Re: Anyone have real world prices for PADS and Altium Designer PCB design apps?

On Thu, 25 Jan 2007 03:01:10 GMT, "Brad Velander"
<bveland@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Well you certainly haven't gotten much of a response.

Largely it looks like you understand the issue(s) pretty well.
There are
licensed users on this group of both PADs and Altium but they are probably
all sure that there is no sure single answer to your enquiry. It varies with
all the conditions you mentioned, including how well sales have gone this
quarter, this half, this year. The biggest question would be how many seats
are you going to buy? Also those actually using licensed software probably
aren't keeping up on pricing and bundling.

I wouldn't have minded any response about pricing, even out of date
prices. ;->

We're only thinking about buying two seats. When I thought about it
though, just finding out what other people had bought, which packages
and options and how much they cost, would have been quite interesting.
That would have been a guide to what we should be looking carefully at
buying.

You're right, there are a lot of options that could be purchased and
it would be interesting to find out what other users bought and which
options they found were most useful.

As for the comment about Altium support getting worse than prior Protel
support, someone is feeding you a complete line of ***. Having used
Protel/Altium for the last 7 plus years, their support has gotten better in
recent years.

Actually, all I know about Altium is what came up on a google search
of s.e.c and s.e.d. while searching for "Protel" and "Altium". I
read a number of posts about how the best version was Protel 99 and
that things had gone downhill since then.

However, it's possible that, as you mentioned, Altium has many more
features and is much more complex than any earlier version of Protel.
So it might appear that Altium is worse, but the bugs/feature ratio
may not have changed over the years.

That ratio might even have improved, but with enough new features, the
total absolute number of bugs has increased. So things look worse, but
they really aren't.

.