It’s time to prepare our PCB design for a 100% migration from Eagle to KiCad. This isn’t meant as provocation, but rather a lighthearted suggestion. ^ _ ^
Effective June 7, 2026 , Autodesk will no longer sell nor support EAGLE. New and active Fusion 360 and Fusion 360 with EAGLE Premium subscriptions will continue to give you access to Fusion 360 electronics as well as EAGLE Premium functionality until EAGLE is no longer supported in June 2026.
Fusion 360 with EAGLE Standard subscriptions will no longer renew after June 7, 2024 . It’s recommended to subscribe to Fusion 360 for access to the electronics workspace.
June 7th, 2023: Fusion 360 (EAGLE Premium as an entitlement) will continue to be available
June 7th, 2024: Fusion 360 with EAGLE Standard will no longer be available for renewal
June 7th, 2026: EAGLE will no longer be available nor supported. EAGLE will no longer be able to be downloaded & installed through your Autodesk account. The licensing for EAGLE will no longer be active
Autodesk bought eagle in 2017, and in 2021 they offered 3.9 Billion to take over altium https://duckduckgo.com/?q=autodesk+altium+bid&ia=web Anyone with more then two braincells would have some inkling of what they thought of that Eagle thing they had bought a few years earlier. It either did not meet expectations, or they only bought it for access to the eagle users in the first place.
(Warning: KiCad rant)
When I permanently switched to a Linux desktop back in 2012 or 2014 or so I was in need of an EDA suite that worked on that platform, did a few reviews, and even back then eagle lost it from KiCad. First, I could not get along with some of eagles features (I could not even type in a value for a resistor, I could only get it from a database / list and one of the first resistors I tried was a 0.2Ohm shunt resistor (quite regular “cement” resistor value) and it was not in eagle. Another reason for me personal was that eagle appeared to have hardly any improvements for already a bunch of years. Back then KiCad was quite rough. It had serious bugs (library management did not work at all, you had to hack into text files) but the things that did work were simple and straight forward, and KiCad was being actively developed, so I expected improvements over time. Then I used the “Getting started in KiCad” tutorial (KiCad V3?) which was excellent back then, and made my first demo PCB in about an afternoon. After that I liked KiCad so much already that I did not even finish reviews of two or three other EDA suites I had on my list. And now 10 years later, KiCad has matured a lot and is more then adequate for the sort of PCB’s I am interested in.
(Warning: Autodesk rant)
I don’t like that autodesk company much. They don’t care about their users, they only care about making money, and that they do that with software is merely a coincidence. I never fell for the fusion360 trap. They gave it away “for free”, a lot of people fell for it, started using it, and a few years later when it started working properly they took out a lot of the features that made it attractive, as a big “thank you” to all their early adopters and beta testers.
When I read that autodesk was taking over eagle back in 2017, It provoked a little smile, as I was convinced it would be a boost for KiCad, which had matured enough back then for most “mainstream” users and hobbyists. This recent thread on this forum: KiCad growth based on created Github projects is a measure for KiCad’s popularity growth over the last 12 years, and it’s quite amazing. I would have expected a more clear sign of the 2017 takeover of eagle though. Such as that 2020 growth spurt, but it is a bit late to be related to that takeover.
This is exactly why I refuse to use any sort of subscription software. Not only do you have to keep paying someone else to have access to your own work product, but if they drop support you lose it forever.
Was it, in these forums? I wasn’t aware of it. I just searched the forum for “Autodesk” and “Eagle” and neither turned up a discussion of Autodesk terminating support for Eagle.
Of course, since I abandoned Eagle when it went to the subscription model in v8, I really haven’t been tracking its developments.
