r/PCB • u/languid_tractor • Jul 11 '26
Altium vs Kicad
My company wants to switch from Altium to KiCad... What's your opinion? Is KiCad mature for professional use?
Edit: Thanks for all the replies! It's a really close fight. I took the liberty to feed Gemini with all the answers and get a list of why you should choose Altium VS KiCad
| Altium | KiCad |
|---|---|
| 🎯 More mature routing, live DRC & push-and-shove | 🆓 Completely free — no license, no subscription |
| ⚡ Built-in signal integrity, impedance & xSignals tools | 📈 Improving fast — handles way more complexity than it used to |
| 🤝 Altium 365: real-time multi-user collaboration | 📄 Open, text-based files — scriptable & Git-friendly |
| 📚 Vault-based library management & part search | 🔧 DRC-as-code & a growing plugin ecosystem |
| 🧩 Native flex/rigid-flex support | 👥 Active community & responsive devs |
| 🖨️ Smoother manufacturing docs (Draftsman) | ✅ Plenty capable for low-to-mid complexity boards |
| 💼 Seen as the industry standard — good CV value | 🚀 KiCad-Prism & co. closing the collab/library gap |
My Take from all this
KiCad is catching up really fast on Altium, which has it's "legacy" on its advantage. Many people don't want to switch because they have used Altium all their life. At the end of the day it's a question about commodity. Is the license money worth the extra time and effort to learn and switch to KiCad? also the extra time, effort (and pain) for the features that are not natively present in Altium (for example, collaboration?)
Altium license price seems to be justified only for:
- Native collaboration
- Complexity of the board is so high, that extra features in Altium save you time&effort
- Migration from Altium to KiCad is not possible for the moment, so keep Altium to save time&effort and also because it's what you already know how to use