Does it make sense to learn Altium now that Kicad is so good?

[Roader]

Hi,

I am just getting started with Kicad, and wondering whther it worth learning Altium? Since Kicad is free, has lots of tutorials, and also a lot of new features, does it really make sense to learn Altium? What is it that Altium has which you find really interesting?

[c4757p]

Can you afford Altium? It's certainly more useful to you to put on a resume. As for your own private use...

My personal view on this is that KiCad is great for most small to medium-sized projects, especially if you're a hobbyist or beginner, but you do have to have some patience for slightly unpolished software. It spent a long time languishing before development finally started picking up again, and we have a lot of so-called technical debt to deal with. Some things are waaaaay nicer than they were - some way nicer than the "competition" as well (try to find any PCB router anywhere near this good for a similar price point. ) But then you go to the schematic side and things are still old and crusty - we're still digging our way out from under the old code.

If you have the patience to deal with what is really a fairly typical solution for FOSS, I say KiCad is absolutely perfect if you're a hobbyist, and useful if you want to learn how to design PCBs in general, but if you're looking for software skills directly transferable to a Real Job, maybe not so much, Altium will be of more use to you.

Source: I'm a KiCad developer.

[EEVblog]

KiCad isn't much use on your resume, if that's important to you.

[Roader]

Thanks for the replies 

[miguelvp]

If the school you go at also has Allegro by Cadence it will look good in combination with Altium and OrCad (also own by Cadence)

For what I've heard because I don't have either but seen Allegro been used at my previous jobs, Allegro is the choice for anything on the highest GHz range.

[AndyC_772]

Orcad PCB Designer is the exact same binary as Allegro, just feature restricted by a licence key. The old Orcad layout tool is dead.

It still puzzles me that Altium is the professional tool that gets all the discussion on the forum, while the Mentor and Cadence products are barely mentioned at all. It's especially odd given that Orcad is relatively affordable.

[miguelvp]

I guess I'll assume that Orcad got that way after being acquired by Cadence.

Back on the mid 90's Allegro was the only game in town.

Edit: But for very high speed designs, Allegro is still the best, Orcad is there to compete with Altium and the rest.

[AndyC_772]

Sure; I don't see it would have made any sense to continue developing a separate low-to-mid range layout tool when you can just prune down a high end one.

Orcad PCB designer comes in 'standard' and 'professional' editions. The 'professional' edition is comparable in price to Altium and PADS, while the 'standard' edition is considerably cheaper... certainly within the range of a serious hobbyist or small business, and it's what I've been using to make a living for the last few years. My local distributor occasionally tries to get me to upgrade, but I just don't need the extra features.

[EEVblog]

Sure; I don't see it would have made any sense to continue developing a separate low-to-mid range layout tool when you can just prune down a high end one.

Altium did!
BTW, how has Circuit Maker takeup gone? I haven't followed it for a long time now.

[miguelvp]

Altium wanted to compete with both Cadence and Mentor at the same time so they felt short both ways, focus on FPGAs or on Design if you want to break in either one, but not both.

[Karel]

So my suggestion, get a cracked copy, ...

Maybe not in yours, but in most western countries this is considered illegal.

[Karel]

What is it that Altium has which you find really interesting?

To be honest, very little. I have used it for a full year. My opinion, it's unstable and memory hungry.
The design files are closed/undocumented.  It also forces you to use windows.
Apart from that, it has a marketshare of only 10% so don't worry about your resume.

[EEVblog]

Apart from that, it has a marketshare of only 10% so don't worry about your resume.

At the average company PCB design level, Altium is quite dominate, way way more than 10%.
If I had to pick PCB package to have on your resume that was the most valuable in the industry, it would be Altium.

[EEVblog]

Altium wanted to compete with both Cadence and Mentor at the same time so they felt short both ways, focus on FPGAs or on Design if you want to break in either one, but not both.

It took them 15 years, almost the financial death of the company, and a change of leadership to finally realise that.

[miguelvp]

So what does Gary Smith has to say about it? if that is still relevant?

I don't have the coins to look into the current market but Cadence used to preside. Even if Ansoft was purchased by (Mentor I think)
But Mentor probably presides now on FPGAs.

When I went from embedded to full software before 2000 Cadence had the bigger market share at over 33% not sure where is at now.

