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SPECIFICTION
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Altium Designer vs KiCad

Altium Designer

altium.com

KiCad

kicad.org

Side by side

FigureAltium DesignerKiCad
Price from$460/moFree
Free plan—Yes
Free trialYes—
Open source——
WebYes—
WindowsYesYes
macOS—Yes
Linux—Yes
Self-hosted—Yes
Plans published11
Spec score · Electrical Design Software8.4 (#4)8.1 (#9)
Spec score · Engineering Design Software8.3 (#6)8.0 (#11)
Spec score · Engineering CAD Software8.3 (#8)8.0 (#13)
PurposeAltium Designer is an integrated electronics design tool covering schematic capture, PCB layout, simulation, and analysis.KiCad is an open-source electronic design automation suite for schematic capture and PCB layout.

Plans

Altium Designer

  • Altium Designer 25$460 a month

Altium Designer pricing →

KiCad

  • KiCadFree

KiCad pricing →

In their own words

Altium Designer

Altium Designer has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.

Visit altium.com

KiCad

KiCad is a free, open-source electronic design automation suite for schematic capture and PCB layout. Its electrical rules checker flags schematic connection issues such as output-pin conflicts, missing drivers, and unconnected pins. For board routing, the PCB editor offers collision-highlight, shove, and walkaround modes that respect design rules. An integrated 3D viewer displays board designs with a library of 3D models and supports ray tracing. Schematic netlists can be exported as Pspice, Cadstar, PcbNew, or generic XML. KiCad can import schematic work from Altium tools, CADSTAR, EAGLE, EasyEDA, and LTSpice, as well as PCB designs from a wider range that includes Allegro, Fabmaster, P-CAD 200x ASCII, and SolidWorks. The project aims to serve professional designers while staying approachable to new users. Downloads are listed for Windows, macOS, and Linux, plus Docker; the stable Linux release is an x86-64 AppImage. Most source code uses GNU GPL version 3 or greater, and libraries use CC-BY-SA 4.0. KiCad was first released in 1992 and is managed by the KiCad Development Team.

Visit kicad.org