What is lost when importing Altium projects into Kicad?

[Lithium John]

Long time EEVblog viewer, first time forum user.

I have been hired to prototype a big lithium ion storage system that will use an open sourced battery management system. However, it will need some adaptation, mainly changing the battery cell monitoring connector and shifting the existing electronics around on the PCB in order to place the connector in the middle of the board. Since we are in the early stage of development, the budget is small and it will be very difficult to purchase Altium (the open source project is an Altium project). It would help us a lot if i could use Kicad for this task, but since it concerns a device where safety is of the highest importance, i am a bit worried that something important will be lost or changed without my knowledge when i import the Altium project into Kicad.

Is this a risk? Furthermore, does anyone know what exactly can go wrong such an import?

Finally, any and all tips and tricks are welcome since i am a complete beginner when it comes to PCB softwares.

Thankfully yours

Daniel

[thinkfat]

There's "altium2kicad" (https://github.com/thesourcerer8/altium2kicad) but it seems that there a quite some restrictions and uncertainties. No way around it, you'll have to verify board and schematic quite meticulously.

[pointhi]

Well, you could start thinking what is impossible to import, like design rules. This simply due to the fact that KiCad does not support them in the same way as Altium models them at the moment. The same with Planes, because KiCad does not know the concept -> importer needs to do a workaround.

I'm currently in progress of combining all existing Altium Parser / Importers and integrated them into KiCad: https://forum.kicad.info/t/work-in-progress-native-altium-importer

I would suggest to do a diff of the gerber files and carefully think about design-rules, complex padstacks, hirachial schematics,... In case you want to try my importer, please tell me if something is not working as expected.

[Kasper]

Not sure what your budget is but circuit studio is a cheaper version of altium.  Its not great, its missing some features like length matching but I like it more than kicad and importing altium files was fairly easy aside from some bugs with layer names.