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Those two caveats aside, I still prefer Altium significantly over the competition, and would recommend it strongly.

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Ive worked with all three, and to me, Altium is the best by no small degree.

However, I find that Altium is considerably more intuitive to use, which also makes it easier to learn.

They have excellent and thorough tutorials and written documentation, as well as an extensive video library.

Cadence, for example, has a different application for each task.

So you will have to open one app to do schematic capture, another app to do PCB routing, etc.

Aside from being cumbersome, it also forces a netlist-driven workflow, which I have never liked.

It adds unnecessary complexity, and the occasional bug that comes from different developer teams being assigned to the different sub-applications.

To give you an idea of what a mess they are, if you want to rename or move your data files, and you did this via a file manager, you would break your project.

I was thrilled when I could put them aside and move to Altium.

There are two things I dont like about Altium, however: One is that theyve let their success go to their heads in terms of pricing.

They cost twice as much as they did five years ago (but still less than half of Cadence, Ill grant you).

But what really ticks me off is that unlike almost every other software application in existence, they no longer offer the first years support for free.

But then they got greedy and now they force you to pay for that first years support - and I do mean force, because they wont let you buy the product without it.

That effectively makes whatever price they quote you fraudulent, as you have no choice but to add one years maintenance fee.

This really bugs me, and has caused them to lose purchases because it really rubs people the wrong way.

The second thing I dont like is that theyve fallen into the trap of the whole cloud approach.

Theyve integrated it in several ways, including their whole Vault concept, which I have never used (nor do I want to).

In most ways, I can ignore this and just not use whatever cloud service theyre trying to push.

But the one thing I do not like is that they no longer ship Altium with a full parts library or set of locally-installed help documentation.

This is another case of what the hell were they thinking So if you use Altium on a machine with no internet access, you better hope you dont need to look up anything in their help documentation, because its all on their website.