What are some professional alternatives to KiCad? I've seen Altium (which already appears leagues ahead of KiCad, but the license fee is really high...) but none others.
I think the other two big expensive pro ones are Mentor Expedition and Cadence Allegro. There's also NI Ultiboard.
I haven't used any of them though. I don't think you need them unless you're doing really pro stuff (e.g. a PCIe card or motherboard) or RF design.
On the free side they mostly suck. KiCad is powerful but has AWFUL usability. Don't bother unless you're willing to fight the software and spend hours on tutorials for things that should be trivial. Think early Blender but worse.
The other free options are:
* Eagle: Terrible. Do not bother. No idea why anyone uses this. Doesn't even get copy and paste right.
* gEDA: Awful. Do not use.
* DesignSpark PCB. This is very Windows 95 and a bit odd in some ways, but it's probably the easiest to use software and it's not limited like some free software (frequently there are board size or component count limits). Very decent option. If you're new to PCB design and use Windows I think I would maybe recommend this. Either this or...
* Horizon EDA: A new option that uses the KiCad routing engine but is way more usable. I would say this is the best free option at the moment, and it's open source. Except maybe LibrePCB because...
* LibrePCB: I haven't actually gotten around to trying this yet so I have no idea. May be good, may be awful.
gEDA was quite good when it was active. In the last few years the ringdove eda project is actively maintaining and improving pcb, while the lepton eda project is actively maintaining and improving the rest. They're quite good.
> What are some professional alternatives to KiCad? I've seen Altium (which already appears leagues ahead of KiCad, but the license fee is really high...) but none others.
Kicad is on a good track to become as capable as Altium, if we judge over the last 3-4 years of the progress. I made it a habit to give them money annually via the Donate button on their front page: https://www.kicad.org.
At least for many common use cases that is absolutely true.
IMO other tools mostly excel at special tasks. Be it having a good component library, or less rocky integration with external tools, for example for FPGA/ASIC configuration or layout, so the stuff that is heavily driven by commercial interest in increasing an engineer's speed or lowering defect rate.
(Disclaimer: Haven't been doing electronics for two years, though, as I switched to Software.)
I'm a generalist with a degree in computer science and physics, experience in science (a little), software and electronics engineering, and a lot more non-technical stuff. While I'm certainly a lousy software engineer, it's more than enough to get hired in and around Munich.
Technically it's embedded, but the products are sufficiently complex that my day-to-day work involves everything from the usual embedded stuff (hardware set-up, FPGAs), managing devices, web development (Most devices have a reasonably modern SPA web interface using different frameworks) and signal processing. A lot of the work needs to scale from small embedded SoCs to bigger "appliances" and further. I'm pushing very much for modern techniques, such as shipping virtual units as containers for evaluation or development against our device APIs, which our customers quite like. While a lot of it is in C and C++, I'm generally also pushing for newer languages, for example a lot of the tooling I build is nowadays in Rust.
(If you're interested, feel free to have a look at the careers page. If you plan to switch and are a good fit otherwise, I'm certain that could be accommodated. In case you choose to apply, drop a note that you have a recommendation from an employee, it should speed things up. We are definitely looking for many new engineers as we're growing quickly. ;) )
I'm in a similar position (EE doing embedded programming with experience in Python C and C++ and a bunch of other stuff) and also thinking about switching to higher level stuff (web-apps, business apps, whatever). Also in Europe.
My motivation: the higher level stuff seems easier with up to twice higher hourly rates, but most importantly: it seems way easier to get fully remote jobs in the higher level programming areas. I would even take a pay-cut in exchange for fully remote: it's my nr 1 motivator to switch to something else.
What's your motivation if I may ask? Just curious.
>What's your motivation if I may ask? Just curious.
Same. Mostly the possibility of WFH which is absent if you ever need to touch lower level HW. Pay I can take it or leave it.
> the higher level stuff seems easier
It's not really easier though. I had a 3 month stint doing some backend contract work and the amount of framework fuckery and the speed of development on live web systems that customers use, can be crazy stressful compared to embedded.
