How's its library management? Last time I tried Kicad it was impressively bad.
Yes, KiCAD, for some reason, has a GUI for library management which is both nonstandard and confusing. The schematic symbol library manager and footprint library manager have similar GUIs but behave quite differently.
Schematic editing isn't bad, although it has the worst approach to wire junctions ever seen in a schematic editor. The dot where wires connect is an entity separate from the wires, and can be omitted or moved, with negative effects on the netlist.
Layout is OK, but, as mentioned, the footprint library isn't very good. Expect to spend time looking at manufacturer data sheets and drawing footprints to match.
There's an autorouter, but due to some political problem you have to download it from another site and rename it. The autorouter and the design rule checker don't quite agree on some tight clearances, which can be a problem.
It's open source, and widely used, so you know it's not going away.
> The schematic symbol library manager and footprint library manager have similar GUIs but behave quite differently.
Just to expand on this, KiCad is an abomination stitched together from the corpses of about six different programs. There are four different graphical editors (schematic part, schematic, pcb footprint, pcb layout) which look somewhat similar but have notably different user interface conventions for selecting, moving, copying and deleting objects, making it frustrating to switch between them. To make it even better, the PCB layout program has three different options for the "canvas" (ie. the layout area) which again have different interface conventions, and additionally some features are only available in some canvases and will simply fail to work if another canvas is selected.
These programs communicate via export/import functions instead of being properly integrated so the process to add a component to a circuit board involves five different programs and four export steps. You also can't back-annotate any changes at the PCB level back to the schematic (or at least, it's a royal pain to do so.)
Once you get your workflow going and you've pushed past the worst of the confusion, it works just well enough that it's easier to put up with the pain for now and allow your resentment to simmer than it is to figure out how to build the damn thing so you can fix it yourself.
(For comparison, I used EAGLE back in 2004 or so, and I thought it was pretty good. I'm not sure what they've done to it since then to garner such animosity.)
Yes, KiCAD, for some reason, has a GUI for library management which is both nonstandard and confusing. The schematic symbol library manager and footprint library manager have similar GUIs but behave quite differently.
Schematic editing isn't bad, although it has the worst approach to wire junctions ever seen in a schematic editor. The dot where wires connect is an entity separate from the wires, and can be omitted or moved, with negative effects on the netlist.
Layout is OK, but, as mentioned, the footprint library isn't very good. Expect to spend time looking at manufacturer data sheets and drawing footprints to match.
There's an autorouter, but due to some political problem you have to download it from another site and rename it. The autorouter and the design rule checker don't quite agree on some tight clearances, which can be a problem.
It's open source, and widely used, so you know it's not going away.