At times when I have to do a circuit or PCB design in my professional work I mostly use Altium Designer. I’m not a full-time hardware designer consultant, and do both hardware and software. So, I can’t justify paying several thousands of dollars per year, unless I would be involved in a year or longer hardware design only project. Also, clients usually provide a license seat for me anyways. However, I needed to have a PCB design software for my products and projects. About 2-3 years ago I started a new hunt for it. I have used Eagle before, and have briefly looked at KiCAD. When compared to Altium it feels like 90s, especially KiCAD. I didn’t want to use these, and certainly was not going to pay for unlimited version of Eagle given how outdated it was. I was browsing for the alternatives, and found out that Altium started to offer CircuitStudio, which is basically much lighter version of Altium Designer, and costs couple of hundreds of dollars. They also started to offer CircuitMaker, which is a free cloud based version. These two seemed like the best candidates at the time. CircuitMaker CircuitMaker is targeted towards makers and there …
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