Special Promotion for EAGLE PCB Users

It is tempting.

I have a full Eagle license and probably will be okay for about a year. The big question for me is which package will be the next highly popular package? The ability to share designs with a large user base is important.

Eagle has a huge user base compared to other packages. What will happen to this user base?

I expect their user base to erode substantially due to the new license scheme, but will they hang on to enough market share to make it a market leader in terms of seats?

The door is open for others to take some of the user base, but are any other packages attractive enough to take a really significant share?

I think it will still be a tough decision in a year when I will be considering choices as I am not keen on the subscription model.

It is tempting.

I have a full Eagle license and probably will be okay for about a year. The big question for me is which package will be the next highly popular package? The ability to share designs with a large user base is important.

Eagle has a huge user base compared to other packages. What will happen to this user base?

I expect their user base to erode substantially due to the new license scheme, but will they hang on to enough market share to make it a market leader in terms of seats?

The door is open for others to take some of the user base, but are any other packages attractive enough to take a really significant share?

I think it will still be a tough decision in a year when I will be considering choices as I am not keen on the subscription model.

I have other concerns but also concerns ... It's tempting but for now it is not the worth. There are some easy questions that I will see how can be answered and how easy it is to do.

How to convert Eagle previous projects to Altium?

How to reuse the custom libraries already designed?

How is possible to generate a g-code for milling prototypes with Altium? This is my typical pre-prototyping PCB phase to avoid making many PCB circuits prototyping outside and this save an incredible amount of fime.

These are just the most important concerns I have. I have just downloaded now the free trial to have time at least to make a test before consciously deciding what to do.

Last but not least, Eagle has both Mac and Windows versions, and Altium ?

A reply by the author of this post is also welcome.

Enrico

I'm not averse to subscription but the significant cost increase for 6-layer with EAGLE means CircuitStudio will be lower cost over a couple of years, based on risk assessment that 6-layer may be used for a few months per year.

However what's putting me off CircuitStudio is that when I tried their DXP product many years ago for a complete, reasonably complex project, it had far lower productivity than EAGLE. I could have done the job in half the time with EAGLE. I hope that has changed, but from the screenshots it doesn't seem to look much different. We give a lot of time learning how to use a CAD package, and the hope is it is in exchange for improving productivity.

To compound that the second reason I get cold feet with putting effort into CircuitStudio is that there have been many comments from users about strange impacts due to CircuitStudio being a deliberately cut-down product. Just one example that was concerning to me was that polygon priority could not be controlled except by the order that polygons are created. To me this seems like trying to deliberately slow down the user. They may as well have nag screens to watch an advert in exchange to allow a user to type in a priority, it is that silly.

So, for me I can't find an attractive package and I'm holding out until I hear that some of the deliberate cut-down functionality doesn't slow down productivity, and hearing more about ways that the work effort to create pads and parts and schematics and layout can be as fast compared to EAGLE, not just for CircuitStudio but for other packages too (for me I've ruled out DipTrace, I can't recall the reason but it was based on the information on their website).

So like you, I'm also waiting out for this year and postponing the decision.