It's like changing the components of a car, while driving it. Shit breaks much more often. Embedded felt much less stressful since any of my commits to production didn't instantly impact thousands of customers at once like on the web, with the risk of fucking their data or experience.
There's probably no single field where you will find more solutions to the same problem, maybe except for text editors? Common ones would be Mentor Xpedition, PADS, Cadence or OrCAD, though. Another irritatingly common one is Eagle, but last I used it it was quite a bit worse than KiCad.
However, this is a small subset of the actual list. Chances are, there's many companies working with proprietary PCB designers that were discontinued 20 years ago or just maintained for a few companies.
Eagle was popular because you could get it for free as a hobbyist. That suckered me in years ago, convinced my employer to pay for the license, and then they got acquired by Autodesk literally 2 weeks later and refused to honor the license we had just bought, so I had to guard my installer binary with my life.
And then we ourselves got acquired by a company that could afford Altium.
Last I used KiCad for much (ca 2018), I found the workflow to be kind of clunky so I never expended much effort to get really good with it. For instance, their footprint assignment scheme caused so many errors because you couldn't, at that time, assign footprints to a given part in the component editor. Thus, you could spend a lot of time getting the footprint just so, then not notice you fat fingered the footprint assignment unless you did the old trick of printing out your solder mask and hand populating your board.
But whatever KiCad's current flaws, its not Fritzing, so that helps.
I used Eagle in my first few years of hobby PCB design. It was fine, worked well. I really jumped on KiCad after development started to pick up and Mac support became really reliable. The workflow for managing schematic symbols and component footprints has _massively_ improved. It's definitely more usable. I think shortly after I started using KiCad, Eagle was acquired and that really soured me to it. Autodesk's products are fine, but I don't really care for their business practices. Your noting they were unwilling to honor a license brought prior to purchase is more kindling for that fire.
Eagle's poor copy and paste when I had to use it at university was a real shocker. So much work for such a common task. And it was so easy to get it wrong.
Sadly, it's not like KiCad excels there either. At least to my knowledge it's not possible to replicate a routed part of your module like it's already possible to reuse schematics sheets, is it?
It's kind of a miracle that the output files from all the solutions are standardized and work across the industry to automate production and you can get a PCB made for $1. In the mechanical CAD/manufacturing world there is a LOT of manual work and discussion required. There are now automated quoting services, but they just put the onus on the user to upload files and manually input details into a proprietary system.
I'm not an expert for mechanics, but isn't what you discuss for mechanics usually tolerances or properties that are not directly involved in the outline of a part, such as materials used or roughness?
This stuff you still need to discuss. It's just that the basics are often enough. But, in my experience, if you want less than 0.3 mm tolerance on your PCB outline or a component needs a certain soldering cycle or method, you better tell your PCB manufacturer and you better do it on the phone, they may or may not look at the drawings. Once we only accidentally discovered that an isolator in a medical device was soldered using a temperature profile that exceeded its maximum temperature and thus the isolation was no longer guaranteed by the manufacturer.
Yes, tolerances and other things need to be discussed. STEP files can technically convey most of these things, but in practice most MCAD software cannot output these details to STEP files, and most machine shops won't check these details anyway. Both parties tend to revert to 2D PDF drawings to agree on details, and more importantly figure out whose fault it is in case of a mistake in production.
ECAD is way more standardized than MCAD for information sharing and version control, and at least has industry standard best practices. MCAD is still a wild west, with mostly proprietary tools used for version control (several thousand dollars per user per year) with no hope of interoperability. And each vendor that offers automated quoting uses a proprietary system, with a lot of manual inputs.
Granted, mechanical parts can be much more complex and it's easy to make unmanufacturable parts in MCAD, whereas ECAD is basically a stack of 2D layers. But still, as a mechanical engineer I am amazed at how easy it is to order a PCB or even an assembled PCB compared to ordering the simplest machined part.
All of that will probably be solved when an AI is released that generates code-based mechanical CAD models (supporting tolerance annotations per mechanical feature) based on text/voice input.
