With Eagle being having a sunset date from Autodesk and not wanting to use Autodesk Electronics (Eagle in Fusion). I looked for EDA tool alternatives. I spent a good portion of the beginning of 2024 learning and building a product in KiCad v8. See the launch video below.

After fighting KiCad for months, I gave up and will be trying out LibrePCB.

I have converted my Cyclone Pulse Wrangler circuit to LibrePCB. So far I am very happy with the tool. It needs a few QOL improvements but, overall, much more enjoyable experience then KiCad. I am not constantly looking up how to do simple actions.

LibrePCB has a REALLY good Eagle Part Library importer. One of the best I have ever used.

The tool also supports plated slots in the footprint editor natively. No “workarounds” that are required in Eagle and KiCad to pull them off.

I have only used the library and schematic editor. Both are missing more complex tools that Eagle and KiCad have but for 99% of PCB designers and users. They will never use those… and I rarely use them as well.

Let us see how the PCB layout tool is!