Evaluating alternatives to Altium

[jmarkwolf]

I've been using Protel/Altium for 15 years for work and home, but will soon have no access to these tools any longer. The full Altium suite is way too expensive nowadays to buy for home use, so I am evaluating other packages.

I'm pleasantly surprised with how useable EASY-PC, DIPTRACE, and possibly Eagle are for the money, and am considering the purchase of Altium Schematic editor ($995) and one of these other tools just for the PCB editor.

I know I'll lose the easy forward and backward annotation and seamless integration between SCH and PCB going this route, but I'm more worried about ECO process such automatically updating the PCB reference designators correctly anytime the SCH reference designators are re-sequenced. This can be a big problem.

The last time I used a SCH editor and PCB editor from different makers was with OrCad and PADS2000 back in the old DOS days. It took a 3rd party utility to correctly reconnect the PCB nets anytime the SCH parts were resequenced.

Can anyone on the forum advise if I'm likely to experience such an issue nowadays, if I charge down this path?

 

[ZASto]

Best value for money: KiCAD **broken link removed** cross platform SCH/PCB tool and costs NOTHING.

 

[sky_123]

I used Altium DXP for only one design (but it was a fairly complex one), but for home use I went back to Eagle, not because I think it is totally amazing (it's not), but Eagle has one major benefit for me - it is really fast to work with, once you have had some experience with it. And the autorouter is pretty good, even if you only partially decide to use it.
I like the fact that I can create new symbols fairly quickly, and the fact that you can automate some stuff using the scripts,
e.g. to place lots of components in an arc or whatever.
I've heard good things about KiCAD but never used it.
I tried Easy PC many years ago, and it was lacking at the time. It is probably better now.
The package I really liked was the old Zuken CADstar but I can't imagine it is low cost.

 

[Mattylad]

The package I really liked was the old Zuken CADstar but I can't imagine it is low cost.

Its lower than you would imagine at the moment, however a lot depends upon the OP's requirements.
How many boards PA they do, what technologies are used and needed etc.