What do you like best about SolidWorks PCB?
Having the full workflow in one application. Component creation, schematic, and layout can all be happening in parallel in tabs. I like that you can use multiple windows on multiple monitors.
The "PCB Inspector" feature is powerful and lets you edit many components at once. Integrated version control is a big time saver and I have never lost any work. The ability to deactivate/reactivate license is handy for working on multiple computers. Good features for complex schematics and PCBs with many layers, like the ability to click stacked items and pick one out of the middle is nice. Really great UI for building curved traces.
The query builder for design rules is fantastic, it can really pull off some elegant solutions. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about SolidWorks PCB?
There were a few obvious hotkeys that are sorely miss. For example, the most frequently used tool in schematics (the Wire tool) is missing. Every other PCB software I have used has this shortcut (Eagle, DipTrace, even free Android or browser based circuit sandbox apps have this).
Switching tabs is painfully slow. Like go get a drink and come back slow. I have a modern custom PC whose resources all stay below 10% when switching tabs in Solidworks. The horsepower is there, Solidworks PCB just doesn't use it for switching tabs. Other than that performance is great.
The UI can be ambiguous about whether wires are connected or not. Most editors let you view the "top" of the pcb or the "bottom", but in solidworks PCB you have to laboriously turn the 6 or so bottom layers off to get a full view of the top, and vice versa. Or settle for just viewing one layer at a time. This really gets in the way when trying to reconcile collisions between say, silkscreen and solder mask layers. You're constantly switching between top and bottom as you go through the design rule check, but you have to turn off 6 or so layers every time you jump from top to bottom.
Only 20 "undos" is stingy. I hit that limit all the time, and look at my many GB of unused RAM, and think, "why?"
I was really turned off when Solidworks canceled the online licensing for Solidworks PCB. I had tried multiple times over a year to get it set up, but the process to set it up was so convoluted and the documentation failed to provide working steps. I reached out to my distributor for help and they said the feature was being phased out because no one was using it. Well duh, no one is using it because no one can figure out how to set it up. But I'm really hurting for this feature. I have a long commute to work and its super stressful that if I forget one time to go through the extra dance of manually deactivating the license, I could have to drive for an hour just to go home and deactivate the license so I can come back to work and actually work. If I'm going to pay premium price for design software, this is a feature I expect. All competitors that I know of (Altium, Eagle) offer this feature, and it is industry standard (think Adobe, Office, Autodesk). It's also tone deaf to be canceling this remote work feature when more people are working from home than ever.
I was not impressed by the Solidworks integration. We chose Solidworks PCB specifically because my boss is a mechanical engineer who designs in Solidworks, and we wanted the seamless sharing experience. But when he imported my PCB into solidworks, it was an uneditable block of geometry. So we can't see any value over the typical workflow where the circuit board 3D file is exported as a .step and imported into Solidworks. We stopped using the integrated PCB tool and just share .step files now because it's easier.
Solidworks PCB has this very bulky PCB Services server that is a lot of work to set up, but I honestly can't see any benefit to it. If you're going to make me set up a server, I at least expect to be able to share my component libraries across multiple machines. But no, you have to go into Tortoise SVN and manully pull out each component library, open it in Solidworks PCB, and compile it locally. Repeat for every library, multiply by every time the library is modified. There's also no warning if you're using an out-of-date version of a component. It would have been easier for me just to put the libraries in a shared folder.
Documentation and community are poor. Can't get answers in the Solidworks PCB forum. I'm always having to google the steps for "Altium" instead of Solidworks PCB"
If you are going to have your PCB populated by automated SMT equipment (pick and place machine) definitely avoid solidworks PCB. The pick and place export dialogue is the absolute bare minimum. There are no options to customize the columns, origin, suffixes, etc. We had to write custom python scripts to post-process the solidworks PCB pick and place files so that our pick and place machine could use them. Contrast that with free PCB software like Diptrace that gives you a full page of settings to format in detail and achieve compatability with picky pick-and-place machines. Altium as well gives you a full page of settings.
There are much cheaper alternatives, which will get the work done much faster, and with much less banging your head against the wall by yourself. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
