I've personally enjoyed using DipTrace, very intuitive and easy to pick up, it's far less than $1000. I've been hearing good things about Flux but haven't tried it myself yet. I hear it's not complete, but coming along quick.
Comments like that are hard to respond to. The topic here is KiCAD, but you haven’t addressed whether you have given KiCAD 7 (or 6) a real try. Without that information, and without understanding what you didn't like about KiCAD, it’s hard to address these other options, and you don’t really even mention what you actually like about DipTrace. “Intuitive” and “easy to pickup” are arguably properties of KiCAD, for anyone familiar with schematic capture and PCB design. It used to be harder, but tons of effort has been poured into KiCAD for many years now.
Why would anyone want to use an old, proprietary program like DipTrace when KiCAD is free, cross-platform, open source, and arguably just plain better? DipTrace has a Mac version, but all of the discussions I see online indicate that it still hasn’t been updated to work properly on Apple Silicon.
It’s been probably 7 or 8 years since I last saw someone using DipTrace, and I wasn’t impressed then. It’s also $995 for the full version (the closest to KiCAD’s feature set), which is hardly “far less” than $1000, but the absolute minimum version I would even consider would be $400. I’m amazed at how their website seems to be exactly as I remember it from so long ago.
Looking through their marketing site, I literally don’t see a single thing that is better than KiCAD. I personally just don’t understand why anyone would buy DipTrace in 2023. So, it’s hard to respond without just coming off as dismissive. I wish I could provide a more balanced comment that makes it seem like DipTrace is still competitive, well-maintained software… but that isn’t what I believe. I’m sure it’s fine for basic use cases, but KiCAD is great for those use cases and so much more.
Flux seems gimmicky at first, but browsing through their materials, I am at least impressed at the effort they seem to be putting in. They even had a comparison page against KiCAD, but this attempt to sell against KiCAD ended up being some disappointing nebulous statements that didn’t seem to have much merit, apart from the real time collaborative nature of their product, which seems to be their one actual advantage.
Different people can have different opinions, of course, but KiCAD is great quality software with a lot of momentum.
If you want to share what features you like most about DipTrace, or what you think it does better than KiCAD, that would certainly be interesting to hear.
Using Diptrace I've appreciated the reasonable pricing $150 for thr lite version), the online library integrations have been working well for me both in ease of finding what I need and dropping it right in, but also in the quality of the footprints, etc.
I also prefer thr UI interface. Many ecad solutions are clunky and old school to use in their UI. In Diptrace the whole thing is basically achieved by left and right clicking, selecting from context menus.
There aren't too many ECAD/PCB tools I haven't at least played with a bit... Diptrace has some neat features but overall I can't quite get used to their design flow and library process. I know Stephen Kraig from the MacroFab podcast extols its virtues often, which is why I tried it out in the first place.
As for Flux.ai, that one is new and I've been out of the pure PCB world for a little bit so have not messed around with it. To be honest, I'm not a fan of browser-based tools, personally. Even Altium 365's new features (though some are certainly useful), take some getting used to - I suppose I don't really like the "data in the cloud" prospect that much. That being said, I did link Flux.ai first on my recent survey of AI/ML-based PCB tools [1] as they seem to be quite far along.
The problem is that PCB design tools all lie on a spectrum from "jump in and design the board right away" to "you'd better spend a while getting your libraries and environment ready to go". Tools like PADS seem to be more towards the latter, while Altium and KiCad are closer to the former. OrCAD is probably around the middle or so. It can be tough to give a tool a fair assessment if it takes more effort to get going on a design.
I've personally enjoyed using DipTrace, very intuitive and easy to pick up, it's far less than $1000. I've been hearing good things about Flux but haven't tried it myself yet. I hear it's not complete, but coming along quick.