I evaluated both this and Horizon EDA last year and found Horizon to be far more powerful and polished.

https://horizon-eda.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Is Horizon competitive with KiCAD for hobbyist stuff yet? It has some killer features, but KiCAD is just too good.

Yes. We use it for professional stuff.

I think it's better than KiCad in so many big and small ways, starting with library management.

Horizon EDA developer here. More than enough, everything's there for small to medium-sized projects.

Excellent, thank you! I played around with it for a bit, but I got stuck trying to look for an ESP8266 footprint and quit. It does look very promising overall, though.

Horizon can import KiCAD footprints IIRC.

It's a real shame Horizon uses GTK.

What should it use?

Related:

LibrePCB 0.1.4 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23059615 - May 2020 (20 comments)

LibrePCB 0.1.3 released, now with DRC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21676027 - Dec 2019 (33 comments)

LibrePCB: First stable release published - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18569969 - Nov 2018 (51 comments)

LibrePCB: First release candidate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18302409 - Oct 2018 (5 comments)

I haven’t tried LibrePCB, but I should really give it a go. Designing PCBs can be fun and useful when hacking around electronics.

I know my way around Eagle, but the free version is way too restricted and I can’t justify spending that kind of money when it’s a hobby that I poke a few times a year. But I also have had a hard time getting into Kicad for the same reason — a few months ago I wanted to make a board for a project and I decided to give KiCad another try, and after not making much progress over a long period of time I ended up downloading Eagle and dealing with the limitations.

I guess my rambly point is, EDA software has phenomenally bad UI in my experience that takes a lot of time and effort (and reading, not just poking around!) to learn, and I really would love to see something that could flip that trend without itself being overly limiting.

A few months ago, you would have been on Kicad 6 (assuming you didn't pull some ancient 5.0 release from your distro), which I've found to have a great UI.

Like all EDA software, the UI is optimized for power users, and therefore has some quirks and a learning curve for the hotkeys, but I would not say that Kicad is phenomenally bad. Work your way through one tutorial (eg. this recent one: https://youtu.be/aVUqaB0IMh4) and make a quick-reference note for shortcuts, and you can probably be off to the races.

Totally contra to this project, but relevant for your point. I found EasyEDA, developed by the people from JLCPCB, to be very easy to use for hobbiest boards. Their integration with their SMT assembly service was also pretty neat for my usecase

JFTR, LibrePCB Fab[0] service provides integration with few PCB manufacturers.

[0] https://librepcb.org/blog/2022-09-08_partnership_with_pcbway...

This sounds better to me than EasyEDA since I don’t want to be _stuck_ with JLCPCB (though a friend uses them and I’ve really only heard good things about them, so I’ll probably use them for my next project anyway…)

Does EasyEDA lock you into JLCPCB? I don’t have anything against partnering with fab houses since it can really help accelerate the project, but I feel a little weird about using something that’s so deeply tied to another product that I “don’t need.”

I feel like I should give EasyEDA a chance though either way, because it can’t be worse than Fritzing.

There is no lock-in. The only connection from the user perspective is one-click ordering without downloading and uploading gerbers.

What's wrong with KiCad?

There is is some trouble with ordering smt service from jlc directly from kicad. But you can just import kicad into easyeda and export for production. Annoying extra step anyway. Kicad ftw

I don't agree. Just a few weeks ago I taught two people, who had 0 PCB design skills, the basics in KiCAD. The first PCB designed by one of them is currently being produced. It was incredibly easy to teach and didn't take more then 45 minutes.

High recommend the Digikey tutorial for KiCad as well: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEBQazB0HUyR24ckSZ5u05T...

librePCB is really great. its got a ways to go but updates like this show how quickly its accelerating. while i dont hate and use kicad a ton its always nice to have solid competition and choices in workflows and tools and cross pollination of course

Could You expand a bit on the practical difference between Kicad and librePCB? Ideally for a hobbyist/ DIYer with no high frequency stuff? When / for what use case would You pick one or the other?

I appreciate that they point out the weaknesses of LibrePCB

> So, if you are looking for an intuitive EDA tool to quickly design a simple PCB, you should give LibrePCB a try. But if you want to design complex PCBs, LibrePCB is probably not (yet) the tool you are looking for.

Thanks, but what I was after was the OPs actual experience. What's "his" (or any other actual individuals) reason to use one or the other.

Stuff like "Kicad pisses me off because of X", or "librePCB really speeds up / simplifies me doing Y".

Eagle library import - nice (assuming it works).

Does KiCad support this feature?

> Only one library file format for all kinds of library elements

This is not a good thing. It is easier for reuse to have separate symbol, footprint and 3d file.

They are different files, just using the same S-expression based format.