So, keeping that price point of $900 in mind, there really weren’t any truly professional PCB design tools with a professional workflow, a wide adoption, and a knowledgeable pool of users until you were prepared to spend >$6,000 on something from Cadence, Mentor Graphics, or Altium. Moreover, once beefed up with ULPs (Scripts, effectively), Eagle was/is extremely capable and certainly affordable with free options topping out near ~$1600, although, my understanding is that most were spending ~$900.

For many years, Eagle, now from Autodesk, easily dominated the entry-level segment of the market. If you look at the landscape of rigid-flex PCB design tools prior to their release, what you’ll find are some very glaring holes from the entry point of the market to the pinnacle of the market. However, I will say that this spike in interest does somewhat validate our aspirations, and that is what I’ll try and explain here for everyone. So, despite all the activity in the blogosphere, there’s really nothing to see here. After all, it’s just good business sense.

Although we did see a spike in interest following that announcement and felt we’d make it easy for people looking to make the move. It got me thinking that perhaps we haven’t done a good job of clearly stating what our motivations are for our professional PCB design tool offerings here at Altium.įirstly, let me say that the license model change from Autodesk has had no real impact on our strategy for CircuitStudio ®. Why do you think Eagle users should take a look at Altium products?” “It’s no secret that Autodesk Eagle ® recently moved to a subscription-only model and that Altium has been running replacement discount promotions. One of the questions that came from the live-via-internet audience was: Our CMO, Ted Pawela, recently did a live interview with the folks over at Adafruit.