alternatives to eagle

[Anonymous]

Like me I'm sure many of you were using Eagle precisely because they did NOT have screw-your-customer-subscription-model.

I have been an eagle customer since 1.0.  I use to get tech support directly from Klaus 🙂  I'm so freaking disappointed.

I'll have to use 7.6.0 for the time being.  It seems stable enough that it may be good enough for my work for at least a couple of more years, maybe longer.

So I am looking for recommendations for a different schematic capture/board layout program.  The choices are getting quite thin.  A lot of ridiculously expensive pay-for-it-all-the-time programs out there.

I'll start things off with KiCAD which I have already seen mentioned several times.

http://kicad-pcb.org/

i have not used it yet, but I'll certainly be trying it out soon.

RIP Eagle.

[mihavin]

Thank you for the link. I am moving out from Eagle. And will never back again to Autodesk. I am also working in software company, and 100% sure, that is not a way to serve a customer.

[Anonymous]

I absolutely agree with BGM that Autodesk should have seen this coming long before the release of Eagle 8.



The cleanest solution I can imagine that would have allowed the complete transition to the subscription model, but would not have irreparable damaged the relationship to existing customers would have been to offer perpetual licenses and subscriptions concurrently for a clearly communicated interim period.

This would have been similar to the "last buy" option that semiconductor vendors offer their customers for an end of life product.



To me the switch of license options without prior announcement and without a grace period for existing customers is highly unprofessional. As Autodesk is no small company where such a mistake can be the responsibility of a single employee, I can only conclude that this was intentional to force customers into the new model. Again, this is highly unprofessional and shows that they either have no confidence in the future product development, or that they intentionally accepted to disturb their customers' business for short term sales.

A semiconductor vendor that does this would be out of busyness soon, considering the damage this situation causes for the clients which become unable to support/continue their products.

Considering the importance of ECAD software for product support, I see no reason why an ECAD vendor should be judged by different standards.

It is ironic that Autodesk offers solutions for product lifecycle management, but is unable to implement even the simplest PLM measures for a newly acquired software product. Failing to see that changing the license terms is for many customers no different than discontinuing the product is unacceptable for a software vendor specialized in professional software.



Consequently we have blacklisted Autodesk as we would blacklist a semiconductor vendor that fails us in such a critical way. I can only encourage everyone to think carefully whether to build their busyness on a vendor that cannot keep promises made six months ago, cannot communicated important changes in advance and does not care at all about the fallout this causes for their existing customers.

[Anonymous]

Hi All,

This is the first time I have been on this forum.  At first I thought maybe it was a good thing that Eagle got absorbed into AutoDesk, how ever this subscription licensing scheme is so out of place with the thinking of the users that are originally attracted to eagle.  

I have been using eagle since dirt was formed, so this is disappointing for me.  The means that the support was provided by Ed and Jorge was excellent and the software useful and effective.  For now I will use what I have and hope you guys decide to provide a purchase model as before, otherwise I too may have to find an alternative.

All the Best,

Greg

[Anonymous]

Since my previous post has disappeared (possibly it wasn't constructive enough, though it was IMHO as polite and constructive as it gets considering the circumstances), I'll leave out most of my personal opinion. It would be nice to get some feedback when posts are deleted.. but well.

I suggest that Autodesk improves their policy how changes to Eagle and the terms and conditions of its usage and licensing are communicated in the future.

I'm not sure many people will continue to invest in Eagle if they can't be sure that important changes are communicated in advance and with enough time for customers to react. Much of the harsh reactions could have been avoided with a grace period for existing customers during which perpetual licenses would have been available as well.

As an engineer I'm used to getting product change notices before a semiconductor vendor discontinues a part or even before slight changes are made to IC markings. Therefore I might expect to be granted some reaction time when a fundamental change is being made to a software product I have paid for in the past. Since this has not been the case with Eagle, I have to deal with this situation in a much more drastic way. I would have happily paid for a few more perpetual licenses, but now I'll have to look elsewhere.

[jorge_garcia]

Hi @Anonymous,

Thank you for participating, I looked into your disappearing post and it looks like it was a technical glitch on our end, we apologize for the confusion. You should see that the post is back.

I wish to thank you for your suggestions and for taking the time to post them in the professional manner that you have.

Best Regards,

[Anonymous]

Hi Jorge,

thank you for your kind words.

You yourself show a very professional manner. I can't even tell whether you really have confidence in the new licensing model, or whether this is just the corporate statement that you have to convey, while you might have different opinions.

