# Altium Develop Reviews **Vendor:** Altium **Category:** [PCB Design Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/pcb-design) **Average Rating:** 4.5/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 1,001 ## About Altium Develop Altium Develop is a collaborative platform for electronic product development that connects requirements management, ECAD design, supply chain, and manufacturing into a single, unified environment. Built on Altium Designer® and Altium 365®, it enables real-time collaboration across engineering, design, and operations teams, reducing delays caused by disconnected tools and file-based workflows. Designed for electronics teams and organizations managing complex PCB and hardware development, Altium Develop supports cross-functional collaboration throughout the entire product lifecycle. Teams can work together in a shared workspace, ensuring that all stakeholders—from design to procurement—stay aligned with up-to-date project data. Key capabilities include: • Real-time collaboration: Shared workspace for ECAD design, reviews, and project coordination • Component and supply chain visibility: Access to live component data, pricing, and availability • Requirements and design integration: Link design decisions to project requirements for better traceability • BOM and workflow management: Manage bill of materials, sourcing, and change processes in one platform • ECAD-MCAD co-design: Enable collaboration between electrical and mechanical teams By centralizing design data, workflows, and collaboration, Altium Develop improves visibility, reduces rework, and helps teams bring electronic products to market faster. The platform is particularly well suited for organizations looking to streamline PCB design processes, enhance collaboration, and scale development across distributed teams. Altium Develop is used by teams evaluating alternatives to tools like Autodesk Fusion, KiCad, Cadence OrCAD, and SOLIDWORKS for PCB design and collaborative electronics development. ## Altium Develop Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users appreciate the **ease of use** in Altium, highlighting its intuitive interface and helpful features for PCB design. (269 reviews) - Users appreciate the **seamless collaboration features** of Altium Develop, enhancing productivity and design quality across teams. (217 reviews) - Users value the **user-friendly interface** of Altium Designer, enhancing their PCB design experience with intuitive tools and integration. (145 reviews) - Users value the **collaborative environment** of Altium Develop, enhancing teamwork during design and prototype testing. (133 reviews) - Users appreciate the **efficiency** of Altium Develop, as it significantly boosts productivity and streamlines the design process. (100 reviews) - User Interface (91 reviews) - Sharing (83 reviews) - Users find Altium Develop to be incredibly **intuitive** , facilitating faster PCB design with helpful features and shortcuts. (82 reviews) - Customer Support (81 reviews) - Integrations (79 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users note a **steep learning curve** with Altium Develop, requiring significant time to gain proficiency. (93 reviews) - Users find the product **expensive** , posing a barrier for hobbyists and hindering engagement with the Altium ecosystem. (88 reviews) - Users express a desire for **missing features** in Altium Develop, citing limitations in editing and tool functionality. (65 reviews) - Users find the **complex interface** challenging, indicating a need for more intuitive navigation and tutorials. (57 reviews) - Users report **slow performance** with Altium Develop, especially during project loading and when managing components. (50 reviews) - Users report **performance issues** with Altium Develop, including bugs, crashes, and slowdowns on large projects. (47 reviews) - Learning Difficulty (46 reviews) - Software Bugs (40 reviews) - Lack of Features (36 reviews) - Complexity (35 reviews) ## Altium Develop Reviews ### 1. Feedback on my altium 24 usage experience **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Gene L. | Senior Hardware Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 06, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** Version management is convenient, facilitating multi person time-sharing collaboration, user-friendly interface, and good user experience. 27/1000 Real time Translation Version management is convenient, facilitating multi person time-sharing collaboration, user-friendly interface, and good user experience. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** There are not enough shortcut keys, and the class selection button on the PCB design interface needs to be clicked every time. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** Building original components, packaging, schematic design, PCB design, etc. ### 2. A Game-Changer for PCB Design Collaboration **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Hardware | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 01, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** Altium 365 excels in facilitating collaboration among team members, regardless of their location. Its cloud-based platform allows for real-time sharing, reviewing, and commenting on PCB designs, which significantly enhances productivity and reduces miscommunication. The integration with other design tools and the ability to manage components effectively are also standout features that streamline the entire design process. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** One downside of Altium 365 is its occasional lag and slow response times, especially when working with larger and more complex projects. Additionally, the initial learning curve can be steep for new users who are not familiar with cloud-based design tools, requiring a significant amount of time and effort to become fully proficient. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** Altium 365 has significantly improved our design team's ability to collaborate on complex PCB projects. Previously, coordinating design changes and ensuring everyone had the latest updates was a cumbersome and error-prone process. For instance, on a recent project involving a multi-layer PCB for a new consumer electronics device, team members from different locations were able to simultaneously review and edit the design in real time. This not only reduced the risk of version control issues but also sped up the design process by 30%, allowing us to meet tight deadlines and bring the product to market faster. The integrated component management system also ensured we used verified components, reducing the risk of production delays due to sourcing issues. **Official Response from Alanna Jordan:** > Thank you for sharing your experience with Altium 365. We're glad to hear that the platform has improved your team's collaboration and streamlined the design process. We understand the challenges of the initial learning curve and are committed to providing resources and support to help new users become proficient more efficiently. We value your feedback and will use it to enhance the user experience. ### 3. The most powerful and easy to use EDA tool I have used **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer & Network Security | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 01, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** The best thing about Altium Designer is how powerful it is when it comes to working with advanced designs while still being user friendly. The UI also looks very modern and is something you can proudly show of to your customer without them questioning if you are using a software from the early 2000s. It is also good how often it recieves updates which gives confidence that alot of effort is being put in to keep improving it. