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.

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.

I'm personally not jumping from EAGLE to Altium. I have a v7 Pro license so the logical jump "up" for me would be Altium Designer and not Circuit Studio but even with their 40% off promotion it is still WAY more money than EAGLE even before you factor in the cost of the subscription required to be able to access support and updates after the first year which is something people seem to forget. Add in that it's Windows only so I would need to boot into a Windows VM on my Mac to do design work and it's even less of an option.

EAGLE does have some mitigation against not being able to continue once you let your subscription lapse. Designs are still fully readable and can be exported to manufacturing in the free version and you can always drop back to v7 if you need to edit something and your v8 subscription has lapsed.

If you only need 6 layers for a small amount of time then you can upgrade your subscription to Premium for the duration of that project and then drop down to Standard or freeware when you don't need that capability.

I do think they could staunch a lot of the bleeding of the existing user base by introducing two more licensing tiers:

1) Low cost non-commercial license for Makers.

2) Intermediate level license between Standard and Premium as currently the step between the two licenses is large.

They clearly aren't going to reverse course on the subscription model. I do wish there was an option to pay a "full and final settlement" to allow the permanent use of the version you had on subscription once you let your subscription lapse but I don't know if they have the capability to implement such a thing into the subscription system or not. I don't see this happening any time soon if ever though, and being able to fall back to a v7 license mitigates a lot of the issues (for me at least) anyway.

Best Regards,

Rachael

I'm personally not jumping from EAGLE to Altium. I have a v7 Pro license so the logical jump "up" for me would be Altium Designer and not Circuit Studio but even with their 40% off promotion it is still WAY more money than EAGLE even before you factor in the cost of the subscription required to be able to access support and updates after the first year which is something people seem to forget. Add in that it's Windows only so I would need to boot into a Windows VM on my Mac to do design work and it's even less of an option.

EAGLE does have some mitigation against not being able to continue once you let your subscription lapse. Designs are still fully readable and can be exported to manufacturing in the free version and you can always drop back to v7 if you need to edit something and your v8 subscription has lapsed.

If you only need 6 layers for a small amount of time then you can upgrade your subscription to Premium for the duration of that project and then drop down to Standard or freeware when you don't need that capability.

I do think they could staunch a lot of the bleeding of the existing user base by introducing two more licensing tiers:

1) Low cost non-commercial license for Makers.

2) Intermediate level license between Standard and Premium as currently the step between the two licenses is large.

They clearly aren't going to reverse course on the subscription model. I do wish there was an option to pay a "full and final settlement" to allow the permanent use of the version you had on subscription once you let your subscription lapse but I don't know if they have the capability to implement such a thing into the subscription system or not. I don't see this happening any time soon if ever though, and being able to fall back to a v7 license mitigates a lot of the issues (for me at least) anyway.

Best Regards,

Rachael