Electronic CAD - Which is the best value?

On that list alone, you'd have to say Kicad surely!  I suppose if, say, Altium had a needed feature not present in KiCad with no work around, then Altium is the best value.  I'm probably biased in any case as I've only ever used KiCad which, frankly, has been perfect for my needs and seems to have a lot of advanced features I wouldn't use.  I'm always puzzled by the loyalty to Altium Circuit Studio given the consistent and continuing problems with zero support or updated versions.  Even the new software that replaces it seems to have been in Beta for over a year.

Incidentally, that's the price for a year : ) Unless one freezes their PC from updates (not practical), at some point the chances are high an upgrade would be needed. Maybe not an upgrade every year, but perhaps every two years might need to be budgeted.

For hobbyists the answer is clear (I think you knew the answer when you wrote the question : )

For businesses, the better options from all of these manufacturers are a different price, there are more enterprise-focussed products they offer. 

I think Eagle comes with Fusion 360 mechanical CAD, so that is part of their value proposition. The reason I started the discussion was I just noticed the price of OrCad seemed like a new value point for the Cadence offering. I have not used a recent version of KiCad so I can't evaluate it properly. The last time I used KiCad, it was too cumbersome and the productivity was too low for me to continue with it. I assume it is better now, but I don't know how much better. For me productivity is a crucial factor in the value equation. 

shabaz said:

For businesses, the better options from all of these manufacturers are a different price, there are more enterprise-focussed products they offer. 

Yes. Once your job is to design PCBs efficiently and maintain their product lifecycle, the Altiums of this world win. They also integrate into a versioning, archiving and document management solution that's enterprise scaled.

If you are talking about OrCad, it is a perpetual license. It is stable enough that you shouldn't need to upgrade until your computer operating system no longer supports your CAD version. I assume there are lots of different opinions on the subject. I was just wondering if these "low" cost versions of high end CAD systems were attractive to members for whatever their reasons might be, such as they use the big brother system at work. For example, in my case we use Cadence at work, but I am not motivated to use it at home, even at this price. I own an old version of Eagle at home and there are no fees associated with it, so there is no value in switching to KiCad just for the price. KiCad got a big infusion from CERN 10 years after I bought Eagle.

Hi Doug,

I agree, for productivity for hobbyists, there's nothing quite like old EAGLE, it feels very much optimised to get core things done very quickly. Certainly, it takes longer with KiCAD, since KiCAD is still missing some things like making changes to groups of items, which EAGLE is not bad at, and complex board shapes (not complex pads! they are a complete pain with old EAGLE) are quick natively with EAGLE too. I think all of the CAD packages listed would be slower for the core hobbyist tasks compared to EAGLE. However, you're on a zero-cost release, whereas others would have to spend $600 per year to experience that speed. From my perspective, I'm prepared to take the hit on productivity on some aspects, and still have a warm feeling I can accelerate in places with some custom code, and through use of the new features which old EAGLE doesn't have. I'm prepared to do that despite still being able to fall back on old EAGLE, but can totally understand that others might not if they too have old EAGLE.

If I didn't have old EAGLE, then the decision is in some ways easier between the two - I'd be very willing to take this productivity hit, because it's small compared to the very large cost per year for EAGLE. Fusion 360 doesn't factor in for me, so perhaps it is likely a different story for others who make use of that. I want to use FreeCAD, because I'm pretty sure it will meet my very minimal CAD needs. All this is hobbyist level - at work I don't use any CAD package (and when I did, I used software which isn't developed any longer, by Zuken).

Zuken used to be a pretty big name in CAD, although it is one of the few I never tried. If I didn't have Eagle, I would most likely be using KiCad, although for small projects I might try free versions of expensive packages.

There are many other low cost options.

I use and strongly recommend EasyPC from Number 1 systems.

It's cheap and above all simple. No good for ultra fast wiggly impedance and ns matched tracks but OK for most other stuff.

Another cheapo (and some versions free) one I've just heard of is DipTrace.

I'd be ultra cautious about a very low cost "introductory" type offer on an expensive system like Ordcad. I know people who seem happy with Orcad but for me it's way too complicated in ways that make the tool get between you and the job.

Don't  be misled by PCB systems that offer built in simulation LtSpice (from AD) or SuperSpice are free. I've never found the integration of a simulator with the pcb tool to be worth anything at all - because you almost never want to simulate the pcb but an aspect of it.

MK

michaelkellett said:

Don't  be misled by PCB systems that offer built in simulation LtSpice (from AD) or SuperSpice are free. I've never found the integration of a simulator with the pcb tool to be worth anything at all - because you almost never want to simulate the pcb but an aspect of it.

I've tried to use that too. There is an advantage, that you can reuse your schematic drawing expertise in the CAD tool to draw the design-to-be-simulated.
That said - I've never used it beyond trying it out. I use LTSpice for simulation (and need to get better at it).

Just to add to the simulation ideas, Multisim is pretty easy-to-use for simulation, it tries to show things during execution-time, i.e. allows the user to watch behavior as the simulation runs in short time-bursts that make it look real-time even though it isn't, rather than execute the entire simulation and then observe the recorded results after the simulation completes. It's pricey (typical of NI), but a low-cost way is if you have young family-members (doesn't need to be son/daughter from what I can tell, can be extended family, of school-going age) and then there is a discount. I used that to simulate large chunks of an SDR project I worked on a while back (even though it's not really designed for RF stuff).