[Karel]

At the average company PCB design level, Altium is quite dominate, way way more than 10%.

The only thing Altium is quite dominate in, is advertizing and giving people the impression that they are quite dominate.
Have a look here (scroll down to page 50):

http://www.altium.com/resources/investor-announcement/investor_presentation_august_2015.pdf

[miguelvp]

I don't see any figures against competitors, or is that what you mean?

[miguelvp]

Altium wanted to compete with both Cadence and Mentor at the same time so they felt short both ways, focus on FPGAs or on Design if you want to break in either one, but not both.

It took them 15 years, almost the financial death of the company, and a change of leadership to finally realise that.

Well, there is no way they could catch up with Cadence, so their best bet would have been agaisnt Mentor at the time.
I guess the ambivalence of the situation hurt them more. But they never had a chance against Cadence in the high end.

It was probably best for them to keep on growing steadily in the low-mid range.

[miguelvp]

Not real research, but according to the interwebs Synopsys was leading both Cadence and Mentor by 11% in 2010 with Mentor being ahead of Cadence by a little:
https://www.garysmitheda.com/2011/01/2011-complete-market-trends-executive-summary-eda-grows-again/

But no mention of Altium there.

Would love to know who is ahead nowadays.

[EEVblog]

With those market percentages be very careful what you are comparing.
Altium does PCB and practically nothing else.
The other biggies make most of their sales from IC and other high end tools, i.e. EDA instead of PCB.
So those market share numbers are based on company revenues, not actual PCB seats.
You essentially can't compare the EDA and the PCB only markets.

If you look at the actual real world design engineering level PCB tool market (that is difficult to get numbers on) you'll find that Altium is one of the dominate players, if not the dominate player. Hence it's value on the resume of a design engineer.

[Karel]

With those market percentages be very careful what you are comparing.
Altium does PCB and practically nothing else.
The other biggies make most of their sales from IC and other high end tools, i.e. EDA instead of PCB.
So those market share numbers are based on company revenues, not actual PCB seats.
You essentially can't compare the EDA and the PCB only markets.

The document I referred to talks about PCB Design Software marketshare.

[miguelvp]

With those market percentages be very careful what you are comparing.
Altium does PCB and practically nothing else.
The other biggies make most of their sales from IC and other high end tools, i.e. EDA instead of PCB.
So those market share numbers are based on company revenues, not actual PCB seats.
You essentially can't compare the EDA and the PCB only markets.

The document I referred to talks about PCB Design Software marketshare.

No, he is right, it's EDA in general, the PCB study itself is $1K so the only thing we know it's that it grew over 6% in that year for all players.

No details are given on that synopsis and I'm not about to spend a large one to find out.

[miguelvp]

No figures on who is on top in this summary but it shows Cadence, Mentor and Zuken as the tools for power users and the last two as for the upper mainstream users for PCB design.

Altium is around the lower mainstream users with Orcad

https://www.garysmitheda.com/2009/01/mentor-buys-valor/

Of course the people that bought the data, can't disseminate it or they'll get into trouble. Unless it was a magazine and they did publish it. But it's hard to find real numbers on who is on top,

But since Valor represented 46% of the PCB market share, I will say: Mentor > Cadence > Zuken/Altium
Edit: NI is there too, but probably in the low noise.
PCB market share is just 10% of the total EDA figures, and the PCB market is really not that big anyways. Just $75.5 Million in 2008, the big money is in IC design and the fastest growing seems to be ESL (Electronic System Level) design.

Of course, kicad is nowhere to be seeing regardless of CERN interest on it.

Edit: Just to note, this is according the market share research of that one site. So there is a possibility that they are full of crap.

[miguelvp]

I will venture to say that Orcad is a good thing to know since that covers the lower mainstream users and prepares you to the power user sphere.

But also look into what Mentor has to offer via Valor since it has a huge chunk of the market share and also what Zuken has to offer as well.

I guess the only way to know is to look at the job ads and search what is more in demand, it might be Altium after all.
The companies that have the largest market share might not hire as much.

[mikeselectricstuff]

KiCad isn't much use on your resume, if that's important to you.

Though any significant amount of PCB design experience will be - PCB layout skills & experience is about much more than knowing a particular package.

[tggzzz]

KiCad isn't much use on your resume, if that's important to you.

