Our Path Forward

[edwin.robledo]

Hi,

We want to let you know how much we appreciate your participation in the Autodesk EAGLE forum. Your questions and comments are of great value to us.

Many of you have noticed that most of our development team's energy has been focused on expanding the capabilities of Fusion 360 to include electronics. Fusion 360 natively has many of the features you have requested. Our goal is to create a seamless experience that unlocks new product development opportunities for advanced innovation. This strategic move will provide unparalleled user efficiency, empowering you with the cutting-edge technology needed to succeed in today's competitive market.

Today we officially announce our 3-year plan moving forward with Autodesk EAGLE. Please follow this link to a blog for more information and visit our knowledge page to access our Frequently Ask Question document.

Best Regards,

Edwin Robledo

[kostkaV5ARK]

It's unfortunate that Autodesk is pushing a solution with mandatory and exclusive cloud storage, a complete non-starter for many customers. Time to find alternatives.

[fosterbFJ7DL]

Can y'all let the Linux version die a natural death rather than revoking our ability to use the software? There is no viable transition path for those users.

[csvanberg]

"Your questions and comments are of great value to us."

Mmmmkay...

Who was asking for pushing "electronics" into a mechanical CAD program?

Mechanical engineers? Hobbyists?

What percentage of Electronic Engineers pushed for this move?

Unless you can prove otherwise I'd say this was a d**k move by the tone deaf Ivory Tower guys.

Clearly in the comments, committed long time EagleCAD users have no use for a mediocre mechanical CAD package.

The layout of Autodesk's site is clearly designed for investors and finance guys.

I'm sure EagleCAD is not a big part of Autodesk's focus.  Divest EagleCAD to another company that actually cares for its user base.

AutoCAD got a big slapping when Solidworks came into the picture ~30 years ago , their response was desperate and toxic. I hope those types are gone.

[jorge_garcia]

Hi @fosterbFJ7DL,

We are working on an interim solution for that. Stay tuned.

Best Regards,

[rg.jones]

I currently pay $146 CAD for Fusion 360 with Eagle Standard subscription. According to your blog post I have to subscribe to just Fusion 360 starting next year. Currently the cost for that privilege is

So in 2024 I will start paying just over triple for the same thing and then once Autodesk decides they don't need to offer any discount then I can expect to pay almost 5x what I am paying now for a lot of extra functionality in Fusion 360 I will never ever use? Sorry guys, I moved from Eagle to Autodesk subscription as I was interested in some new functionality but when this drops ... I will have to look for alternatives and it gives me pause now to even consider moving any of my previous designs from Eagle to Fusion.

[csvanberg]

Fusion360 makes no sense whatsoever. I have said this before.

Fusing PCB design with Mechanical CAD makes it harder for both, technically and financially.

A bug in one section will affect both. Cost of development and support increases.

This comes from my pocket, not Autodesk's.

Mechanical Engineers DO NOT PRODUCE PCB's, and Electrical Engineers do not make full mechanical designs, only need minimal boundary specs for packaging.

There has been no updates for EagleCAD for several years, although some thing can be improved,but basically it works, as is.

Me paying for Mech. CAD is a waste of money, and I guess that's were these fees for this programs goes to, I'm not onboard with this.

Which of the top PCB programs integrate full mechanical design? Altium/Protel? Pads? Orcad? Allegro/Cadence?

Please get a clue.

[isaac_s6000]

This has absolutely ruined my year. I design PCBs and have no use for mechanical CAD. For my needs Fusion360 is very expensive and runs unusably slow on my machine.

The cloud aspect is bewildering to me. Who benefits from all your customers' projects being stored on your server? It doesn't make any sense to me to mandate it.
I started using EAGLE around 2015 as a hobbyist and last year began paying for a commercial licence as I worked on designs for my small business I just started last month.
This licence expired in May when our household had had more urgent financial commitments and when I try to get back to work I find the software I create with is no longer available.
What do I do now?
Earlier this year I was excitedly preparing to transform my hobby into an income source and now the uncertainty makes me feel sick.

Fusion360 is not suitable for my work. I know and love EAGLE. It feels like I've been robbed.

[fosterbFJ7DL]

isaac_s6000, I've used eagle since the early 2000s. I feel ya. KiCad is the
future. I appreciate having Eagle for all these years, but it's time for us
to learn something new. I've heard a lot of good things about KiCad in
recent years, but have put off learning it.

