What Is Altium 365, and Why Does Your Team Want It?
By the CADPreview Team · Series: The Hardware Budget
"The right question isn't whether a tool is good. The right question is what problem it solves, for whom, and whether the cost is proportionate."
Your hardware team has mentioned Altium 365. Maybe in a budget conversation, maybe on an invoice you didn't quite follow. Either way, you need to understand what you're being asked to pay for.
Two Things With Similar Names
Altium Designer is the design software your hardware engineers use to draw schematics and lay out circuit boards. It is expensive, powerful, and the engineers who know it tend to know it very well.
Altium 365 is a separate cloud platform built on top of it. Its job is to connect the design work to the rest of your organisation, the people who aren't engineers and don't have Altium installed, which is almost everyone.
When your team asks for Altium 365, they are usually asking for both. That matters when you look at the total cost.
What It Does
Four things worth understanding.
Design visibility. Anyone with a browser can view the schematic, the board layout, and the bill of materials without installing anything. They can comment and ask questions without interrupting the engineering team or waiting for an export.
Version history. Every revision is recorded automatically. You get a complete, timestamped history of every change. Useful when something goes wrong, or when a compliance question surfaces six months later.
Centralised component library. Approved parts go in. Unapproved parts don't get used without a process. This matters for supply chain resilience and manufacturing consistency.
Integration with business systems. For larger organisations, Altium 365 connects to PLM platforms that link engineering design into procurement and manufacturing planning.
What It Costs
Altium 365 is structured in three layers. There is a shared Workspace at £860 per year, which is required to use the platform at all. On top of that, each engineer who needs to design costs £860 per seat per year. People who only need to view and comment, your firmware team, supply chain, programme managers, are called Collaborators and are free.
For a team of four engineers, that comes to £4,300 per year. Reasonable, for what it is, if your team is already committed to Altium Designer as the design tool.
The Real Question
Altium 365's Collaborator tier being free is a genuine strength of the platform. If your engineers are using Altium Designer anyway, giving the rest of the business visibility into the design at no additional cost is a good deal.
The question is whether your engineers need Altium Designer in the first place. If your team uses KiCad, you are not buying into the Altium ecosystem at all, and the visibility problem still needs solving by other means.
Right now, that visibility problem is almost certainly being solved badly. Design files are too large for email. PDFs get exported, sent over Slack, and are out of date within a week. Nobody is quite sure which version is current. Someone asks the firmware engineer about a pinout and the answer comes back three hours later with a screenshot of a schematic from two revisions ago. The problem is not that the information doesn't exist. The problem is that the information lives on one person's machine and getting it out requires interrupting them.
CADPreview connects directly to your KiCad project on GitHub. Anyone with access sees the current schematic, layout, and bill of materials in a browser, without installing anything. No exports, no Slack attachments, no email threads with v3_FINAL in the filename. The design stays current, and the engineers don't have to do anything to make that happen.
Questions Worth Asking
Is your team on Altium Designer? If yes, Altium 365 Collaborators being free changes the conversation significantly. If no, the visibility problem and the design toolchain problem are separate and deserve separate answers.
Which specific features are driving the request? Visibility, library governance, and constraint management are different problems with different price tags. If the answer is a general "it would make everything better," probe further.
What does your team actually design? Altium 365's strongest value sits at high complexity, large teams, and formal governance requirements. If your products are solid but not exotic, which describes most real world hardware, the value proposition is weaker than the sales materials suggest.
The Short Version
If your engineers are already on Altium Designer, Altium 365 is a reasonable way to bring the rest of the business into the loop, and the Collaborator tier being free makes the maths work. If your team uses KiCad, you are solving a different problem, and the answer does not need to cost £4,300 a year before anyone has drawn a single track.
Either way, the version of the design living in a PDF buried in an email thread from six weeks ago is not a solution. It is the problem.
CADPreview is a web based viewer for KiCad projects hosted on GitHub. Connect your repo once, share a link, and your whole team sees the current design in a browser, without installing anything.