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Have you had to handle conversions at all? I have a project stuck in Altium I'd rather not pay to continue developing.



No, but as a former altium user who was burned by altium, if you aren't working on a team with multiple users, it is well worth the pain to get rid of altium. There are some muscle memory things you might have frustrations with the first few weeks, but it has been smooth sailing after the transition period.

My only complaint with KiCad is their library/BOM management is a bit clunky, but the fact you can automate things so much easier vs altium more than makes up for it.


I've at this point needed to convert projects between Eagle, KiCAD, OrCAD, and a few others.

I've seen Altium do decent at open EagleCAD. I've seen KiCAD do much better at opening EagleCAD. I assume KiCAD and EagleCAD work decently well with one another's file formats due to both being text based and documented.

That said, no matter how much someone paid for the software being converted from or to, I've yet to see a project that wasn't better served by starting from scratch and reproducing the design. Each tool just has a somewhat different paradigm (or default grid spacing or whatever) and like... EagleCAD symbols imported into Altium work they just suck. For example.

I've been dealing with this mess for a while. My colleague has decades worth of PCB designs trapped in OrCAD pre-cadence. I've been pushing him to EagleCAD, and have been pushing myself towards KiCAD for over a year. Now I'm telling him "hey, it's closer to orcad" and "the HTML BOM will make your life way easier training grad students" and "the package library is way more reliable" and these are legitimate honest-to-god features that are convincing to an experienced designer.

You see enough proprietary tools like this get the death knell and you learn to recognize the signs I guess. This one was pretty obvious and thankfully y'all have three years to download KiCAD ASAP, use it for every single project from here on out, gradually transition legacy documents in every CAD system to KiCAD. For once in my life I'll have some well-grounded confidence that my designs are safe and highly likely to still be usable in ten years when I badly need to debug them and create a new board revision.


Honestly, we had a bit trouble converting Altium projects to KiCad and kind of gave up on it. Probably also depends on complexity of the board and maybe we just need to invest more time into it. But for now we have to maintain a Altium license for older boards. All the new stuff we build in KiCad.




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