Altium vs KiCad

Software
41

@supton

I don’t know if Altium is trying to compete with KiCAD, but I don’t think it is. IMO they are aiming for big companies who can scoff at the bill. Altium wants to play with the big players on the cloud.

I remember that not too long ago, Altium dedicated one of the pages on their web site to half-truths about KiCAD. They claimed that KiCAD was “free software,” obfuscating the distinction between free and open-source. (Free is when a guy distributes an executable, not necessarily with the source code, and tells the world, “Here, take this and have fun,” with some disclaimers about merchantability and/or suitability. Open source must be just that; also open source software is trademarked and can enforce rigorous quality standards.) Then, the Altium site claimed that development of free software is left to the whim of the developers, who will develop/fix code if they have time. (Back then, KiCAD was under CERN, mind you.) A look at the nightly builds can easily disprove that claim, obfuscation of open-source not withstanding, as it could back then. More recently, I vaguely remember seeing an ad by Altium, referring to KiCAD, saying, “The clown just came to town” or something to that effect.

Agreed on the buggy code, that has always been a problem. On the flip side, as I look at your plugins, as a non-programmer I’m finding myself overwhelmed by trying to learn git and all the overhead there. Well done or not, Altium attempts to integrate these features.

So does KiCAD, too! KiCAD has a plugins administration page, which you can select from the initial startup menu. KiCADstepUP can be installed from the FreeCAD plugin manager. This week I installed on a Linux box at work the newest version of KiCAD via flatpak. I think that now the RF tools can also be installed through the KiCAD plugin manager.

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42

I’m not running ERC ever so I will not put issue about it.
Reading KiCad forum since 2017 I think that important what is missing in ERC is understanding that power goes through fuses, PTCs, chokes, trafo coils, ferryte beads, and small value resistors.
I think it can be done by adding to symbol definition a flag telling ERC that if power comes to any of its passive pins than it is also present at all other passive pins or more complicated (because of trafos) by defining pin sets that are connected from power point of view.
I am powering all ICs through ferryte beads. I have pi-filter after each DCDC. In some cases I have 1 ohm resistor at supply output to ensure stability.
I imagine my schematic being full of POWER_FLAGs if I were running ERC.

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43

As a workaround… I use a userlayer for this. This was done in 5.1v for a 40kW inverter and this card set above another card (IMS) so those areas were either SiCFET or the flyback transformers

2025-01-01_00-01-1735692076
2025-01-01_00-01-1735692076971×676 39.8 KB

The DRC rules are great in Kicad, soo much better than the approach that Mentor Xpedition does it but this concept doesn’t exist. For it to work each footprint would need a height field (which also would mean a crude cuboid could be generated, like Xpedition). Once height information is available I can easily see a feature required such that “componentHeight < Foo” rule exists.

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44

I will defer to you on that one–I don’t pay attention to much of the back and forth, I prefer to be in the lab. :slight_smile: Maybe they did try to compete with KiCAD and I’m just wrong. I just look at all of what they are trying to do, and thinking about how most don’t need that, they just need a basic layout tool–not everyone is designing iPhones. Their recent acquisition by Renesas may (or may not) change their direction.

Given their recent change to licensing many have labeled the clown a different way. I know I’m not impressed. Many on the Altium forum have been rather unimpressed by that one.

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45

I’ve done a lot of IS in Altium too and sort of had the same assumption. Then I had a gig porting Altium and OrCAD designs to KiCad, and decided to shoot for minimal delta and maximal usability going forward. That meant I got to know the DRC rules engine really well. This is a feature I’d mostly overlooked and I was stunned to find it’s really powerful. These weren’t IS designs, but they did have a lot of weird and wonderful layout rules (honestly, they were so weird I suspect many of them were bugs or just accumulated junk in Altium/OrCAD and not deliberate designer decisions), but I was able to use KiCAD’s rules engine to mimic them all.

I did have to get a bit creative to capture the per-layer behaviour of some of the fancier pads, using multiple pads where KiCAD doesn’t allow per-layer distinctions (by the way, I like that KiCAD doesn’t bring this sort of complexity to the surface). But other than that, it was a pretty impressive (if rather unorthodox!) demonstration of its capability. Plus, being text-based, it’s easy to version, diff, comment and manage complexity. Of course, some prefer graphical tools and they bring some benefits, but IME they’re generally short-lived and come back to bite.