Though any significant amount of PCB design experience will be - PCB layout skills & experience is about much more than knowing a particular package.

Very true - of most aspects of engineering.

Knowledge of which button to press has a half life of about 5 years. Knowledge of what you need to achieve when you press buttons lasts a career.

[Karel]

Some EDA companies don’t like to give up their numbers at all.  They know the game, and they don’t want to play - or they have only one product, so they can’t play the revenue shell game with their competitors.  In those cases, the analysts make an educated guess based on publicly available information.  Sometimes, that educated guess is wrong.

In the case of Zuken, that is exactly what happened.  For a long period of time, analysts were ranking them #3 in the PCB market based on an educated guess of revenue partitioning from perpetual licenses, term licenses, support, and services.  Zuken saw their own numbers, smelled something rotten, made an appeal, and won.  Just like that - they jumped to #2 in PCB.  This obviously was not a welcome development for Cadence, who then fell to #3.  It was also not the best of news for Mentor Graphics, who suddenly had a smaller #1 number than before the “adjustment”.

http://www.eejournal.com/archives/articles/20110517_board/

[EEVblog]

KiCad isn't much use on your resume, if that's important to you.

Though any significant amount of PCB design experience will be - PCB layout skills & experience is about much more than knowing a particular package.

Yes, of course. But a lot of HR and recruitment droids don't know that.
Heck, even a lot of hiring engineering managers don't know that.
Have the wrong package on your resume and you may not even get your foot through the door.

[EEVblog]

Which PCB package experience the industry demand also depends highly upon what country you are in.
In Australia it's almost 100% Altium. Same for China (although no one there buys it).
US, I'm less sure, but Altium has a big presence.
In the OP's India, I have no idea at all.

[EEVblog]

From a 2014 investor presentation:
http://www.altium.com.au/resources/investor-announcement/introducing-altium-goldman-sachs-conference-20-may-2015.pdf


Again, it's based on Revenue, not number of seats and popularity.

[miguelvp]

Let's say that 2008 6.9% PCB market share is low and give 10% growth of the industry, that $75.5M market in 2014 should be around $133.75M, let's be generous and round it up to a cool $150M market.

Altium at 10% will mean they made $15M revenue on PCB and their reported revenue in 2014 was USD $70M (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altium), so does that mean they make $55M on their FPGA effort?

If that is the case, I guess it wasn't a bad move after all.

Then again, since 2008 a lot has happened so the market might have exploded lately.

Good business for at least Gary Smith selling the figures back to the Vendors

Btw in the US Cadence had a strong presence in US Universities specially on high end research, because of their other analysis tools that plug into Allegro. (Thermal, Structural, etc)
So probably mostly use for Research and Development and probably Military as well.
I think Mentor has a stronger presence in Automotive, but that's a guess. But seems they do have a big workforce in India, so it might be prevalent in there as well.

But as for total revenue of companies that do PCB software, it seems Cadence is still on top:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadence_Design_Systems
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mentor_Graphics

Synopsys is bigger yet, but they don't do PCBs
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synopsys

[EEVblog]

Let's say that 2008 6.9% PCB market share is low and give 10% growth of the industry, that $75.5M market in 2014 should be around $133.75M, let's be generous and round it up to a cool $150M market.
Altium at 10% will mean they made $15M revenue on PCB and their reported revenue in 2014 was USD $70M (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altium), so does that mean they make $55M on their FPGA effort?

Altium do not sell FPGA tools. They sell PCB tools and Tasking compilers. PCB is >80% of their revenue.
Altium always knew that is they sold FPGA tools separately that no one would buy them, and their entire FPGA dream would come crashing down. So they bumbled FPGA with PCB. IN fact they made PCB "optional extra" at one point!
Your numbers are way off.

[miguelvp]

Not my numbers, Wikipedia has Altium listed with $75.5M revenue in 2014 which by your slide is half of that at $37.5M
Then Gary Smith that prepared that other slide put altium at 10% meaning the market value for the whole industry in 2014 was $375M.
Gary Smith on that report I linked mentioned that the PCB market share increased by 6.9% back in 2010
https://www.garysmitheda.com/2011/01/2011-complete-market-trends-executive-summary-eda-grows-again/
and that the total PCB market share was $75.5M in 2008.
https://www.garysmitheda.com/2009/01/mentor-buys-valor/

That means in 6 years it has grown 496.69% or pretty much quintupled. Or a yearly growth rate of 30.62% which is way higher than the growth he reported in 2008.

