I think altium has taken over as the top tier commercial offering in this space.
replyI always disliked Orcad. Especially because cadence had excellent software that predated OrCAD, and for reasons that I cannot fathom chose to promote OrCAD after they acquired it instead of the better software.
Here's a specific example in the interface. If you wanted to draw a wire, the keyboard shortcut of the old software was 'w' but orcad required you to type 'ctrl + w'. Why are you forcing me to use control when w doesn't do anything on its own? It was filled with similar tiny annoyances that just slowed things down. (Admittedly, it's been years since that was my primary work, and free stuff is good enough for what I do now.) I sincerely hope that orcad has continued to improve over the years.
Altium has taken over a lot of small to medium sized shops. Mostly because the price is right for its capability. It also has a history of being the least bad compromise between the odd mixtures of excellence and user-hostility Cadence and Mentor tend to come up with, going back to the Protel days, and they've done a good job in the last decade+ of marketing it to those shops. Cadence and Siemens nee Mentor (and maybe Zuken? I've never seen Zuken in the wild, but it always makes these lists) have been neglecting the entry level and smaller organizations and aggressively trying to move their customers to their higher tier offerings during that time. But while it's Altium's flagship product, it is not top tier. It is really entry-level for a professional PCB-level design package, like PADS and OrCAD as opposed to Xpedition and Allegro.
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