KiCad vs EasyEDA vs Altium: which one fits which job

EasyEDA runs in a browser, with desktop clients if you want them, and it is free. Its real advantage is what it is connected to: the LCSC parts catalogue and JLCPCB’s fabrication and assembly service. You place a part that is in stock, and the board, its bill of materials and the assembly files line up with what you will actually be sent. For a first board, that removes a whole class of mistakes.

The Standard edition is the simpler one, aimed at students and education; the Pro edition handles larger designs, adds constraint-driven design and team features, and has a full offline mode. Both include SPICE simulation. The trade-off is that the workflow is built around one supply chain. If you buy parts and boards elsewhere, the integration that makes EasyEDA easy matters less.

KiCad is free and open source under the GPL, runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, and works entirely offline. It has become a tool professionals use for real products, not only a hobbyist’s option. Version 10, released in March 2026, added design variants, time-domain length tuning for high-speed nets, a graphical rule editor and importers for Allegro and PADS, on top of a push-and-shove interactive router and SPICE simulation.

The cost is time. Libraries, footprint assignment and the board setup take a while to learn, and KiCad has no built-in autorouter: you route by hand with its interactive router, or use an external one. If you want AI help inside KiCad, the KiCad and AI guide covers the options, from MCP servers to scripting.

Altium Designer is a commercial Windows application sold by subscription, priced per seat, with a free trial; see Altium’s own pricing page for current plans, which in 2026 include tiers for individuals, teams and enterprises. What the money buys is depth: signal-integrity and constraint tools for high-speed design, managed component libraries with supply-chain data, mechanical CAD integration, and collaboration for teams working on the same product.

If you are one person building boards with a few hundred parts and no gigabit interfaces, most of that depth goes unused. If you are a team shipping DDR, PCIe or RF products to production, it is often worth more than it costs. Altium also offers CircuitMaker, a free Windows tool built on its engine, for personal projects.

Switching tools is rarely clean. KiCad imports Altium designs, and EasyEDA imports from several formats, but footprints, rules and stackups usually need fixing after an import, and libraries don’t travel perfectly. Fabrication output does travel: every one of these exports Gerber, drill, BOM and pick-and-place files, so the fab doesn’t care which you used.

• First board, ordering from JLCPCB: EasyEDA.
• Free forever, any OS, offline, open source: KiCad.
• You want a skill that carries into many jobs and open-source hardware: KiCad.
• A team shipping high-speed or regulated products: Altium.
• Altium’s engine for personal projects on Windows, free: CircuitMaker.

PCBEditor isn’t a fourth option for the same job. It covers the step before these editors: you describe the board in plain English, an AI picks the parts and intent, and deterministic algorithms build the netlist, place, route and check the board. You then export Gerbers, or open the native .kicad_pcb file in KiCad and keep working there. For a side-by-side against each tool, see PCBEditor vs KiCad, vs EasyEDA and vs Altium.