There are many PCB Design software available in the market. It is not easy to find list of all software and price information at one place, I have searched online and tried to collect all the information at once place so it is easy reference for you.
Commercial Softwares
| Altium | ~7000$ |
| Altium Student | ~99$ |
| Circuit Studio | ~495$ |
| Cadence Orcad | ~1500 |
| Cadence Allegro | N/A |
| Mentor Pads PowerPCB | ~9000$ |
| Mentor Xpedition | N/A |
| Autodesk Eagle | 100$ / 520$ |
| Diptrace | 75-995$ |
| Zuken CR3000/8000 | N/A |
| Proteus | ~200-6000$ |
| Pulsonix | N/A |
| EasyEDA | 4.9-9.9$ pm |
| Easy-PC | 300-500P |
| Ultiboard | ~2500 |
| SolidWorks | N/A |
| Circuit Wizard | 69-89$ |
| ED WinXP | N/A |
| Pantheon PCB (RF) | N/A |
Design Software on Cloud
Some other useful links to refer:
Which PCB Design Software is the best?
Now the big question, when you have so many choices which one to choose. My advice is if you can afford, go for Altium Designer otherwise KiCad or Autodesk Eagle are the next best options.
One of the biggest reason I propose Altium is, it is very easy to use and it will improve your productivity significantly.
I can guarantee, you can compare it with other available softwares in the market. Also, if you see their last 3 year updates, all are focused on to improve the productivity and to empower engineers be more productive. Altium Designer allows engineers to focus on their design not to figure out how to implement design aspect using the tool. Just see their draftsman feature, interactive routing, etc. to start with.
Actually, you must try Altium to realize this fact.
If you don’t find a PCB Design software listed here or you have latest price information, please let me know, I will update.
Yes I agree, both knowledge about PCB Design and the tool are equally important.
I did try CircuitMaker a while ago and in the end chose to go with Eagle, don’t remember why, but I’ll try CircuitMaker again and see if the present version is better.
Thanks!
I’ve used Autodesk Eagle with a student license all this while. But nowadays I’ve seen a lot of instances of people on the internet switching to KiCad because it is free and open source. I too think the time has come for me to make the move to KiCad. I’m aware of the fact that KiCad has a slightly different workflow than Eagle and is harder to use.
As of now I can’t consider paid options like Altium. So in the long run will expertise in a proprietary or an open source tool be more useful? Which is used more in the industry, Eagle or KiCad?
See in PCB Designing, Tool is one thing and technical knowledge about PCB Design is another. KiCAD is a good option is you cannot afford Altium, another option is the Student version if you are still with a university.
Did you see free options? CircuitMaker is another good tool
Circuit Maker is having lot of serious bugs as June 2022 & company main support fellows says we are still noy able to solve it and working on it. There is limit of 5 projects and you can download project locally and hence delete / publish one project if want to continue with new one. Automating is very slow. Kicad with free autorouting software available on https://www.freerouting.org/ which can be easily interfaced with KIcad is obe of the option for those how want free pcb design software