I'm enjoying reading the comments. I felt rather sheepish when I made the entry of Fritizing. I felt it was a step back in terms of PCB capabilities from Eagle. I'm in the infancy stage of developing PCB's. When I discovered Eagle was unable to handle my board size in the demonstration software I decided to purchase a subscription. When I needed to change operating systems on my computer to license Eagle, I went in search of something that would work. Fritizing worked.
Before I retool and look at software I'm going to sit on the sidelines and listen to the commentary.
The question "Which PCB software do you use?" doesn't explain why it is being used or the level of experience involved or the long term application. What are the chances of overlaying the different products on a grid similar to what I have drawn?
It appears the list of software far exceeds what the author has included. I hate to miss any of the software collections in the comments. I'm interested in evaluating the products by hearing the feedback. I have no interest in taking the PCB building knowledge into a career. If I was still working you can bet that would be important. Building a few boards in my basement is a lot different than learning in my basement so I can develop skills to take it to a project at work.
What is reasonable investment of time for a return from the software. I try to evaluate software purchases like hardware. What am I going to do with it now and what does the future hold. I have learned to invest in computer hardware that has the ability to expand. Since I keep the hardware for ten years it provides some flexibility.
I'd run a mile from Altium Designer. I've used their older DXP for a basic design (4-layer, handheld PDA-style product) and while I got it done, it took a lot longer than it should have, not because of the learning curve, but because of the workflow. Maybe it's changed, but it still looks similar from screenshots. And the crashes.. got tiresome fast.
I don't think the large multinationals use Altium Designer either, so I don't know why people bother with it - the learning curve is wasted if the aim is to learn an expensive package for a future career in PCB design. Cadence or Mentor Graphics products get used. Zuken had the awesome Visula but it's replaced with CR-8000. CADstar was nice to use too, at least in DOS version days, I've found it harder to use the Windows version : (
I gave Pulsonix a shot recently, but would be nice to try Easy-PC sometime too (again I've not used it since its DOS version).
If you want to do serious high speed digital or fancy RF (for example, check out Dave Jones' teardown of Chinese spectrum analysers) then AFAIK none of the above will get you there - and it'll be time to sell the house and buy Xpedition Enterprise.
@Christopher - you really should add an "other" option to this pole.
There are dozens of PCB CAD systems - and Altium make 2 !
I use EasyPC - cheap, simple and reliable - in 17 or 18 years an upgrade has never trashed an old design and the total number of issues (crashes, not working, need for support) has been maybe 10 in all that time.
Many years ago, I was an EAGLE user. I transitioned to KiCad about 5 years ago. At this stage, I would like to understand the reasons and benefits to consider moving to Altium.
The reason I'm considering a change is because I have a need for high-speed digital (>5Gb/s) and RF board designs.
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