[theatrus2]

KiCad is getting better and better. At this point Altium is copying features _from_ KiCad, so you know the competition is real :).

Altium is still a Delphi-ish program, though with lots of things now just compiling to .Net. The core layout package has always been solid with a very small core developer group running it which is really more what its known for. The library management parts with collaboration are actually getting a lot better (ECAD<->MCAD, etc).

Altium gained tons of weird stuff with a super weird push to "FPGAs for everything", a giant off-shore (not Australian or Carlsbad) development team, and... all of that crash and burned and no actual customer actually understood what was happening. Much of that legacy is still in parts, but most of the features have been removed by now.

[spacedcowboy]

If you need it, the field solver for high-speed diff pairs in Altium is head and shoulders above the approximation techniques in the online tools - which never agree with each other anyway. Kicad is no better than the online ones.

The price of a standalone field solver (which would be more capable than Altium’s, for sure) is more than the price of Altium…

Given that an FPGA can output a lot of diff pairs at pretty high speeds these days, even us hobbyists can have a need for this sort of tech.

[samtho]

99% of the time, I’m routing CMOS logic, i2c, SPI, maybe a CAN network here or there. I have maybe 10 projects where I worked with anything so critical that it required the most precise diff pair length matching. I think SRAM was the only that actually was affected by lackadaisically ran diff pairs.

Even then, KiCAD has successfully guided me to routing a number of signals that are capable of data transmission well into the megahertz range.

[ilyt]

Yeah. If you need it. Which in most times is resounding "well it would save me some time but not really, I can get by".