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problems-with-others.md

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What is wrong with Kicad?

  • No component based design approach: Broken by design.
    • Hierarchical sheets just work wrong:
      • Can not assign correct references when duplicating a hierarchical sheet¹.
      • Can not handle circular dependencies
      • Does not perform a cleanup for deleted/moved HSheets. We need a separate tool for that purpose.
      • Importing other schematics does not append its hierarchical sheets (no dependency tracking)
      • Weird design for storing instance references: HSheet instance references are stored in their own hierarchical sheets, thus you may easily end up duplicate/conflicting component references when you copy a HSheet to another project, duplicate a HSheet in the same project and rename it, etc...
        • Hard to create new tools for handling the problem.
      • Including HSheets from another directory is not possible
  • Bugfixes take centuries.[1]
  • Feature requests are not welcome. Apparently this was not exactly true.

    Some very active community members act like they have rights to talk on behalf of Kicad in KicadForum, which misguides people (including me) to interpret the case like so.

  • It's so hard to install both Kicad and the libraries that that we needed a separate project for that purpose
  • New versions can be incompatible with the previous versions without any compatibility mode. You may loose your projects that you made 6 months ago.
  • Unhelpful error messages:
    • "Multiple item D3 (unit 1)": What is "unit 1"? Where is it? What should I do?

Schematic Editor

PCB Editor

  • Only basic support for alignment, no rulers etc.
  • No component-based design (you can not re-use your pcb drawings in another projects)
  • Lack of manufacturing mode: You can not create multiple drawings to print out at the same time.
  • No copy-n-paste from another pcbnew editor.
  • Footprint associations are painful:
    • Doubleclick just changes a footprint, without confirmation or undo option.
    • You can not unassign a footprint association, only option is deleting everything
    • No footprint association table that you can freely edit

What is wrong with EasyEDA?

  • Not open source.
  • No offline ability.