I appreciate that you continue to discuss the issue with us "angry customers", no matter how often arguments are repeated. While I admire your attitude, it is a bit saddening that you have not been given more authority and tools to resolve the individual problems we have with the transition, let alone the ability to remove the root cause.

As it is, the whole discussion seems a bit pointless. Don't get me wrong, I don't think this is your fault. But it seems no Autodesk employee communicating with Eagle customers is in a position where they have the slightest chance of resolving the conflict or shaping the future license development. 

Thus the only way for us customers to make our point heard is not to enter the subscription model. I just hope that someone up the hierarchy draws the right conclusion and changes the license, instead of abandoning the whole project. But maybe we are the ones in error and the new license model will be a success. I'm only certain that it won't work for me and that I'm not the only one.

Best Regards,

  Sven

[Anonymous]

I found this link in Google:

http://www.cadsoft.de/download/

[Anonymous]

oh, wow! this sucks!

I've never used Eagle before, but surely I wont even try it now... (I've been using autocad for decades since 1997 back in high school, "AutoCAD12") But for design I had always prefer "ArchiCAD" from Graphisoft.

[Anonymous]

---

@edwin.robledo wrote:

Hi Copperwheel,

...If you kept your EAGLE license progressively current, the investment is almost the same...
Best Regards,

Ed

---

Except that most people do not and have never done that. This is what is actually happening: you observed that people do not, in fact, constantly upgrade every time they could. To maximize profits, you figured out a way to extract the amount of money from subscription that you would have gotten if people had been upgrading constantly. That is the reason the numbers match.

To compare those numbers and claim that the "investment is the same" is highly disingenuous, and that alone has convinced me to ditch Eagle. The numbers you're throwing at us are based on the preposterous assumption that we would ever have purchased upgrades on day one.

You weren't able to force customers to modify their behavior to buy every release religiously, so you found a monetization scheme that would profit you just as much. As always, you're reducing your costs and increasing your profits. Nobody is convinced otherwise. Now you're shoveling out a steaming pile of marketing to sell the idea to the customer. "No really, you don't want what you think you want. You want this."

But feel free to tell me more about how increasing my costs and tying me to a contract is improving my service as I walk away. It doesn't matter. the decision has been made on both sides.

[Anonymous]

Nope, your observation does not match the observation of many other people, there was a man calculating that this move even saves him several thousand USD over the years.

And for the case of PAYG, you haven't shown the math. Even in the case of a pro user, who had installed the very much professional Altium, they kicked the Altium out due to uselessness of the controls, for much cheaper and from the simple user standpoint, more capable, Eagle.

I do not see the point of crying over this, tere are licenses that match your needs, for example the Target (or what was the SW name?, I keep forgetting), where you can buy your software and have it, for just 999 USD.

But in my development work, I prefer the software updates and extensive instant backannotation, and ability to request and get features. What do I pay? 1000 USD over 10 years.

It doesn't seem so different, the main differences are: pay in advance for a version you can own, or pay as you go (or don't) if you don't like the version you get.

The other difference is of course the susceptibility to a country-wide internet connection loss, which always can happen.

[Anonymous]

Bugfixes: the bugfixes I received over the past month make me shut up about the subscription model. I can't imagine working with the 8.0.0 compared to 8.2.2

The heck, do you know how much does it cost to have someone fix your computer? And now I'm paying for maintenance, bugfixes, libraries, and new features just around 10 euros per month. For people who smoke, that's many times their daily dose of nicotine. I'm tired of fighting an ideological war, I want to have results.

[Anonymous]

I can certainly sympathize with those who are objecting to the new subscription model for Eagle CAD. I think what really gets me is the "we're doing this to benefit the consumer" corporate-speak I'm seeing in these posts. People who use Eagle are pretty smart and treating them like 6th graders being talked into eating healthy foods doesn't make friends or loyal customers.

I pay the subscription for Adobe Creative Cloud because there is a value to having all those pieces of software. For the cost of one title, I can work with all the titles. And the more titles I work with, the more loyal a customer I become. I'm thrilled to send Adobe my money because of what I can do with their tools. Everyone wins. I'm not sure that's happening here. Ultimately, we'll have to wait and see what Autodesk does with the big sack of gold they get from subscriptions. If a healthy chunk of it is spent on improving the tool and developing new functionality, hopefully with user input, then I'll probably stick around.

