The OrCAD Professional has everything what you need for designing any board (you can use OrCAD Professional to design complex and advanced boards). Based on the information I have, OrCAD Professional starts at $2K (for a standalone license) and includes advanced features. 3 and more HW engineers, I would seriously consider to go for OrCAD, see the next point.Īltium Designer is getting more and more expensive (I think it is around 10 000 USD or even more, correct me if I am wrong) and OrCAD can be interesting from price point of view. Altium is the software what I have and use in my company (I also have OrCAD Professional, but I have not had the right project for it yet). It is also very intuitive and user friendly. Altium is a complete package – you have everything in one place from schematic, libraries, pcb, output documents. Personally I love Altium Designer more than OrCAD from Cadence. Many people ask if they should go for Altium or OrCAD.

Therefore I am updating this article so you have more accurate information. A lot has changed after I initially created this post.

Altium designer 18 license price