[liudrelectronicsolutionsllc]

I've used EAGLE for over a decade and have EAGLE 6 commercial license for business so I was quite disappointed that AutoCAD took over and even more disappointed when AutoCAD put EAGLE into a subscription-only type of service, no more perpetual licenses. You basically learn a technical language that you can only speak while your license is active and you stop speaking it once your license expires (someone pointed out not able to open things with expired license). Now that AutoCAD has decided to discontinue EAGLE, it's like the ground is sinking into an ocean for me. If that feels like the same for you, I'd recommend hopping onto KiCAD. It's the nearest island although not a great one. I have a book I can read to learn it. No auto router means more manual routing. I used to have issues with parts library but now major parts vendors offer most parts library in KiCAD besides other software. I'm sure I can transition as edwin mentioned, away from AutoCAD in less than 3 years. I can start with the book, then remake a simple design, and go on from there.

[nekuneko]

I really hope Autodesk would reconsider this decision of merging all to Fusion360. I'm really sorry but I'm not moving to Fusion 360 on any case, I already have tried to use it several times but it is a slow program and difficult to use.

Autodesk Inventor and EAGLE are perfect solutions for offline use and super easy to use. We Engineers are not interested on a unflexible cloud storage solution, we and most of people already have our own cloud/local storage and version control implemented on our own servers/computers. Also each person has his own way to organize its work in folders. Using the Autodesk unflexible cloud storage doesn't provide to us any advantage, it's just break our workflow. A designer usally works in solitaire not in a collaborative way. We just need a quick offline access to our data, not depending having internet connection to modify a file, this is absolutely awful and inneficient. Also we usually work with several designs at the same time, just for compare parts, libraries, or schematics, using Fusion360 is limited on working at just one project without being able to compare files with other projects easily. I only can see drawbacks on Fusion360.

Unfortunately like other people have already said what you are doing with this decision is pushing us to move to another PCB cad solutions with offline use as Kicad or Altium, so I think your are meaning that our paths will split forward on 2026.

[csvanberg]

Reading Edwin's blog post how great he this thinks this idea is,  makes me wonder how much user input was involved with this departure.

The blog post looks like the self adulating verbiage has been toned down, but is still is full of tone deaf verbiage, ...our strategy.., ...our intent..., ..our end goal.., ...we needed..., ... we are confident...,  etc.

What is this self-proclaimed confidence based on? Do you have and hard statistical user input to support this?

How may samples were used, how many years of product experience among user samples?

While Fusion360 mechanical remains free to tinkerers, it is financed by the PCB revenue from people and businesses who did not want or ask for this.

All development of PCB improvements has been frozen for 5 years(?), while the payments have not stopped.

[melisa.kaner]

Hi there - 

We really appreciate your time in the forum and your time helping us understand your thoughts on this topic. We are focusing our energy primarily on Fusion as we believe it to be the solution for integrated smart product development. 

I understand and greatly value that you are all long-standing EAGLE customers and can appreciate the impact this has had on your day-to-day. 

To that end, I'd really love to ensure I understand all the thoughts on this topic more deeply - if anyone is open to a quick call to discuss, please send me a DM. 

Best regards, 

Melisa

[liudrelectronicsolutionsllc]

@melisa.kanerI've been teaching college students for about two decades, countless engineering students. I think that making a "smart integrated system between electrical and mechanical designs" is delusional. The whole educational system doesn't change at the whims of your marketing VPs or innovation departments. Let me reiterate, the undergraduate educational system does NOT change because a company like yours decides that ECE and MME should have a combined software suite! Integrating these elements have edge cases that benefit some but is a major drawback for most. Also as many pointed out, they are using the fusion software's partial capability only but must pay for the whole, myself included. You risk losing a large amount of subscriptions based on unrealistic expectations that "if you make it then they will use it". There are now feature-rich PCB cad software that are open source or free to use, such as KiCad. And the electronics vendors have caught on quickly with parts libraries which was my one reason against migrating to KiCad. This reason is no longer valid with the offering of library parts in KiCad formats. Take a look at what they offer (incomplete):

Did any of these similar product decide to "smart integrate" or is it just you? Is the Veep that pitched this "brillent" idea even still working for your company? Last time I looked, these Veeps are like fk tourists. They come to one place, act like they own the place, take selfies to prove important things they've started. Then before you can hold them responsible for the trash they littered, they've gone to the next spot already.