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** A downside is that to have the absolute best expeiance you should run it on a high-end modern computer. The difference in using a 4 year old computer against a new one is very noticeable and will affect how smooth you will experiance the software. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** It really have improved and speed up collaboration between hardware design and mechanical design. Generating perfect 3D models of the PCB makes the mechanical design a breeze. ### 4. Productivity and collaboration greatly improved **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Industrial Automation | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 12, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** Highly customizable design rules and checks, 3D views, and Draftsman documents are all great. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** Learning curve is steep but it is very powerful once you become proficient. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** I was unable to reliably design flex and rigid-flex boards with my previous software. Altium has these types of designs in mind and makes them quite easy. ### 5. As it is the best software for pcb design i have ever used. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Aadarsh K. | Student., Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 15, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** In altium designer the auto routing which is easy to use and ease to implement it. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** The complex structure of the altium designer is the worst i have ever seen. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** it is very helpfull to design a PCB for me compared to others with quality. ### 6. I would highly recommend **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ethan B. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 15, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** I like the ease of importing components from 3rd parties, and the user interface makes pcb design alot easier. Another aspect of Altium I like is the ease of making custom component symbols and footprints. The routing tools and controls make layout a breeze, especialy the custom rules. The 3D rendering of the boards also looks very visualy appealing. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** I dont dislike anything about it, I think it is a robust system. Although I think a block diagram specific option would be useful rather than making a block diagram on a schematic, but this isnt that important to pcb design just documentation. One thing I wish were better though, is that I wish the traces on the 3D model to show up better but thats all. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** It is solving the difficulty of making custom footprints and symbols with its intuitve GUI. Also the issue of project and file managment, altium makes everthing streamlined. ### 7. Electrical Engineer, started using Altium during academia now using it for professional work **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Education Management | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 15, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** The ability to manage libraries, create templates, project lifecycles, and effortlessly grant access to other users to view/edit the documents based on the roles. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** The cost of using the tool is a bit high. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** The ability to create a collaborative environment is a big plus of A365. Only Altium is thinking intensively in that direction to make a collaborative space between EE, ME, project managers, etc. Sharing files with ease to other designers is a use case for myself using Altium 365. ### 8. Best Addition Yet **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jordan W. | Senior EE, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2022 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** You guys do a great job with version control of Electronic Designs. One big time saver for our workflow is batch component creation. This allows my team to make families of passive components with ease. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** Something I dislike about A365 is the online browser tool. One time I had a colleague accidentally delete a bunch of components in our vault. Luckily they were still in the trash can however I couldn't select all of the components at once so I needed to click through and restore one at a time. This took hours to do with 800 parts gone. Other aspects of the web browser app don't allow for multi-select either which would be very helpful. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** The way we do version control of templating and design projects. Before we were very old-fashioned with zipping up projects at certain states and saving them to the corporate server. A365 allows us to not only easily track our changes but allow us to revert to a previous state. We are comfortable and familiar with how GIT works and work with some Software folks. So when they navigate our projects it looks familiar to them and understand our revisioning. ### 9. Major upgrade over freeware options **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Albert T. | Hardware engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 10, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** Drag and drop functionality for everything. Ease of routing high speed digital with length matched differential pairs. Supplier integration with BOM - makes it easy to price boards and either quote or check other's quotes. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** Frequent crashes and stability issues. More recent versions have improved things, but I still run into issues more frequently than other software. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** PCB and electronics design. ### 10. Incredibly powerful and intuitively convenient **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sam S. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 12, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** I love that a majority of the features in Altium are designed for hardware developer convenience to help make work more efficient and less of a headache fighitng the tool. One of my favorite features would probably be the 3D viewer. It helps a ton when designing and fitting boards into enclosures designed by my teams mechanical engineers. