CircuitStudio vs. CircuitMaker

[Ahrenp]

I've been looking at CircuitStudio due to it's attractive pricing this month and I am wondering about the differences between it and CircuitMaker. Besides the cloud/community aspect of CircuitMaker and its limitations are there any other differences between the two programs? Any major benefits to CircuitStudio? How does the library system in CircuitMaker compare? Octopart library integration vs Altium Vault?

[Harvs]

I use circuitstudio daily, and looked at circuitmaker as a package to introduce some folks at our local hackerspace to.

If you completely ignore all the cloud aspects they're extremely similar with a change of colour.

However you can't ignore the cloud aspects. The biggest thing with the cloud in CM that turned me off is it only allows you to add components to your projects that have come from their server.  So there's no such thing as a local library of components.  When you create a component, you have to upload it to the community for anyone to use before you can even drop it on a schematic.

For me this is a complete debacle of a situation and has lead to the community being proliferated with useless, untested parts created by people who don't really know what they're doing.  I'm a big fan of OS, but there's no way I want to put out a symbol/footprint for a component before I've been able to build the prototype and know it's correct.

CS is basically the same software but has the same local storage (or use your own SVN) and library management as Altium Designer, which I personally like.

[Ahrenp]

Thanks for the info, I was not aware of the restrictions on library components. I've downloaded both CircuitMaker and a trial version CircuitStudio and played around with them both a bit. One interesting difference I found is that CS does not seem to support net classes while CM does, which isn't a huge deal but it seems like a strange omission.

Do you have any experience with the Altium vault? I have been able to find parts in it but it was a less than ideal experience as several components would show up during a search with 20 columns of unreadable information. I haven't found a way to permanently filter the columns to make it easier to find what I'm looking for.

I've created a few test components and do find the local library management in CS to be quite good.