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Altium CircuitStudio Community Poll

Altium CircuitStudio Poll –

Altium and the e14 Software Team would love to get your feedback on CircuitStudio and PCB Design Tools overall.

Congratulations to the 5 lucky community members who won Altium CircuitStudio Poll subscriptions in our Community Poll.

The competition has now closed but feel you have not given your feedback yet? There is still time to enter this poll!

 

 

 

 

Thank you for taking the time to answer the questions in this survey, it really helps us to get a sense of how you use your software, areas you feel would be most impactful to you for improvement and to give you an opportunity to provide that feedback in a targeted way.

 

This poll was a competition which has now been drawn. For more info see announcement in the comments below.

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  • My reason for not moving to Circuit Studio. OK, here goes:

    I am a contract Electrical Engineer. I have a side company that I started to do side work developing circuits, laying out boards and optionally  delivering products. So lets face it; in the industry, there are two major players now, Altium and Cadence. Although Eagle and KiCad are fine products, the industry just doesn't take them seriously. To get started, I purchased 2 seats of Orcad/Allegro for an amazingly low cost. Two seats for about $1200 perpetual licenses including dongles with optional maintenance. I prefer dongles so I can install on multiple computers and just use one (two) at a time with the dongles.

     

    I would absolutely LOVE to get a seat of Altium Designer also, because that would open me up to supporting companies who use Altium internally and I personally like the Altium flow and GUI better than Cadence tools. However, the price I was quoted was absolutely OUTRAGEOUS, $9650. WAY too much for a one person side shop like me. When I saw that Altium had a low cost Circuit Studio deal, I got pretty excited. Even though it's not full Altium Designer, the CS feature list vs. Designer was acceptable to me.I don't need all the features just like I don't need all the high end Allegro features.

     

    Then I found out that the project files are incompatible and anything created in Designer could not be modified in CS. Since many of my contract projects will begin with projects that are already started in Designer, Circuit Studio does me no good. That is ONE BIG advantage to ORCAD/ALLEGRO. All the source files are compatible across all version, just the feature use is limited to the particular license on the computer that you are using at the time. So that Altium flaw is a deal breaker for me.

     

    I honestly can't understand how Altium can justify such a price structure. Cadence is offering deals that even serious hobbyists can afford, while Altium Designer has priced itself outrageously and denied themselves the small business startup audience.

Comment

  • My reason for not moving to Circuit Studio. OK, here goes:

    I am a contract Electrical Engineer. I have a side company that I started to do side work developing circuits, laying out boards and optionally  delivering products. So lets face it; in the industry, there are two major players now, Altium and Cadence. Although Eagle and KiCad are fine products, the industry just doesn't take them seriously. To get started, I purchased 2 seats of Orcad/Allegro for an amazingly low cost. Two seats for about $1200 perpetual licenses including dongles with optional maintenance. I prefer dongles so I can install on multiple computers and just use one (two) at a time with the dongles.

     

    I would absolutely LOVE to get a seat of Altium Designer also, because that would open me up to supporting companies who use Altium internally and I personally like the Altium flow and GUI better than Cadence tools. However, the price I was quoted was absolutely OUTRAGEOUS, $9650. WAY too much for a one person side shop like me. When I saw that Altium had a low cost Circuit Studio deal, I got pretty excited. Even though it's not full Altium Designer, the CS feature list vs. Designer was acceptable to me.I don't need all the features just like I don't need all the high end Allegro features.

     

    Then I found out that the project files are incompatible and anything created in Designer could not be modified in CS. Since many of my contract projects will begin with projects that are already started in Designer, Circuit Studio does me no good. That is ONE BIG advantage to ORCAD/ALLEGRO. All the source files are compatible across all version, just the feature use is limited to the particular license on the computer that you are using at the time. So that Altium flaw is a deal breaker for me.

     

    I honestly can't understand how Altium can justify such a price structure. Cadence is offering deals that even serious hobbyists can afford, while Altium Designer has priced itself outrageously and denied themselves the small business startup audience.

Children
  • in reply to markbolla

    Mark, thanks for the reasoning and I can appreciate that file compatibility is essential if taking existing designs to modify. I would just like to clarify that schematics (.schdoc), symbol libraries (.schlib) and footprint libraries (.pcblib) are directly compatible between CS and AD. The PCB files are slightly more tricky but current AD versions can import CS PCB files (.cspcbdoc) and if you save the design in V5 binary format from AD this can be imported into CS. Agreed that it is not 100% friction free but at least there is the option to interchange files.