Electronic CAD - Which is the best value?

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. 

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.

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.