Maybe it has grown that much at a way faster rate since 2010, or that Gary Smith doesn't have all the data needed to figure it out, but it's a living for him.

Oh well, statistics are usually pretty wrong, but might be useful indicators for the people making the decisions, or to keep the board happy.

[miguelvp]

Something doesn't add up on your slide:

Code: [Select]

Product Revenue                  2014    2013    Change
Altium Designer Licence         25,301  23,469      8%
Altium Designer Subscriptions   33,586  27,541     22%
TASKING Licences                 3,628   2,546     43%
TASKING Maintenance              3,273   2,824     16%
Other                            5,324   5,674     (6%)
Total Revenue                   71,112  62,054     15%
Source, page 4 2014 Annual Financial Report:
http://www.altium.com/resources/investor-announcement/pdf/altium-annualreport_2014.pdf
Edit: Report is in Thousands USD

[EEVblog]

Not my numbers, Wikipedia has Altium listed with $75.5M revenue in 2014 which by your slide is half of that at $37.5M
Then Gary Smith that prepared that other slide put altium at 10% meaning the market value for the whole industry in 2014 was $375M.

Maybe it's half yearly?
Altium did indeed make $76M in sales in 2014
http://www.altium.com/resources/investor-announcement/pdf/altium-annualreport_2014.pdf
I worked at Altium for 4 years, and the market figures were well known for being a big mess.
Altium is in a more solid market position in seats than that 10% would dictate.

And what's this X2 and Atina product stuff?
http://www.altium.com/resources/investor-announcement/altium_-_ubs_conference.pdf

[EEVblog]

Not my numbers, Wikipedia has Altium listed with $75.5M revenue in 2014 which by your slide is half of that at $37.5M

Here is a better chart:

http://www.altium.com/resources/investor-announcement/pdf/altium-limited-investor-presentation-aug-2014.pdf

[miguelvp]

Altium is in a more solid market position in seats than that 10% would dictate.

Not for the GHz aspect and that's where it's going, they better shape up.

And what's this X2 and Atina product stuff?
http://www.altium.com/resources/investor-announcement/altium_-_ubs_conference.pdf

Maybe that's where X2 and Atina fits

Interesting they do have a slide where it states the market share being at USD $700M, maybe it was more but around that. Where the analyst  Gary Smith was mentioning it was USD $75.5M  in 2008.

In any event, if you look at the annual reports for Mentor and Cadence, they do dominate the US and Europe, Zuken is established in Japan (maybe other parts of Asia), and apparently where the OP lives, Mentor is ahead.

So it pays to look at the job requirements for your particular country, but Kicad is way under the NI noise. In any event it doesn't really matter, it's just learning a new tool.

The problem with Kicad was that they use very strange terminology and I don't know if that did change, but with that base you'll struggle to use mainstream tools because terminology will confuse you.

[tggzzz]

KiCad isn't much use on your resume, if that's important to you.

Though any significant amount of PCB design experience will be - PCB layout skills & experience is about much more than knowing a particular package.

Yes, of course. But a lot of HR and recruitment droids don't know that.
Heck, even a lot of hiring engineering managers don't know that.
Have the wrong package on your resume and you may not even get your foot through the door.

True of many aspects of engineering, unfortunately.

The way around it is, unfortunately, to have a little experience in N-1 tools plus a lot of experience in 1. You can then either put all N on your CV or just the one that is relevant to a specific job. That should be sufficient to get you an interview, and that's the sole purpose of a CV. During the interview you can be completely honest with any technical people you bump into.

[nctnico]

Orcad PCB Designer is the exact same binary as Allegro, just feature restricted by a licence key. The old Orcad layout tool is dead.

It still puzzles me that Altium is the professional tool that gets all the discussion on the forum, while the Mentor and Cadence products are barely mentioned at all. It's especially odd given that Orcad is relatively affordable.

I agree. The price I got quoted to upgrade my ancient Orcad Capture/Layout to Allegro is extremely reasonable including a 2 day training for Allegro!
I have used Altium before but found it a very obfustigated piece of software to use. I even needed the manual to just start a new project! I never had that problem when I started to use Orcad Capture/Layout! I'm not quite sure whether Altium is really used a lot in the higher end market. Many example diagrams and libraries for parts I download are in Orcad formats.

