what is the size of active KiCad userbase ?
No 
to quote another active forum member… and here he is:
How active is active? For example, I didn’t get any designs manufactured all of last year; life has precedence. But I follow KiCad’s progress, tinker with design, and modify schematics as ideas come to me.
Maybe you might want a more quantifiable metric like how many downloads from the KiCad repo were made of each release.
It is FOS; anyone can and does “have a go”. Youthful Lego (Arduino) electronics types inspired by whatever, Altium refugees, retired folk who just can’t kick the habit, etc. etc. etc.
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Is that recorded somewhere?
Web servers have the raw data but it may not be accessible in a usable form.
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I did some work on the number of KiCad projects posted each year to Github. You might be able to draw some inferences from that.
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Interesting, but, given the flight from Github, have you considered adding other sources. Has Gitlab picked up significant usage?
Flight from Github? First I’ve heard of it. Were they caught hosting Nazi repos full of white-supremacist nodejs snippets?
You could search other code repository hosts (Gitlab, Sourceforge, Bitbucket, Launchpad, …), but I’ll bet they don’t sum up to 10% of what Github has. Just not worth it, especially since the imprecision of my Github scan is probably greater than that. The important takeaway is the growth trend of KiCad projects over time. Adding other hosts shouldn’t affect that much.
Anecdotally, I suspect that the majority of KiCad users do not publish their work in public Git repositories, on GitLab or anywhere else. Not to discount the interesting stats that come from analyzing those repositories that do exist, but I don’t think it likely represents an accurate userbase estimation.
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Since a few years, I’m yearly asking the PCB manufactures to give us some numbers of the KiCad market-share. I just asked again:
https://twitter.com/Chaos_Robotic/status/1748707178637103583
To give a rough overview over the answers of the past:
- January 2023
- AISLER: 38-42%
- December 2021
- AISLER: >30%
- September 2020
- OSH Park: 25.5%
- AISLER: 23%
- December 2019
- AISLER: 15%
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I assumed that PCB manufacturers don’t cares what software was used to make gerbers they get so they simply don’t have such statistic. Do they have it? Why and what for (from their point of view)?
I think that no one downloads KiCad just to have it and not use. So it should be the better measure of number of users. At least I think so.
You’re wrong here. Such information is quite important marketing information for them. Aisler has a long (multiple years) running sponsoring campaign for KiCad. They even have a system in place that directly couples KiCad donations to orders for PCB’s. KiCad is also (and increasingly) being sponsored by other PCB manufacturers. If you look at: Corporate Sponsorship | KiCad EDA Then you see at least 5 PCB companies that are big sponsors. Very nice, but there is likely also a business part to the sponsoring. For example, if those companies measure an increase of orders for PCB’s made with KiCad, then they are more inclined to continue sponsorship, because it profits them too.
You are probably wrong here too. There different reasons for downloading KiCad.
- Just to look at a project found on github, gitlab, or other git repository (or web) site.
- Schools (students) which use it for a short while.
- People trying out KiCad, but don’t like it.
- Companies who download it just for evaluation.
Up to (and including) KiCad V5 there were quite a lot of people who evaluated KiCad, but concluded it was not good enough (yet) for their purposes. I am not entirely sure, but I think that from KiCad V6 and onwards more companies tend to stick with KiCad after an evaluation.
In 2017 there was a huge boost for KiCad, when eagle got bought by autodesk and they moved from a (free for small pcb’s) and paid / owned model to rental / subscription / web based). The hobbyists using the fee version were the quickest to leave. There was also a lot of resentment towards autodesk in general and their subscription model. You can read about this on the EEVBlog forum and on Hackaday. And now, the eagle has crashed. See: They Used To Be A Big Shot, Now Eagle Is No More | Hackaday
In the last two years the number of people (seriously considering) switching from altium to KiCad seem to be increasing, but I have no hard numbers.
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Similar switch happened with Mentors Expedition to Altium. Mentor didnt change the licence what was always time limited but imperminently increased the licence fees. They came up with incompatible formats in later versions for older designs when switching from its schematic editor to current DxDesigner. It may be a minority, but I know several fellows who did not switch from Expedition to Altium but from Expedition to Kicad (while old versions of Eagle and Expedition are still in parallel use for existing designs )
Some manufacturers have this information because they accept .kicad_pcb files directly.
KiCad also embeds this information into all gerber files it generates.
Here a header of a gerber file from a copper layer:
%TF.GenerationSoftware,KiCad,Pcbnew,8.0.0~rc1-ec3bf79c42~176~ubuntu20.04.1*%
%TF.CreationDate,2024-01-21T00:17:26+01:00*%
%TF.ProjectId,rollerblinds_stm32,726f6c6c-6572-4626-9c69-6e64735f7374,rev?%
%TF.SameCoordinates,Original%
%TF.FileFunction,Copper,L2,Bot*%
%TF.FilePolarity,Positive*%
%FSLAX46Y46*%
As far as I know this is a common practice and other EDA suites do this too.
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I know that gerber files can have information what program generated them. What I doubt is if PCB manufacturers take care of it and make any statistics from it.
They may have to, if their processing software has to take into account the source software for any workarounds required.
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Well one result of manufacturers paying attention is the appearance of plugins that make submitting a job just a few clicks.
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I sort of wonder how many corporate users we have. I expect to give a brief KiCad training to a small group at my employer during the next 3-4 weeks. We are looking to replace ExpressPCB for breadboards in my group. (We use something bigger for the “official” boards.)