46

There are very real distinctions between interior and surface layers for breakdown voltage and current rating

47

Yes. Yes there are.

I may have misled you if you’re thinking this is the “weirdness” that KiCad couldn’t capture without some creativity. It’s a public repo, so you can read all about it if you like. One example is here:

https://github.com/blues/note-hardware/blob/master/Notecarrier-F/v1.3/KiCad_format/documentation/Porting-Notes.md

Use the following as a search term to get a taste, but there’s lots of detail there if you want to dive further, and I’ve left dispassionate notes. Suffice to say I’m not talking about an inability to design for important electrical phenomena. That may still be the case, but I didn’t come across it.

leaving small invisible pads around the inners layers of PTHs

48

OK, I shall open a thread when it’s not a hangover day and see whether there are features or techniques I was unaware of. I am on v7, not v8 so maybe that’s a difference, but when I looked at the v8 new features it didn’t seem to address any of the things that interested me.

I don’t want to drag this particular thread into a in-depth investigation of DRC. :slightly_smiling_face:

49

First of al price. Altium has a VERY advanced price. As in too high.
I have worked with Altium in about 2019 and I advised my employer not to continue to pay for it.
Altium kept adding features and changing the user interface so that the documentation was always behind or wrong.

KiCad documentation may also be behind or wrong but you are not paying for this punishment.

Altium has some features for managing complex bills of materials which I was on the edge of learning which may have been some help for the case where I had one printed circuit board with which we wanted to build two different assemblies. But it is fiendish to learn.

Regarding, “What more can you do in it and what designs can you do there that the can’t in KiCad?”
Short answer, nothing. People were designing challenging RF systems with drafting boards and masking tape before computers. There is no magic in either.

Your better question should be, How do I efficiently learn either Altium or KiCad? You have to find tutorials that are written to the level you are at now.

If you are a beginner with electronics you also need to learn the electrical engineering skill set too. Schematic capture and PCB design is only a subset.

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50

For KiCad I recommend the following:

The four best KiCad tutorials I have found to date 20241202.

First:

For a mostly complete overview of a very simple Schematic, PCB (and the symbol and footprint editors), start here:
Robert Feranec What is KiCad about? Starting with KiCad … https://youtu.be/maaBkw7IRUc

This tutorial is for an older version, 5, but still very very good to start.

Second:

For Version 7.0 here is a well done but much longer tutorial of a complete schematic and an abbreviated PCB project for an ESP32 project.

made by morten KiCad 7 ESP32 PCB Design Full Tutorial

Note: I found that I could listen to this video at 2X speed with good intelligibility.

The following two are part of longer series and will each teach you things the other does not (Or else I may not have watched the full series on either)

Third:

This is the older version 5 but for Hierarchical schematics the best I found.

John’s Basement on KiCad 5 #17 Hierarchical Labels & Pins https://youtu.be/m_HTBurAJn4

This tutorial on Hierarchical (multi page) schematics which (multi page) are very essential for complex is about version 5 KiCad but still works.

Fourth:

Much more elaborate project(s)

KiCad 6 STM32 PCB Design Full Tutorial - Phil’s Lab #65 https://youtu.be/aVUqaB0IMh4

Phil’s schematics and PCB are attractive and electrically well thought out.

Here is the “BananaSchplit” a useful design:

Design Review

To understand that there are many more requirements to keep in mind on a schematic and PCB design, I encourage you to read this design review guide.

While it is written by people using a similar professional software, Altium, the requirements it identifies are VERY much the same because they are requirements for a good schematic and PCB which is largely not specific to the software in which you do the design. I am going to guess this will introduce you to a lot of requirements which are all worth while learning.

Fabricator Requirements

If you will be fabricating PCB and assemblies from, for example, JLCPCB you need to read and understand the fabricator’s requirements.

See: PCB Manufacturing & Assembly Capabilities - JLCPCB

Getting Help

Finally, help us help you. When asking for help DO NOT make us guess.

