If I had enjoyed using Eagle, I'm sure I wouldn't have switched. To be honest, I wish I enjoyed using Eagle. Not willing to put the time into learning another tool at this time. Perhaps a current user can advise further on this.I enjoy using Eagle. Either the user has not spent the time to set it up correctly, or Altium have not improved it very much over the past 10 years.
You will read over & over that Altium users state the auto-router is useless. You can also use the Electra auto-router if you have a license for it. I used to use Freerouter (source code developed by Zuken which puts Altium's auto-router to shame), but now I'm very happy to use the embedded DipTrace auto-router. Ver 3 onwards had a lot of auto-router programming updates. You can lock parts of your layout to allow re-routing to only affect the certain board areas where you need an extra track to be added. All the tracks/via's/pads/copper expanses will have the correct clearances as set up in the auto-router rules file. It has however not been a pressing issue as you simply update the schematic & re-run the auto-router to add in the extra tracks. Quote A group of Beta testers are testing the interactive push & shove router for the next release. Of course you could just use LTSpice which is free or any other spice simulator. Finally, OrCAD offers a PSpice integration (again not sure if you care.), thus in the future you could add PSpice to your setup, do MoneCarlo and other simulations using the same OrCAD entry front end. I would guess that not many people care that much, but again you should be aware about the existence. Note, that OrCAD - Allegro offer you the (probably most advanced?) concept of a "hierarchical design re-use flow" (layout and schematic) that exists for PCB tools which you may appreciate in the future, but not initially. I have never used Altium, Circuit Studio.I am just guessing here. I could imagine that one would come up to speed on other layout tools (Altium, Circuit Studio etc) faster and as the learning curve of these other tools is not as steep. configuration of Allegro with many features disabled to get you hooked hoping you will want all these features in the future and pay for the upgrade. The version in OrCAD PCB Designer is the min. Allegro (Called PCB Editor), is probably one of the best and most complex PCB layout tools available with a pretty steep learning curve. Of course database maintenance is independent on OrCAD and is another topic in itself, but you need to be aware that OrCAD CIS exists. (I use it, works very nice but requires constant maintenance of whatever database solution you choose). OrCAD CIS (upgrade, more expensive) contains the database integration and automated BOM and BOM Variance generation linked to a variety of your database choices. OrCAD: Easy to learn, has a few quirks but it is a good tool.
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