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** The main pain point I have found with Altium is figuring out issues with missing library metadata. For example, if I copy a footprint and schematic symbol from an existing library into a new library, there are weird linking issues when trying to bring those parts into the PCB layout. It's most likely user error but I have not found the errors to be too helpful in solving the problem. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** Altium Designer is allowing me to create, easily, a new version of an existing embedded module that our company has been using for a long time. The ease of use of the PCB library and SCH library, plus the ability to work with multiple schematic documents makes everything way easier. All of the automatic features in Altium help me save time working with the software and spend more time analyzing and designing my circuit. **Official Response from Alanna Jordan:** > Thank you for sharing your positive experience with Altium Designer! We're glad to hear that the 3D viewer and other features have been helpful for your hardware development work. ### 11. Valispace Experience **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Andrea N. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 10, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** Valispace is an intuitive tool for the project develop, in particular focused principally on the requirements managment but not only. It is possible to define it a sort of System Engineering tool, where it is possible to develop simulations, priliminary budget and mange the requirements from the first relase to the verification **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** It has not major weaknesses. Sometimes some little bugs could be detected but the Customer Care resolve any issue in a very short time. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** It is possible to manage the requirements in an esay way and it is possible to share the requirements with the teams, discuss on that, create new tag, create new fields basing on the Customer needs. In addition, it is easy to export the requirements in excel or word format in order to deliver the document to the Customer. ### 12. Altium is a powerful PCB software that is always updated with new features **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mahmoud A. | Hardware Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 29, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** Altium designer developers always focus on updating Altium with new features that save time and effort for developer and provide better performance and to provide better design review experience. also the ease of design reuse and modifications to save redesign effort and time. also the integration with CAD tools is perfect as it provides a good integration with mechanical design team. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** Merging Designs from some software tools is not supported yet. but they're working on it according to Altium Webinars Instructors. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** Solves issues like gap between designers and procurement using the active BOM feature and BOM Portal. Also saves time and effort specially for newer versions like AD23 and AD24 ### 13. Collaboration at heart **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Walid A. | Hardware Developer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 03, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** Altium offers version control and design history, making our work easier to track, and get back to a specific time. Also all the yeams can work together at the same time on the same PCB design **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** Can feel unsafe sometime to store sensitive designs **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** Teamwork design ### 14. One of the finest tool for electronics board designing **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Hardware | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 20, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** Its cummunity support like altium users altium designers community. Support from community. Extensive availability of components for our any projects related to PCB development . it s amazing tool with all in one features for me and my team like PCB designers. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** complexity of uses my be some times. But with experience and community support this issue it not that big. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** CaD MAd designs Meeting our requirements for PCB components designing and testing ### 15. Altium is a user-friendly experience with lots of helpful tools for schematic and layout design **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Medical Devices | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 27, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** I like how nice the interface looks, it is not cluttered and easy to follow. Lots of helpful tools to use and also the documentation is easily available for all versions of altium. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** Sometimes the manufacturer part search can be slighlty buggy when linked with the active bom. Some parts say they are available on the digi-key site but not when implemented in the Active BOM. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** Altium is helping us create our board designs with ease and also allows us to use built in tools to help make veryfying the design a lot easier. ### 16. Altium Designer and Altium 365 Review **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Aviation & Aerospace | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 28, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** Altium Designer is a very capable tool for designing PCBs. It's user interface is both highly detailed yet straight forward and usable after spending time exploring the different features Altium Designer provides. Because of the number of design features Altium Designer has, it is very easy to implement unique and highly specific design features. In addition, Altium 365 makes it very easy for other members of my team to review my work in large detail and to integrate my own work with my team's overall project architecture in the Altium 365 file organization. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** Altium Designer has a relatively steep learning curve for people new to PCB design and electrical circuit concepts, but the Altium Designer tutorial and free Altium Education PCB Basic Design Course make it much easier to learn. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** Altium Designer allows me to design complex PCBs with unique design constraints. ### 17. Screwdriver that fits with every bolt **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nick L. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 25, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** The best part is the integration with both Solidworks and Autodesk products. This is so beneficial to diverse teams with varying software affinities. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** The initial learning curve when switching from other PCB design suites. Converting from simplistic softwares can be daunting at times with the shear amount of features available. