this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2025
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Electronics
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For hobby work altium is quite ridiculous.
I design with Altium professionally every day. It is buggy spaghetti code that they got that way by shoving more and more productivity-centered features in there with little thought.
The libraries are a complete and utter shitshow also, which is why pretty much every company just makes their own.
It works (usually) and you can design fast with it, but for someone lightly using it for hobbies, it is a massive overkill and steep learning curve to not get any benefit over KiCAD in the end unless they want to start doing multichannel complex flex-rigid designs with mechanical linked integration.
Plus for someone wanting to just do a half hour or hour of designing in their free time, the 3-5 minute startup time would also get annoying.