Mentor vs Altium

[Tinus]

Good day,

This is my first post in the forum, although I have been reading the posts for a while now.  I apologise if this question has been asked before but I could not find a post that answered my questions.

I recently joined a software company that is starting up a hardware development division.  They have a small hardware product currently which they developed using Mentor Graphics LS Pads.  Now, I have been tasked at looking for "the best tool for the job" to standardize on.  I've been using Altium for a couple of years and I would love to keep on using it, but to be fair I have to do the research.  I have to say, I personally don't like the Mentor tools, it feels like they over complicate the simplest of tasks and I feel that productivity is much higher with Altium, but that might just be because of my experience with Altium.

I've gotten some quotations and it will basically cost the same to update the current Mentor license to the latest version as it would to buy a new Altium license.  Now I would like to get some reasoned opinions from those of you that have used these tools?  Some Pros and Cons for both/either would be great.

Thank you
Tinus
- "Hallo" from South Africa

[McPete]

G'day Tinus,

I've been an Altium user for 3 years, but last week I got a job as a PCB designer. My new employer is an established defense contractor, who use Mentor.

So, on Wednesday, I got my first taste of Expedition... it is clunky compared to Altium, but MAN, it's crazy powerful. Maybe too powerful for simpler boards, but if you're doing RF work a lot (as we are), it just has all the integrated tools to handle RF and high speed work.

I've been plugging along on my own, asking my colleagues the odd question, and I think I'm getting the hang of it pretty quick! Training might be useful if you need to get up to speed quickly.

Honestly, if you need the capabilities, and can handle the expense of he license,  you'll love Mentor. Just give yourself a month.

Cheers,
Pete

[free_electron]

Hold it. There is no such thing as 'mentor'. Mentor has at least three layout tools
- dx designer
- expedition
- pads

Pads is old and crufty. It is not a mentor tool. They borged it just like cadence borged orcad , and let it whither away to push their higher end stuff.

Expedition and dx designer are more powerful than altium but they are difficult to learn and use as they target very complex designs that need that kind of ammo...

Altium is an all round tool with lots of advanced capabilities. Some really whacky shit like ddr5 routing where you need mathced impedance and length tuning and differential can be done in altium but it takes work. Such stuff works better with dx designer.  Combine dxdesigner with hyperlinx (another mentor tool) and now you have a router with built in field solver ! . But, you'll be out of pocket half a million dollar at this point.

See where we are headed ?
Wanna do extreme shit like folded flex boards for aerospace go Catia from Dassault
Wanna make boards for radars, MRI scanners , pc motherboards for thatest intel xeon cpu et al ? Go mentor cadence or zuken (expedition allegro , not pads or orcad)
Wanna do advanced boards without breaking the bank ? Go altium
Wanna make doublesided hobby stuff : eagle diptrace et al
Wanna tinker with the software itself go kicad , geda et al

Wanna use old deprecated overpriced stuff ? Go pads / orcad