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** Developing highly specialized PCB's for complex shape enclosures and environments. The ability to collaborate with multiple teams of engineers that often use different CAD softwares is essential for being able to leverage Altium Designers large toolset in a collaborative cloud environment. Quickly being able to update high level supervisors on progress with web based visualiizations and a powerful organization overview on mobile devices is an excellent addition to weekly updates. ### 18. A User’s Perspective: Reviewing Altium’s Design Software **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Roland L. | Senior Electronics Hardware Design Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 10, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** The interface offers a neatly integrated environment where all the functions are easily accessible. The constraint manager makes it very straightforward to handle rules in one place. Updating the layout after a schematic change is very straightforward. The generation of manufacturing data is made really easy, as are the 3D functions of visualization, case model integration. Learning to use the software is quite easy with a large amount of training material available. A lot of effort was put into customer support. But most of all it allows to concentrate of the important thing, schematic and PCB design. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** Some of the functions are overly complex, such as the interactive BOM. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** It allows to design PCBs with a straightforward design flow and concentrate on the aspects that matter most. ### 19. learning experience **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Roberto R. | Desarrollador de HW /FW, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 27, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** - I love the component finder, where I can download datasheets and 3D models -3D views and design rules -reliability and reputation in the market **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** -autorouting is not optimal -the non-use of AI to seek to optimize routing -compatibility only for windows, it should also be for linux and mac **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** High fidelity PCB designs for industrial use. ### 20. Game-changing in managing project requirements **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Giorgio A. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 19, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** What I appreciate most about Valispace is that it serves as a collaborative platform where you can calculate and store your project engineering data, manage requirements, perform simulations, documentations, and also store testing procedures and test runs, all in one system engineering tool. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** What is currently less useful is the Time Sequences module, which has limited utility in the design phase. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** Valispace primarily addresses the challenging issue of internally reviewing requirements within the company and especially with the client. Without Valispace, this process would be much longer and more difficult, risking the loss of information on requirement traceability and history (change log). Valispace streamlines this review, aids in the verification process, and connects it to the design values of your product. ### 21. Altium 365 We love it, will you? **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Manufacturing | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 13, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** Overall I am quite pleased with what Altium has put forth. We have really liked the service, support and efficiency that Altium has provided our company. It has too many incredible features for us to dive into, but I recommend anyone in the field of electronics or related professional to use Altium 365. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** One of the issues we had with Altium is surprisingly the application having TOO many incredible features. Its comprehensive features and integration can be daunting for newcomers, making it challenging to learn quickly. Additionally, the subscription price might be viewed as relatively expensive compared to other PCB design software, but it may vary depending on your organization. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** Altium 365's feature of cloud based real time collaboration makes it so easy for our teams to collaborate as well as share projects with our customers. It's Great! **Official Response from Alanna Jordan:** > We're glad to hear that you are pleased with Altium 365 and that it has provided great service, support, and efficiency for your company. We appreciate your recommendation to others in the electronics field. Thank you for sharing your feedback! ### 22. Great and easy way to collaborate with colleagues on Altium Project **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Research | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 03, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** I like the fact that it is a easy way to work together with colleagues on the project in real time. Also a easy way to review the schematics and layouts with colleagues who don't have Altium installed who can just review it by using the browser. It is easy enough to set up and saves a lot of time in big projects. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** Not much to diske, worked perfectly for the entire time. One downside could be the high subscription cost. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** Collaborateing with colleagues in real time on big projects. ### 23. Altium is the only tool I imagine using for PCB design **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Adam S. | Electronic Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 31, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** That it allows for clear control of design version history, still improves with the application features and allows for a decent library management. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** I dislike the subscription models change. I also do not like the lack of logical connections between the component and its footrpint and symbol revision statuses **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** Process implementation and library management ### 24. Altium continues to enhance its capabilities, solidifying as a leading PCB design solution **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Electrical/Electronic Manufacturing | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 08, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** + Comprehensive cloud based library management + Ease of project synchronization + PCB layer stack manager + Plenty of layout helper tools **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** - Occasional software bugs and restarts - Slow startup speed - Online viewer could improve in speed and useability **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** Altium offers an accessible entry point for new users while providing a comprehensive array of advanced tools for experienced designers. Its cloud-based component library