[peter.mitchell]

So i think the question here has changed from "Does it make sense to learn Altium now that Kicad is so good?" to "Does it make sense to learn Kicad/Altium now that Orcad/Allegro is so cheap?"
To which i would say, probably not.

[peter.mitchell]

I can see in many big company's designs, they use Allegro/SPB. I do not see Altium often in huge designs by big companies.
On the other hand, Altium designs are usually seen in small to medium-large designs made by small companies or studios.

But this does not mean Altium is useless. IMHO, Altium is more ergonomic, and allows more abusing than the strict rules of some other packages, such as Eagle.
Probably I'm biased, because I've been using cracked Altium/Protel for over a decade since I was 12, and I spent ~$8k on its license just 1 year ago.

Don't get me wrong, i have an active altium sub - it's good enough for me to pay for it, but if i didn't have everything tied up in it i'd change in a heartbeat.

[nctnico]

Still I feel that I should look into Kicad's current state more closely before shelling out the cash for a commercial package. My biggest worry regarding Kicad is that the component management is not there. Orcad Capture CIS saves me a lot of recurring hassle with assigning footprints and offers creating a 100% correct bill-of-materials with one click. Ofcourse all this depends on an up-to-date component database which links footprints, symbols, part numbers and suppliers together but that is easy to do.

[free_electron]

X2 and Atina are high-end layout tools Altium is working on. During the last Roadshow they talked about it.

[easyw]

Hi,

I am just getting started with Kicad, and wondering whther it worth learning Altium? Since Kicad is free, has lots of tutorials, and also a lot of new features, does it really make sense to learn Altium? What is it that Altium has which you find really interesting?

kicad is improving a lot and many open source hw projects are moving to it
if you just have a look at:
http://greatscottgadgets.com/hackrf/
http://numato.cc/saturn-another-attempt-make-open-source-spartan-6-fpga-board-ddr-sdram/
http://inversepath.com/usbarmory
http://virtualsense.it/
some RF boards at
https://myriadrf.org/projects/
and you can find also a I would say 'more than quite complex' board at
https://olimex.wordpress.com/2015/11/20/a64-olinuxino-update-2/

so I consider kicad a very good tool also for production chain...
big latest improvements are differential pair routing and trace length matching, to do high speed pcbs, and moreover you can export your board and parts to MCAD using http://sourceforge.net/projects/kicadstepup/ for a better enclosure design

still there are some stuff to improve (e.g. RF support and eeschema for pin swapping and bom)
but there is a lot of work in progress...
probably we will see kicad becoming more popular day by day

[nctnico]

I'm not worried about be able to do complex designs in Kicad or any CAD package. The big question is: how much time does it take?!

[timofonic]

Any update about KiCad versus big ones?

I wonder what EDA users and developers would think of:


- Find an ethical and robust financing and workforce getting way: A foundation in Germany?
* Crowd funding for difficult /boring tasks.
(extremely massive source code makeover to C++14 or even a newer standard? Powerful autorouters library based on C-PCB?).
* Participate in stuff like Google Summer of Code, coding for women, coding for racial minorities or developing economies, etc.
- Make UI & UX better and more consistent.
* More powerful schematic tool. Easier to use, features, automated schematic - pcb (forward annotation?) link like in Eagle.
- Integrating symbols and footprints into project files, just like in Eagle and others (Altium Designer?).
- Features similar to OrCAD Capture CIS.
- Extreme improvement of scripting support.
- A lot better Gerber viewer plus add IPC1541 (I don't remember the name) support. CNC and pick & place support?
- Full MCAD integration with complete STEP support.
- collaborative capabilities line many other EDA software and easy to use for anyone: Is Git feasible? What about RTCE and some "teaching mode"?
- Full i18n website, centralize community forums and mailing lists with development team members knowing at least English and another language.
- Interperoperability with other software: Altium Designer, Cadence Allegro / OrCAD, Mentor stuff, NI stuff, Cadsoft Eagle...
- simulation integration, maybe by linking it to QUCS.

A question:
- Is WxWidgets still a viable option for the future? What about QT?
- would raise OpenGL usage to 4.3+ provide any benefits?
- What about using BGFX instead OpenGL?