Share the exact file with the problem. Share your entire project or a simplified version which reproduces the exact problem(s) you have.

Hope this helps.

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51

I think you should post this in a separate thread to help beginners

52

Regarding, [quote=“Piotr, post:42, topic:57136”]
schematic being full of POWER_FLAGs
[/quote]

Yes and that is a good thing as you are following practices for the needed case.

53

Do the commercial packages have an open and robust user community with developer engagement comparable to this?

54

The FAQ is wiki style and editable by members with sufficient permissions.

55

There are a number of active people on the Altium users forum. I don’t check to see how much traffic there is, I have my settings to get a notification for every new thread, and then only to threads I’m subscribed–rarely do I go in and just see what has been posted. Rough guess, this site has more traffic, based on nothing more than gut feel. I think it’s a handful of new threads on Altium each business day.

Altium has been ramping up monitoring of the threads… but that does infer that there was a time that they weren’t. Which they were not, we had to file bug reports or file cases. I think (speculation) that it’s more like CS reps responding, as opposed to developers. If they are looking, they are not not commenting, preferring to stay out of the fray.

I cannot comment on the other tools, although one of the discussions had one member indicating that the Altium forum was rather active by comparison. Take that for what it may be. [I’m referring to the forum on Altium’s website, not any independent website, such as EEVBlog or the like.]

56

I’m subscribed to the Altium forum and get many emails every day. There is some involvement of Altium staff, but it is minimal (mainly customer service/support/helpdesk). Many of the posts are from frustrated users. Many users of Altium are switching over to KiCad. There have been many posts recently complaining about the subscription and the ending of the perpetual licences for those whose subscriptions end. There are occasional posts from users helping each other as on this forum. I have not seen any direct posts from anyone who identifies themselves as a developer on the Altium forum.

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57

From the latest news it was announced that Altium was bought by a Japanese company, this is from the category of let’s wrap it up IMHO) The second interesting news in my opinion is not exactly about Altium, but good Linux is that Siemens Xpedition Enterprise 2409 Windows/Linux (mentor) has appeared, this is a worthy alternative, I haven’t tried it myself yet)

58

Regarding, “Do the commercial packages have an open and robust user community with developer engagement comparable to this?”

Perhaps there was some user community(s). It was very early 2020 the last I used Altium. I learned most from youtube by Robert Ferenic about how to use Altium. He also wrote the very best beginner introduction to KiCad I ever found in about 2021.
I remember really resenting that Altium cost so much and then they wanted to sell you instructional material.
Regarding developer engagement, there may have been bug reporting and feature request systems but I was spending vast amounts of time trying to learn what was there.

I learned KiCad much faster BECAUSE of the familiarity I had with Altium. If it was the other way around I would have learned Altium faster.

Hope this helps someone.

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59

What are you using the models for? I’m curious as we had some heated discussions in our company if we should continue using those or use proper ones.
We have more and more designs where it is critical that model are detailed and properly dimensioned. Hence - we have mechanical designers that make these models for our own devices or we get them from manufacturers directly(most of them will provide you any type if you ask).

60

FUD is a favorite response by commercial companies to Open Source projects. It plays on corporate fears of not being able to shift risk to someone else.

Some years back I worked for a large international company (who shall remain nameless). We were doing a huge project using a commercial embedded Linux distro. At some point the box-checkers were lining up support contracts for all the software, because of course you HAD to have support contracts for everything. Then they got to the U-Boot boot loader. U-Boot isn’t maintained by any of the commercial software providers, which utterly freaked out the box-checkers.

First they went to the company providing the Linux distro and asked them for a support contract. They declined. The company offered them a huge multi-year contract, but they still said no because it wasn’t their software and they didn’t have the expertise to support it.

Then the box-checkers came to us in-house software engineers and said, “Since we can’t get a support contract of U-Boot, you can’t use it. Take it out.” We replied, “Are you kidding? That will extend the project deadline by six to 12 calendar months with two of us working on it full-time. And you still won’t have a support contract.” The box-checkers’ heads exploded. They couldn’t imagine not being able to waive a support contract under someone’s nose and demand stuff. Eventually they went away, while muttering about “But what will we do without a support contract?”

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