manager streamlines the design process with an intuitive interface. Within the PCB layout environment, Altium furnishes a robust set of productivity-enhancing features, including rapid layer stack configuration, component grouping, and impedance-controlled routing functionality. Moreover, the online project viewer has proven invaluable for remote debugging and troubleshooting, enabling seamless access to design data without the need for a full software installation. ### 25. Very streamlined experience, intuitive flow with well-structured collaboration features **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mario V. | Chief Technology Officer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 29, 2022 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** Reviewing tools, centralized repository, web client with notes and comments, easy BOM management (good for simple projects, less for complicated deployments), guest user support **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** BOM is not ActiveBOM 1:1 synced, missing vendor lookup from the web interface, missing multiple GIT remotes (this feature is a must for road workers with unstable connections), guests cannot clone projects **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** Having multiple figures in our production pipeline (designers, DFM operators, MFG/CEM, procurement and even end users) allows quicker feedback up to the engineers in case of any issue. Even the normal workflow is much easier to be processed as artifacts are available in the resources and people can know when and by who any modification has been carried out. ### 26. It just works, and doesn´t make any trouble! **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Niklas P. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 26, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** Altium 365 stores data in the cloud, thus data exchnage with collegues or students is no problem any more. I like that a bridge between ECAD and MCAD is included. Yet I had no time to test it. Altium 365 is very good integrated in Altium Designer. You can even make local projects availabel in the cloud. Altium generaly has a good customer supprt and very good help weppages, which are very detailed. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** Cloud storage is convinient as university. Regarding companys I see the a problem with data security. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** Altium 365 makes data always availabel, better than company own network strage. Data can be shared with students and collegues, what makes working in a team easier. **Official Response from Alanna Jordan:** > Hi Niklas! We're glad to hear that Altium 365 is working well for you and that you appreciate the cloud-based data storage and the integration with Altium Designer. We understand your concern about data security for companies and assure you that we take data protection seriously. Altium 365 is designed to make data sharing and collaboration easier, and we're pleased to hear that it's benefiting your team. ### 27. New user **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer & Network Security | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 12, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** The integration of Schematics and CAD (PCB) works well. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** Tried using the Harness feature and I was not too successful. May be because I am still a novice with Altium Designer. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** I was able to bring the PCB Design inhouse. ### 28. Review by a new junior engineer. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Achille R. | Junior Engeneering, Electrical/Electronic Manufacturing, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 30, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** I was really surprised of the shortcut and the cleaning controls. One of the upside is the f1 button, really comfortable. It's a really powerful software that allows you to do everything regarding the pcb design. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** The thing that i disliked the most is the user interface, sometimes I struggle to find a function. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** I develpoed electronic board and I think is the best software to do it. **Official Response from Alanna Jordan:** > Hi Achille! We're thrilled to hear that Altium Designer has been instrumental in your electronic board development. We understand the importance of a user-friendly interface and are committed to making improvements to enhance your experience. Thank you for sharing your feedback. ### 29. Altium user of nearly 20yrs **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Consumer Electronics | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 13, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** The integration of schematics, simulation, BOM organization, and Layout...plus the recent additions of tools/plugins. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** The increase in cost and the upcoming change to eliminate perpetual licenses. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** Schematic capture with real-time supply chain data, BOM management, and accurate/flexible PCB Layout. ### 30. Senior Power Electronics Engineer **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mohammad S. | Senior Power Electronics Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 19, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** It is very user friend for creating a customized library. It is easier to make schematic and therefore a PCB project. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** Defining rules sometimes is complicated. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** Designing the schematics and PCB of the electrical circuits projects ### 31. Pleasantly surprised! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Renewables & Environment | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 26, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** I have used other PCB design software in the past, but this was my first time trying to use Altium to make a full project from start to finish. I really enjoyed the interface and ease of use. Everything was fairly intuitive and easy to navigate through the commands. I also like the manufacturer part search that is built into the software. This is a big selling point for me on Altium because the most time consuming part of a project for me always comes down to footprints and 3D models. Altium has made this considerably easier. Once I actually made it to the PCB for routing and placing components, I saw where Altium was superior to other software packages that I've used. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** I am not a big fan of the cloud saving. Maybe I am old fashioned, but I prefer the local saves. This is only a minor inconvenience and even though I don't necessarily like the cloud saving, I see why they want to do it and why it is beneficial for users. Also I am not a big fan of the change from the old design rules to the new constraint manager. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** Altium is making my PCB design process much faster by having a lot of very helpful built-in features. It did not take a long time to pick up and learn, which is always a benefit. Also the project output functionality when you are finished with a project, but need to export the Gerber and Drill files is very easy to use and useful. ### 32. The best electronic cad ever!!! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Davide A. | Operation Manager, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 12, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** Ease of use, very intuitive menus and controls **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** the cost of the annual subscription, I prefer the perpetual license solution **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** creates 3D PCBs that are very useful for interfacing with mechanical CAD ### 33. One source of truth for your system **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Aviation & Aerospace | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 11, 2023 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** 1. customer support is outstanding! 2.very easy to use!! 3. all the requirements and system specs are in one place. 4. ability to export the data into documents easily, for example creating a verification control document. 5. ability to manage V&V and verify from within the system. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** 1. Not supporting teams working on multiple deployments and deployment types. 2. The verification assignment view should support populating the text field of each verification method per requirement. 4. The ability to tie a verification of a requirement to an event of the project, for example Req#114: verified by test at CDR. 5. Training tutorials should be updated ASAP to represent the new interface of Valispace. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** Having one place to store all product requirements guarantees configuration management and eliminates the need to work with spreadsheets, keep versions etc. The ability to mange tests and verify requirements directly from within the system ensures nothing is missed. ### 34. Promising engineering tool to manage complex hardware projects **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Aviation & Aerospace | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 16, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** The tool serves well for requirements management, providing traceability between requirements and between requirements and design using automated 'rules'. Serves well as a single source of truth for design and its properties. The core functionalities are easy to use and understand and the customer support has been very responsive and helpful. There are a lot of features and availability of API makes it flexible to integrate with existing processes. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** Some of the UI/UX is not always easy/fun to use and the most of the pages do not display well on mobile. It can at times be difficult to align the usage of the tool with more formal processes (e.g. ECSS) and things like gated reviews and 'freezing' certain aspects of design. It is less well suited for situations where a batch/series production is used (i.e. better suited for the design phase and manufacturing,integration,testing of one-off products). Product is still in very active development (positive) but that also means that there are still some things to iron out and things may change in the future, potentially requiring adapting your workflow. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** Managing the entire engineering lifecyle of complex products. ### 35. Used every day and on all of our projects **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** elise c. | Director of Operations, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 13, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** overall very easy to use and necessary for our work **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** cloud system can be unintuitive at times **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** The design rule makes it easy to detect issues when making PCBs ### 36. Altium Evaluation **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Franck E. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 15, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** The possibility during PCB design to route the boards very precisely and the ability to view the design in 3D to get a preview of the shape of the packaging one wishes to use. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** That we cannot do the autorouting of the map with our specifications and not in random ways. Also, do not display the height of the components when deciding to switch to 3D. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** The possibility of viewing the map in 3D to anticipate the shape of the packaging that will be suitable for transport and easy handling. ### 37. Valispace creates a true single source of truth to keep my team and our partners on the same page **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Aviation & Aerospace | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 11, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** Valispace has an intiutiive system in place for linking requirements, components, analysis, and verification together, and it exists live in a web browser that lets me and my whole team look at and work on the same thing at the same time. The best thing about them, though, is their amazing customer service that responds blazingly fast whenever I have issues or comments. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** Vlispace can take a bit of time to administer. It is also not the most flexible tool around, there are limitations in what kind of columns can be created to represent data. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** Valispace solves the problem of making sure my whole team has access to the latest set of requirements in a dynamic program where these things are constantly evolving. It saves me a lot of time finding things for other people on my team. The parent/child relationships are also really valuable when reviewing requirements later, to know what will be imapcted by any changes as well as where numbers came from. ### 38. Highly capable program for PCBA design, but with a substantial learning curve **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Thomas E. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 26, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** All in one end to end functionality, including parts library database, schematic entry, detailed rule assignments, good support for hierarchial designs, built-in line impedance calculator and signal analysis, flexible PCB parameters. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** it can be very difficult to find certain functions, and I still have not found a clean way of doing batch/ global operations to for instance lock all entities on a PCB (I typically use the PCB tab and lock the items by category), reconcile all part instances in a design with the libararies, re-assigning component IDs on the fly (and updating the SCH accordingly), and the confusing operation of the Pad & Via Templates library (and the way vias are handled as a whole: no convenient way to update vias on the PCB with vias in the Pad & Via Templates library, no way to specifiy stacked microvias, etc.). Also the on-line documentation is written from a top down perspective, which makes it exceedly difficult to resolve issues encountered while running the program. There needs to be a solid, well maintained help portal which aggregates solutions for the many issues users encounter. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** We need a fully integrated package for complex PCB design, and it serves this purpose. ### 39. A very powerful software for pcb and electronic product design **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Industrial Automation | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 09, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** The interface is well organized and functional, all is integrated and you don't have to switch between multiple software to capture your scematic, transfer them to the PCB and document your product. I also like the possibility to design multiboard product and document the design with draftsman. This saves us from use other tools just to document the mechanical requirements to send to the fab to build the case for the boards. We are exploring the new harness capability but I haven't yet used this capability in real project. Seems to be real interesting and moves the product in the direction that helps to use the same software from the idea to the documentation of the entire design. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** There are some feature that we need and that has been required from multiple users a long time ago and that has not yet been implemented. What we miss is the possibility to design an asymetrical pcb stackup like you need to do with aluminium board. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use Altium Designer to realize custom board for industrial customer and for our research and development activity in mobile robotics. ### 40. The most complete PCB design tool **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jose P. | Electrical Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 25, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** All the integrations it has developed with the years. I've been using Altium Designer for many years now, I love how easy to use it is, the design environment is easy to handle and customize. Every year they add new features and have been improving the existing ones to make it a powerful and complete design tool. Draftsman, their documents design and automation tool is a big hit for this software suite, now I can automatically build documentation for my designs. I use Altium Designer on all of my PCB designs. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** I would not complain at all of the software suite, I do think it is an expensive tool, and would really love to be more affordable so that I can use it for personal purposes. An observation about the Draftsman tool, the scrolling needs to be improved, it is too difficult to scroll between pages, a 9 pages document is a real pain. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** We design our products, Altium Designer has been of such a great help for circuit and PCB designs. This is the to-go tool for all of our designs. ### 41. Easy to use with lots of resources available. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Brian Z. | Avionics Member, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 29, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** Sleek design, lots of resources/support, intuitive. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** random UI changes creates issues, the price is too high - would not use unless sponsored by company. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** Allows my team to create custom solutions for aero applications. Allows teammates to share and collaborate on projects easily. ### 42. Excellent tool for the PCB designing **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Taresh S. | Software Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 10, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** Upsides and things or features I can consider as good or helpful are as follow analysiss and designing of PCB boards. 3d modeling of PCBs. Circuit simulation. Etc. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** All in one features tool for the circuit development to PCB designing and manufacturing. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** mcad ecad ### 43. Altium pros and cons **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 28, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** Many well-built features including the PCB design itself, simulation, built-in library etc. Really great resources for students/professionals trying to learn how to use the software Has cloud features for working in a team, can be handy **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** Price is prohibitive, hard to justify when free tools exist that suit many smaller-scale projects just fine Can be a little resource intensive to run **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** Designing simple 2 or 4 layer boards for prototyping sensors, power distribution etc. that are custom to the application. ### 44. Experience in Altium in senior year of computer engineering BaS **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Elias M. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 02, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** The responsiveness, compared to other similar hardware I've used throughout college,Altium just felt the highest quality to use. Within 3 months I went from having no experience in PCB design to designing my very own board, things are easy to find and there is no slowdown, everything just seems to work and work well. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** The obscurity of keybinds, this may be due to my own incompetence but I had difficulty in finding keybinds. I found myself looking up the key binds myself **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** Designing a PCB, it benefited me especially as a beginner with tools such as the error reports, and rules to import from my chosen PCB printer. Everything came out just right and the only errors i ever encountered in my own board were my own errors from a design standpoint, but never a fault of Altium ### 45. Not super beginner friendly but very powerful, and can be learnt independently with enough effort. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Environmental Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 18, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** Lots of resources online that discuss the diffreent tools availalbe. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** Very powerful but not super easy to use for first time PCB designers, sometimes making simple boards seem overly complicated and requires lots of research for the first time. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** Lots of tools available for convinience in PCB design, such as the IPC footprint wizard. ### 46. Intern's review! **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ivan D. