Altium Develop vs. SmartForm Comparison Chart

Pros

• The main advantage of Altium Develop is its completeness. It provides a very wide range of tools for schematic design, PCB layout, routing, design rules and overall project management, all within the same environment. The integration between the different stages of the design process makes the workflow efficient and helps reduce the need to switch between different tools. I also appreciate the depth of the features available, which makes the software suitable not only for simple boards but also for more complex professional and industrial projects. For an engineer working with PCB design on a daily basis, having such a comprehensive toolset available is a significant benefit.
• Altium Develop is the next generation of Altium PCB design software. The integration with Altium 365 makes version control and collaboration easy. New pricing structure is transparent and makes it easy for smaller teams to get started and scale up.
• It works fine and has fixed some of bugs that previously existed. Better collaboration tools for cross discipline reviewing.
• Everything is in one program. Schematic, board layout, parts library, BOM. I'm not jumping between three tools and hoping nothing gets lost in between. Drawing traces feels good once you learn the shortcuts, and the tool pushes other traces out of the way instead of just blocking you. It also warns me when a part is going out of production before I send the board out, which has saved me from having to redo a design. The 3D view makes it easy to check the board fits the enclosure.
• The price of the Altium Designer Develop seat is better than an Altium Designer seat alone and includes a wealth of useful features. The BOM health assessment and adaptive cost estimator has been particularly useful to our org. The integration with Altium 365 cloud infrastructure has also been really nice when moving between workstations
• There are a lot of features that really help with design built-in cross probing hierarchy design cost for add ons like PDN and SI are not expensive differential pair analyses
• It has many useful features, like the manufacturing part database, the harness design, and the variation. It improves my work and documentation significantly.
• The best thing about this software is its all in one quality, like you do not have to go to 10 different apps just to build one PCB its all in one and that the reason its famous in industry level manufacturing or in other areas as well. really liked it.
• As a beginner, this is great to learn because of the course Altium provides with this. The cloud support is genuinely great to use and having version control is amazing as well.
• Component libraries and manufacturer parts search means we can find the components we need with manufacturer approved footprints and have them in our design in seconds. ActiveBOM is also an excellent tool for helping us pinpoint which components are facing obsolescence or shortages so we can plan accordingly