Hi,
Just to let the community know - Altium Designer in the newest release introduced official KiCad Importer. It is nice to see KiCad alongside Mentor, Orcad or Zuken tools!
Cheers
Tomek
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Kind of fun coincidence, as KiCad team right now is implementing Altium importer 
But sure, seems KiCad is becoming an important player especially for hobbyists and small businesses.
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Do they know we are about to change the file formats?
Provided how much careful background research and fact-checking they must have been done for the certain article which mentioned KiCad, they must know all ins and outs of the KiCad project.
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Just to refer here
https://www.altium.com/documentation/altium-designer/kicad-import-ad
And the feature of Altium importer on KiCad
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KiCad can now export to Altium with the “native Altium KiCad importer” 
I see a future for KiCad in becoming the de facto file standard for exchanging projects between different EDA packages.
That sounds confusing… KiCad doesn’t export to Altium, Altium imports from KiCad and KiCad imports from Altium.
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Who cares where the function is if you have both programs?
The one who uses them, the user wants to find the function 
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Ownership of bugs, I don’t want to have to answer Altium users posting here about problems importing KiCad projects, eg when they come across a V5.99 project
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I want to apologize for the noise I made here.
My remark about the " native Altium KiCad importer” was not supposed to be taken too seriously, an I added some sunglasses later in an attempt to make that more clear.
That’s really not a bad ideal. Kicad could succeed where EDIF failed.
Kicad could do to all these commercial packages what Linux did to Solaris and HP-UX.
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No need to apologize. Your point is true anyways.
It’s interesting how there are many sides in the situation. The KiCad project wants to make things open, and of course also that people would use KiCad. Altium is closed and wants people to use Altium, not KiCad. By adding the Altium importer KiCad makes the world more open. By adding the KiCad importer Altium may take few users away from KiCad but at the same time makes the world more open, and makes learning and using KiCad an easier choice because it feels safer when the projects can be imported by a commercial application.
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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:
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It would be interesting to know which is the direction of the userbase flow between Altium and KiCad. As far as I can tell – I follow the bug database and the forum daily – KiCad’s Altium importer has drawn more attention of adventurous users than any other feature in v6 development.
A reason for this feature to generate a lot of trafick may be because it is featured on hackaday in a separate article:
So if you see a peak at or shortly after 2020-04-14 then this is very likely the reason.
Hackaday has been following KiCad for a long time.
A total of 
articles have been tagged with “kicad”
https://hackaday.com/tag/kicad/
This is hilarious.
The oldest article on Hackaday tagged with KiCad is:
https://hackaday.com/2011/03/10/thursday-give-kicad-a-try-heres-how/
And the KiCad version used is:
Also telling is this article about LibrePCB.
This article has 51 comments, and a search for “KiCad” also gets 51 occurrences in that article alone. Half (25) of the commenters are mentioning KiCad. Most are praising KiCad, others are writing about other EDA packages. LibrePCB is mentioned 28 times in the article, for most commenters it’s “I never heard of it but am willing to give it a try”.
I find it kinda sad that the (comparatively small) Open Source community is yet again inventing another wheel. From what I last read LibrePCB is only halfway functional and in the meantime the majority of troubles they had with KiCad (and caused them to start this new project) have been solved in KiCad.
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The real strength of open source tool development is that if you disagree with the projects decisions then you are free to go off and make your own tool and let the users decide who’s the better engineer.
I have used librePCB and while the tools are way behind kicad’s features, its library system runs circles around kicads.
LibrePCB has a true N-Level dewey decimal system. Kicad and gEDA both have a fixed 2-Level system. There is simply no comparision.
LibrePCB has a real library manager that works. How many kicad users are still using the same library that was downloaded when they installed. They are way out of date.
LibrePCB can create a NOR gate and fill it. Ever look inside of kicads libraries? It’s a hack.
LibrePCB can handle duplicate component names
Having competition is good and keeps kicad responsive to the users. Besides most people would rather be the captain of their own ship instead to of fourth to command someone elses.
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