I ditched Altium. Here's What Happened.
By the CADPreview Team · Series: KiCad is Enough
"The best solution isn't the most powerful one. It's the one that fits the purpose, delivered faster, at lower cost, without the weight of features nobody needed."
This is the idea behind everything we write here. We call it fit for purpose.
Let me start with something most electronics engineers won't say out loud:
Altium is great. And most teams don't need it.
I've worked in hardware for years, from early-stage concept all the way through compliance, manufacturing handoff, and everything in between. I've used Altium. I've appreciated Altium. And at some point, I started asking a question that made my colleagues uncomfortable:
Are we paying for this because it makes us better engineers, or because it's what we've always used?
The Tool Should Fit the Job
There's an engineering principle most of us understand instinctively when it comes to the products we build: don't overengineer. A product nobody can tell apart from a simpler version, one that cost twice as long and twice as much to deliver, isn't better engineering. It's waste.
Somehow, we forget to apply the same thinking to our own tools.
Premium EDA tools like Altium are powerful. Genuinely powerful. The constraint management, the library governance, the team collaboration infrastructure: for the right team, on the right kind of project, these features earn their cost.
But most hardware teams aren't that team. Most hardware products aren't that project.
I made a list of what I was actually using Altium for day-to-day:
- Schematic capture
- PCB layout (2–6 layers, nothing exotic)
- Generating BOM and fabrication outputs
- Sharing designs with colleagues and manufacturers
- Tracking revisions
That's it. That's most hardware development, most of the time.
And here's the uncomfortable truth: KiCad does all of that. For free.
The Switch
I won't pretend the transition was seamless. It wasn't.
KiCad's UI has a learning curve, particularly if you've spent years with Altium's workflow burned into muscle memory. The library ecosystem is different: broader in some ways, less curated in others. Some things that felt automatic in Altium require a bit more setup in KiCad.
But here's what surprised me: within a few weeks, I was productive. Within a few months, I genuinely stopped missing Altium for the work I was doing.
The designs came out the same. The manufacturers accepted the outputs. The boards worked.
The tool fit the purpose. That turned out to be enough.
The Gap That Remained
KiCad solved the design problem. It didn't solve the collaboration problem, and that's a real gap worth being honest about.
When your firmware engineer needs to check a pinout, they need KiCad installed. When your supply chain team wants to cross-reference the BOM against the schematic, they need KiCad installed. When your CEO wants to understand where the project is at, they're met with a blank stare or a PDF someone remembered to export.
Cloud-connected EDA platforms exist specifically to solve this. They give your whole team, not just the engineers, visibility into the design, the BOM, and the revision history, through a browser, without needing to learn the design tool itself.
That's a real, valuable thing. The question, consistent with everything else here, is whether the solution you choose is fit for your purpose, or whether you're carrying features and costs your team will never use.
Why We Built CADPreview
CADPreview came out of that gap.
It's a web-based viewer that connects directly to your KiCad project on GitHub. Your whole team (engineers, firmware developers, supply chain, management) gets a clear view of the design, the BOM, and the revision history. No KiCad licence required. No additional training required.
Is it a full enterprise EDA collaboration platform? No. It's a beta product, and we're honest about what it does and doesn't do yet. But for teams where KiCad fits the design work, CADPreview closes the most important remaining gap, at a cost that fits the purpose.
So, Should You Ditch Altium?
Probably not if:
- You're doing dense, high-speed designs where advanced constraint management genuinely earns its keep
- Your team is large, your library governance is strict, and deep integration features matter
- You have existing infrastructure that would cost more to migrate than to maintain
But seriously consider it if:
- You're a startup or a small team watching your budget
- Your designs are solid but not exotic, which describes the majority of real-world hardware products
- You're paying for capability your team doesn't use, on every seat, every year
The best tool is the one that lets your team ship hardware. Sometimes that's a premium platform. Often, more often than the industry admits, KiCad is enough.
What's Next
This is the first post in our KiCad is Enough series, built around a simple idea: fit for purpose engineering, applied to the tools we use every day.
Over the coming weeks:
- What KiCad genuinely can't do, and what it can, that surprises people
- How to build a £0 hardware toolchain from schematic to manufacturer
- How to use Git for hardware versioning, even if you've never touched it before
- How your non-engineer colleagues can stay in the loop without learning a new tool
If you're an electronics engineer, a CTO, or anyone involved in bringing hardware products to life, follow along. We'll try to make it worth your time.
CADPreview is a web-based viewer for KiCad projects hosted on GitHub, built for teams who want design visibility without the overhead. It's in beta, which means it's improving fast, and your feedback shapes what it becomes.