[melisa.kaner]

 Hi @liudrelectronicsolutionsllc , 

Thank you for taking the time to detail this out

Regarding your specific feedback on libraries & data ingestion, I'm tagging in my colleague @andy_robertsTPP84 for this topic specifically and he'll be reaching out to learn + understand more. 

Best regards, 

Melisa 

[csvanberg]

"...we believe it to be the solution for integrated smart product development. "

It does not matter what you believe, regardless of some invented marketing buzz phrases.

It will not be smart if you lose your customer base.

[skellerGCJ4L]

Autodesk in their stupidity is forcing me to migrate away from Eagle 9.6.  Since I have to go through the work of migrating I will not be migrating to Fusion Electronics.  Why should I?  Can you guarantee that Fusion Electronics will be available in 3 years, 5 years, or 10 years?  In my opinion, your company is beholden to your accountant and marketing departments.  At the first sign of difficulty or lack of growth in the Fusion Electronics product, it will get killed.  Autodesk is fickle with its products and can't be trusted for my company's long-term success.  I will probably go with a more stable company like Altium.  They have a long history of only doing PCB design software.  I might even consider KiCAD, while open source isn't my favorite option at least I can count on more long-term support.

[burba74ASC]

The same pcb opened in Fusion and Eagle.
Fusion takes 40 times more memory. Does it provide 40 times the functionality?
I am an electical engineer just making pcb's - no mechanical designs. Fusion does not give me any advantage compared to Eagle.
Please let me know what will happen if you end Eagle in 2026. How does this end look like?

Can it still be started and used or can't it even be started at all?
If you just end the support - then it's about the same like now as there was no new Eagle version since many years.

Fusion is unusable for me. It's slower compared to Eagle taking much more resources (and money, too) and I also don't like the cloud storage.
I cannot imagine that ANY electrical engineer knowing Eagle likes the Fusion integration.

In my opinion the best path forward would be to revert back to separate solutions.

[Pieter.Jan.Van.de.Maele]

Thanks a lot for these responses. We definitely understand that this transition will not be an easy one for everybody.

That being said, our team is really working hard every day to make Fusion Electronics better. It would be very valuable to hear more detail on what makes fusion unusable for you and if you could share any specific cases where it's being slow and hurting your productivity. 

You can always post on the Fusion Electronics forum, which we monitor very actively and take action on https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/fusion-electronics/bd-p/6071. We will also reach out to see if we can learn more from a direct discussion

[csvanberg]

There has been a great number of people not getting onbord with Fusion.

Reasons:

• GUI, first slap in the face is the PCB ("electronics") section is not automatically shown. I do not NEED or WANT a full mechanical design, we have Mechanical Engineers using Solid Works, ProE and Creo for that. It clearly shows what YOU have in mind, i.e. not PCB layout or "Electronic design" .
• I find no setting to change this startup behavior.
• You assume mechanical engineers/designers are also electronics engineers. Do you have statistics for that?
• This shows how little you value "Electronic design" and what I'm paying for is not for this, but a Mechanical design package.  The mild 3D PCB in Eagle is sufficient for Electronics engineers. 2D drawings and STEP files can be handed over to Mechanical Engineers doing packaging and integration. They do not need to look at 0402 1% 0.1W resistors. Where did my money go since 9.6.2?; developing a bungled fusion nobody asked for. Accordingly I should not have to pay ANYTHING for EagleCAD as it has not been improved in at least 4 years, and I had fully paid up versions going 13 years back.
• Web based libraries, no go,
• Web based storage, no go.
• Sluggish response, no go, I often keep 5 board open at the same time.
• Fusion cannot even figure out the most basic function of automatically linking identical filenames into a "project"
• Graphics card warning banner, with an RTX3060, really?

Software design requires INTENSE cooperation with users, and the value THEY provide makes the product actually usable and valuable. Guys that design software do not spend a majority of their time designing PCB's, so user input it what makes the product actually workable. How do all the users get compensated for their input? Without them there would be no product.

I and others have submitted hundreds of product improvement suggestions (for free, or rather paid for the privilege to be able to test your software) for EagleCAD which have been met with a yawn.

So you you want me to pay for the development of a stagnated product, with parts I don't need.

If this comes as surprise you must not have read much on the Eagle forum.

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/eagle-forum/our-path-forward/m-p/12703504#M40528

I have saved Robledo's original blog post of the "smart integrated" product, which since have been taken down.

I can re-post it here if you cant find it.

I will not drink the Cool-Aid.