At the moment KiCad still has a bunch of (pretty obvious) limitations that the USD 10,000 Altium does not have.
Some of the limitations are (still).
- No curved tracks (Really annoying for some boards).
- No integrated database (External bom scripts etc).
- Some things need workarounds (for example net-ties).
- Altium has apparently much better routing support.
I’m not able to predict KiCad’s future, but if KiCad can be at some time used as intermediate for several of the mayor EDA suites, then that can start a lot of people using it just for the intermediate file format.
Next step is of course that if people use KiCad to convert from a USD500 program to a USD2000 program, will get curious and start looking at their PCB from within KiCad itself, (First to verify conversions etc). and later, maybe scratch their head and ask themself why they would do the second half of the export…
On Eevblog I’ve read several posts of people not wanting to use KiCad because some feature they deem essential is still missing.
I’ve already read a lot of good things coming in KiCad V6, and have seen lots of significant changes over the years I’m using KiCad.
Gosh, the horrible bugs in Library management from KiCad V3…
Just today I made a project specific library and made some custom footprints in it, and it all worked quick and effortlessly. More about this design in: