Altium Develop

What do you like best about the product?

It provides a collaborative environment for electronics design teams, making it easier to manage PCB projects, version control, design reviews, and engineering workflows. Its cloud-based collaboration and integration with the Altium ecosystem improve productivity and reduce design bottlenecks.

What do you dislike about the product?

It has a bit of a learning curve for new users, and some advanced collaboration and management features could be easier to configure. Performance can also be occasionally slow when working on very large projects.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It centralises PCB design data, simplifies collaboration across distributed engineering teams, and improves version control and project visibility. This reduces design errors, speeds up review cycles, and helps deliver hardware projects more efficiently.

What do you like best about the product?

I appreciate the task management capabilities in Altium Develop. Using structured task assignment within an agile framework creates a smoother, more predictable workflow for our firmware and hardware teams. It aligns our development cadence with the software team’s sprint planning, which improves cross‑functional coordination and helps ensure that all engineering disciplines move forward with shared priorities and clearer visibility.

What do you dislike about the product?

There was the usual learning curve that comes along with change. However, it was short and we were up and running like nothing changed.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Collaboration with a remote team. Having a centralized space where tasks, requirements, and design discussions are clearly documented reduces friction and keeps everyone aligned regardless of location.

What do you like best about the product?

Fluid and intuitive system from making parts, schematics, and PCB layout.

What do you dislike about the product?

Restricts part creation templates and lifecycle control in a arbitrary way, only available higher plans.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Gives full control of the design process in a intuitive way. Simple designs can have simple design rules, complicated designs can have complicated design rules. No need for work arounds or manual methods.

What do you like best about the product?

I like the fact that every time I have a complicated constraint, I usually find it. Not necessarily easily, but I always find it. I also appreciate the depths of the software where I can always find a way to do complicated things such as completely gated ground stitching or dealing with ground pores.

What do you dislike about the product?

I find the drawing tools in Altium Develop very cumbersome, especially compared to SolidWorks, which I also heavily use. When I draw a footprint, I'd prefer to do it like in SolidWorks, where I can pull a datasheet, draw a quick hand sketch, and apply constraints directly. I wish Altium could interpret a rough sketch and convert it into a proper footprint, just like SolidWorks does. Another frustration is the seat availability issue, which occasionally prevents me from saving my project. This has happened a couple of times and is quite frustrating, as it leads to losing work when the seat isn't available, and I can't save. Moreover, it happened a few times when I forgot to close it, causing me to lose my work by not being able to save.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I use Altium Develop because I've been trained on it. It helps me find solutions for complex constraints in PCB design, like gated ground stitching, even if it's not easy.

What do you like best about the product?

I really appreciate the component library management features, as well as the import tool.

What do you dislike about the product?

Managing the board’s 3D view is difficult. Doing translations and rotations, in particular, feels complicated and not very intuitive.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It makes designing electronic circuit boards—even very complex ones—easier for me day by day.

What do you like best about the product?

Integrated tools that work well together. Draftsmen drawings are very useful. Automated told are helpful.

What do you dislike about the product?

Bugs. There are many times that the software crashes or just doesn't work. Gotta have auto backup set or you will lose information.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Schematic design of multi-channel designs. PCB layout of RF circuits with controlled impedance taxes.

What do you like best about the product?

I find Altium Develop efficient once the libraries are complete, making the design process more fluid. Many of the features are quite helpful, particularly the circuit duplicator, which was invaluable when working on a design with 5 identical circuits. I could easily copy them in the schematic editor and use the PCB Layout Replication to achieve uniformity across the board.

What do you dislike about the product?

I find creating the libraries to be a long tedious process. While having a lot of freedom in the use of layers, it makes setting them up and getting them to be exactly the same for a layout difficult and tedious. The initial setup was a slow process of learning for me. With all the features and limited understanding of how it worked, it was hard to know how certain things operated. Some things that seem trivial after the fact, like the Objects for snapping, were not as customizable as in the previous software. Updating the PCB from the schematic or from the PCB to the schematic is tricky compared to Eagle, where both were unified so you didn't need to push them back and forth.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Altium Develop makes the design process more fluid once libraries are complete, and the circuit duplicator with PCB Layout Replication streamlines creating uniform circuits.

What do you like best about the product?

The release system has been really great for locking down versions, and paired with the Git-style control it’s been a huge win.

There are a few learning-curve aspects to the controls, but once you know where the buttons are and how the explorer is structured, designing a PCB runs fairly smoothly.

What do you dislike about the product?

Downside to Develop is the lack of API and scripted automation hooks. I have been leveraging CLI based LLMs for a while and I have to manually export files to allow the tool to properly interact with the design.

Another huge downsize in footprint creation and layout is the lack of basic 2D constraint MCAD solved this last century, and it bothers me we can't have basic reference dimension

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Cross team development and easy file handoff to other teams.

The elegant interface

Library management

It saves us time and headaches

What do you like best about the product?

Tools are build around efficiency. Pricing model is far better than it used to be prior to the "develop" tag being put in the product name. Love the changes.

What do you dislike about the product?

The internal parts library could be better -- missing a lot of components.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It feels like one integrated tool, unlike some ECAD tools that lack cohesion.

What do you like best about the product?

I like the requirements manager and the updated BOM portal. The subscription fees are also a lot less and help us as a small business

What do you dislike about the product?

I have only one seat in the subscription and I am the only user. But sometimes Altium Develop logs me out of the seat and I am forced to spend time to log in again. There isn't a fix that I can find for this and it disrupts my workflow

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We struggled with design reviews within Altium but Develop has changed that by adding requirements which can be linked to issues and the BOM portal provides more context for non-engineers