I'm concerned Autodesk will do something crazy like they did with 123D Design. They killed an amazing design application, forcing teachers like me to change tools half way through the school year without the slightest warning. (The announcement said it would continue to be available, but this was not true for the Mac platform, as the title was immediately pulled from the Apple App Store.) It made LOTS of teachers very angry and many abandoned the Autodesk family of products vowing never to be set up like that again. I think that's unfortunate because Autodesk does have good tools. But the sales and marketing side of the operation seems to be a little tone deaf sometimes.

My students will be coming back to school soon, so it's time to make decisions about what software will be used in my classroom, which will ultimately affect what tools they choose to use as professionals in the field. We'll see how it all turns out!

[Anonymous]

Prior to the "software as service model", I'd have recommended Autodesk's software as the best for almost anything they do. Now I don't know what to say.

[rachaelATWH4]

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@mfordSB8UV wrote:

Ultimately, we'll have to wait and see what Autodesk does with the big sack of gold they get from subscriptions. If a healthy chunk of it is spent on improving the tool and developing new functionality, hopefully with user input, then I'll probably stick around. 

---

I do understand peoples concerns, especially initially when the subscription model was first announced, but EAGLE has moved forward with new features more in the last 6 months than they did in years with their previous ownership. I can see a huge amount of effort being put into making EAGLE a much more feature rich product and look at v8.3, with the integration with Fusion 360. That's a really important step forward I believe. Yes we need more in the routing engine and some of the other routing features they added like obstacle avoidance need a lot more work still (e.g. making it grid aware) but it's going in the right direction.

It seems to me that Autodesk have actually put their money where their mouth is and are investing heavily in this product which is great.

Best Regards,

Rachael

[jarlgjessing]

Fantastic, I will give DipTrace a go NOW!

Looks really promising.

The new licensing scheme and the fact that i MUST be online to use my designs is defenetly not going to work for me.

It saddens me that big companies buy products like this and turns them into "mainstream" versions...

Unfortunatelly we see this more and more, again and again.

Bye bye Eagle 😞 hello DipTrace 🙂

[rachaelATWH4]

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@jarlgjessing wrote:

The new licensing scheme and the fact that i MUST be online to use my designs is defenetly not going to work for me.

---

It is absolutely NOT a fact that you must be online to use your designs. It is a fact that you need to be online to validate your license when you install a new version and if you are a standard or premium subscriber you will need to do this at least every two weeks to maintain your subscription benefits but beyond that you can still operate EAGLE in freeware mode if you can't get online to revalidate your license. The above statement is just not at all correct.

Good luck with Diptrace. Personally, having seen how fast new features are coming into EAGLE now I am more than happy to continue with it. If Autodesk had come along and put the subscription licensing in place but kept the feature addition rate the same as the CADSoft days it might be a different matter but just look at what has been added in the time between v8.0 and v.8.5. They've put their money where their mouth is and it's paying off in terms of how fast the product is improving.

Best Regards,

Rachael

[Anonymous]

"Between a rock and a hard place
is where you'll always be,
cast down into the deep blue sea."

Seriously, there is no way out.

[Anonymous]

the new eagle license is clearely a rip off   (I used version 6 and version 7)

it is time to stop using this product

for this license we don't even have a 3D view by default...

kicad is probably the best alternative

but if other product exists I'm interested...

kicad is not limited and has a 3D view by default

[wingedpower]

I've tried KiCad and every time I try it, I encounter serious stability
issues when running it on Mac OS X. -_-;;

[rachaelATWH4]

---

@Anonymous wrote:

the new eagle license is clearely a rip off   (I used version 6 and version 7)

it is time to stop using this product

for this license we don't even have a 3D view by default...

kicad is probably the best alternative

but if other product exists I'm interested...

kicad is not limited and has a 3D view by default

---

If you previously purchased EAGLE under the old fixed licensing scheme and upgraded every 2-3 years when a new version came out the overall cost didn't work out too much different to the cost of the subscription. The main difference is now the cost can be spread out and you can take a break from paying if you don't need it for a while. Granted if you don't pay you revert to the free license but then that's how the world is going. Under the old system Cadsoft couldn't make enough money and the product stagnated. Now it's full of new features and it hugely more capable than it was.

With regard to 3D view by default. Well, it does integrate pretty seamlessly with Fusion360 and you can get a 3D view from there quite easily. If you are a hobbyist or a startup with turnover less than $100k (or equivalent) then you can get Fusion360 for free.

If you want to use Kicad, feel free, you could also try Circuit Studio if you fancy a drastically cut down version of Altium with next to zero support. Alternatively, maybe actually try EAGLE and see how it's progressed? You'll get far better support from the Autodesk EAGLE support team and the community here than you will for pretty much any other PCB package.

Best Regards,

Rachael