□ My interest is solely in which tool is better for the job. The nice folks at CadSoft are great for offering the very capable Eagle Light for free, and I have nothing against people charging money for software, since that’s how I’ve employed myself most of my life. While Eagle is a single monolithic program, KiCad is a loose collection of several different cooperating programs for schematic editing, board layout, and other tasks. Wikipedia says KiCad has been around since 1992, although I only first heard of it a few years ago. KiCad is a free program (as in freedom, and beer), developed by a team of volunteers, and more recently with help from CERN. Eagle is presently the “standard” for open source hardware and hobby projects found on the web, although this is changing. There’s also a separate non-profit license available, and an inexpensive commercial light license. This version is free (as in beer), but is limited to a maximum board area of 100 x 80 mm, and may only be used for non-commercial purposes. There are several versions of Eagle, but the majority of hobbyists use Eagle Light. If you’re not familiar with either of these tools, Eagle is a commercial program created by the German company CadSoft, and according to Wikipedia it’s been in continuous development since 1988. And with 4 1/2 years more design experience, I can now appreciate how some of what I originally saw as flaws in KiCad were actually just different design decisions, whose value I can now appreciate. KiCad still has lots of annoying issues, but frankly so does Eagle. Although nothing had fundamentally changed, I found that my overall impression of the program was much more favorable. This week I had an opportunity to try KiCad again. I concluded that while KiCad had lots of promise, it was too full of quirks and bugs to recommend, and Eagle was the better choice for most people. KiCad, two of the most popular software tools for hobbyists creating custom circuit boards. Four and a half years ago, I wrote a mini-review of Eagle vs.
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