm still left with doubts as to which option to go for, or if my two options are even the definitive best ways to approach this. Could anybody please advise me on how to proceed?

[penfold]

The smoothest workflow I've found, whilst not particularly "full featured" was using two SVN repositories, one for library MS Access DB and symbols/footprints/models folders, and one for projects; that was for a well established company with a team of ~10 design engineers (2-3 were were designated librarians) and a separate production engineer. AllSpice looks like a neat way around Altium's lack of git support.

With regard to A365... I can't really comment, it looks nice, but without any more information I wouldn't be easily convinced that it solves any serious workflow problems for a small team

[robertferanec]

I would consider to go for Altium 365 - much faster to setup, it works, easy maintenance.

My experience: Trying to setup and run everything by yourself (e.g. database solution) is going to be a lot of work and it still may not be as good as A365. Also, to explain other people how to use a system and ask them to follow some rules when using the system is much much much easier on Altium 365 than on a system with database, git, etc. Plus there are some other things with A365 - managers and clients may use webaccess (very comfortable for them), also collaboration is not easy to solve when designing your own system, but works ok in A365.

The biggest problem with A365 is, that once you start building your system on top of it, it will be hard to leave it and you will need to keep paying licenses for it. But it is a kind of solution what you can start using immediately and focus on designing boards ....

The main reason why I do not use A365 is, that I do not want to pay for Altium extra licenses forever.

[BA_ED]

Robert, thank you so much for your advice - your videos have been a huge help for me and the rest of the Altium community, and I really appreciate the effort you put in to them. So many great tips!

I'm working step-by-step along to your video "How to Create & Use Components in Altium 365" and it's all relatively straight forward. I'll send your comments across to the rest of my team.

[robertferanec]

Thank you very much @BA_ED for watching my videos

[alexwhittemore]

I mostly agree with Robert, though I'll add that I think the value of 365 probably increases the more of you there are. If there are two of you, rolling your own scheme and running it smoothly is extra work for sure, but probably easy going. On the flip side, getting 20 people to consistently adhere to a workflow may be a little like herding cats.

I'd never heard of Allspice, and I'll have to look into it a little more (thanks!) but it seems like it's probably pretty similar to CadLab.io, which I HAVE played with in comparison to A365.

For me, personally, I like A365 but I'm on the fence about whether it'll be enough for me to continue my subscription when I need to renew. As far as designs you get, in a nutshell:
* Cloud project hosting
* Native Git revision control
* Shows you the schematic and layout in highly-browsable form in a browser window without opening the design tool
* Lets you show your customer exactly what's going on easily

Under the hood, this is all built around Git, and you can even add a new remote to your local repo when working on an A365 project to keep everything in sync with GitHub/GitLab/wherever. In other words, the difference between a project workflow in A365 and one with CadLab/etc is actually pretty minor. It's nice that you can navigate your cloud storage from right inside the tool and makes it easy to work on stuff from multiple places/machines, but those are pretty minor conveniences. Mostly it comes down to whether you like the A365 web interface more, or if CadLab is enough for you.

I think the bigger difference is around library management. When last I worked on a whole team using Altium, we just sucked it up with IntLibs stored in Git (which I don't really recommend - merge conflicts are basically a non-starter, and we talked a lot to avoid them). As Robert mentions, teams have been building libraries for a long time and there ARE practical workflows around dblibs, but I don't like them personally. Now, the UI/workflow for managed components is certainly more confusing and cumbersome than a simple intlib, and I don't love that. But A365 is basically a single source of library truth for your whole team, with revisioning, for trivial effort. That seems like it's worth the minor workflow annoyance and noteworthy subscription price if you've got many people making their own components.

Also worth pointing out: there's currently A365 and A365 Pro. Regular comes with your subscription that was previously just support and software major version upgrades. If you want to maintain a subscription for those reasons, A365 is (probably) a no-brainer (and in my previous "team" scenrios, we always did). The subscription upgrade flow is broken for me for some reason, so I can't recall exactly how much more 365 Pro costs, but I seem to recall it's like $1000 a subscription extra per year. As far as this discussion goes, that basically gets you managed components, including "where used" where you can see what designs contain a particular component/version, and a bunch of lifecycle management features you probably don't want.

TL;DR: CadLab/AllSpice get you most of the project management and web interface features for much less money, though A365 is roundly better. Neither gets you an out-of-the-box library workflow, where A365 is definitely a nice win.