There does seem to be a lot of activity going on, but most of projects are garbage and aren’t useful, because people don’t finish them, or don’t document them. The projects become available on the CircuitMaker website, and collaboration in a team is easier. The heavy cloud integration, however, does make it more simple to share, contribute and fork open-source projects. CircuitMaker is also noticeably slower than any PCB design software I have ever used.

The library management is awkward, and is also forcing you to use cloud based stuff. One must explicitly export projects for offline storage. It is heavily dependent on the cloud infrastructure, and all projects and files are stored in the cloud. It allows to have 2 private (sandbox) projects, all other projects are forced to be public. CircuitMakerĬircuitMaker is targeted towards makers and there is also a community around it. These two seemed like the best candidates at the time. They also started to offer CircuitMaker, which is a free cloud based version. I was browsing for the alternatives, and found out that Altium started to offer CircuitStudio, which is basically much lighter version of Altium Designer, and costs couple of hundreds of dollars. I didn’t want to use these, and certainly was not going to pay for unlimited version of Eagle given how outdated it was. When compared to Altium it feels like 90s, especially KiCAD. I have used Eagle before, and have briefly looked at KiCAD. About 2-3 years ago I started a new hunt for it. However, I needed to have a PCB design software for my products and projects. Also, clients usually provide a license seat for me anyways. So, I can’t justify paying several thousands of dollars per year, unless I would be involved in a year or longer hardware design only project. I’m not a full-time hardware designer consultant, and do both hardware and software.

At times when I have to do a circuit or PCB design in my professional work I mostly use Altium Designer.

Circuit studio altium