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 25, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** Easy to get your hands on, also the online '' wiki '' on their website or the manual is easy to follow and to understand. Moreover the libraries and manufacturers parts are easy to integrate and are very useful. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** Not enough tutorials on more advanced disigns online. Their YouTube channel is complete with courses however for me there should be a wider range of online tutorials. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am making a pcb suitable for a high frequency magnetic field generator. It saves me a lot of money to me a'd my company to make it on a pcb instead of buying very expensive equipment. ### 47. A great tool that takes some time to get used to **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Aviation & Aerospace | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 10, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** You can do everything! Everything that comes to your mind, from adding funny curves to pcb traces to adjusting layer thicknesses, there is a very well designed interface to achieve everything intuitively. **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** Tutorials are difficult to find. Even though the tutorials are really helpful, they should show up more intuitively. If there was a section with chatgpt embedded, it could help a lot **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** Brushless motor control card, Aerospace vehicle motherboard ### 48. Altium for Small Businesses - All your basics but Managed **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Henry C. | Team Member, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 05, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** - Component management system; - Their interpretation of version control and revision control/comments is top notch; - All the basics (schmatic, layout, adding traces) and automations on the final pcb polishes (stitching, shielding, board cutoms) - good integration with solidworks and fusion360 and other mcads; - templates in pro version are super handy - technical bug support is quality! - smooth install and setup; works on low-grade machines as well **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** - UI is clunky and slow even on decent computers however, you generally learn to deal with it the longer you play; - not compatible with macos; - component management is a clunky progress that slows down component changes; **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** component management and preventing messups when selecting parts for prototyping early on in the design process; **Official Response from Alanna Jordan:** > Thank you for sharing your positive experience with Altium Designer, especially regarding the component management system and technical bug support. We understand your concerns about the UI and compatibility, and we're committed to addressing these issues to enhance your overall experience. ### 49. an electronic engineer **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** HAIMING G. | Electronic Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 03, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** ease of use, frequency of use, customer support **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** the setup of server (svn) always have problem. **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** it provide ease of use for simple board design and easy to export file to supplier for making boards ### 50. the best Software i used in PCB design **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Airlines/Aviation | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 12, 2024 **What do you like best about Altium Develop?** Altium integrates al aspects of PCB Design into one single interface **What do you dislike about Altium Develop?** the vast number of features can be overwehlming for Begginers **What problems is Altium Develop solving and how is that benefiting you?** Avionic ## Altium Develop Discussions - [How to import and convert the OrCAD (allegro) GERBER to Altium PCB file? (reverse OrCAD GERBER to Altium PCB )?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/how-to-import-and-convert-the-orcad-allegro-gerber-to-altium-pcb-file-reverse-orcad-gerber-to-altium-pcb) - 2 comments, 1 upvote - [How do I format symbol parameters from a database library?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/how-do-i-format-symbol-parameters-from-a-database-library) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [Is there a way to modelize in 3D the Pcb designs?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/36429-is-there-a-way-to-modelize-in-3d-the-pcb-designs) - 3 comments, 1 upvote - [How do I write scripts for example.. transform a jpeg to a logo on a silk layer.](https://www.g2.com/discussions/13888-how-do-i-write-scripts-for-example-transform-a-jpeg-to-a-logo-on-a-silk-layer) - 2 comments, 1 upvote - [What is Altium 365 used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-altium-365-used-for) - 2 comments - [View Altium Develop pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/altium-develop/reviews?page=5§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-06-01+05%3A41%3A41+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=09a03cf3-0114-4b85-afde-41e3333b4117&secure%5Btoken%5D=c6f691bf9fa80a9506a48053ea5edeb2b194e8b3a218ada1a5fd1285eef93893&format=llm_user) ## Altium Develop Integrations - [Google Drive & Docs for Confluence](https://www.g2.com/products/google-drive-docs-for-confluence/reviews) - [Jira](https://www.g2.com/products/jira/reviews) - [Microsoft Access](https://www.g2.com/products/microsoft-access/reviews) - [Oracle Database](https://www.g2.com/products/oracle-database/reviews) - [Power Analyzer](https://www.g2.com/products/power-analyzer/reviews) - [SAS/OR](https://www.g2.com/products/sas-or/reviews) ## Altium Develop Features **Design** - Drawing - Modeling - Visualize - Rendering **Metadata** - Repository **Design** - PCB layout editing - Schematic editor **Tools - Mechanical Computer-aided Design (MCAD)** - 3D/solid modeling Tools - Rendering Tools - Drawing Tools - Editing Tools - Text Editing Tools **Edit** - File Import - Push/Pull - Views - Grips **Data Management** - Version Control **Tools** - 3D modeling tools - Component placement **File Options - Mechanical Computer-aided Design (MCAD)** - Export Files - Import Files - File Interoperability - Backwards compatibility - File size **Collaboration** - Annotate - Documentation - Data Extract **Library** - Component libraries **Customization - Mechanical Computer-aided Design (MCAD)** - Custom Scripts - Custom Menus - Custom Interface **Platform** - Board size - Layers **Environment - Mechanical Computer-aided Design (MCAD)** - Hardware support - Task-based interfaces - Manage Multiple Profiles - Command Clarity **Customization** - Custom interface ## Top Altium Develop Alternatives - [Autodesk Fusion](https://www.g2.com/products/autodesk-fusion/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (509 reviews) - [AutoCAD](https://www.g2.com/products/autocad/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (1,833 reviews) - [Onshape](https://www.g2.com/products/onshape/reviews) - 4.7/5.0 (682 reviews)