http://www.atmel.com/Images/Atmel-8128-Best-Practices-for-th...
To be honest, I don't think it so much of an issue any more. I have a library of parts I use regularly and just design footprints for new parts.
I'm my case, I doubt that Altium would have footprints for many of the parts I want to use anyway (quite often cheap connectors, switches etc). I feel like being comfortable with footprint design is an important part of the design process.
That said, there are many features of Altium that look very attractive. For example the push and shove routing.
This is a nice overview of the KiCad router: https://youtu.be/CCG4daPvuVI
For anyone using KiCAD also check out Xess's list of third part tools: https://github.com/xesscorp/kicad-3rd-party-tools.
there are also a number of third party libraries with a great number of common components. See for example this one by olimex:
I keep trying KiCAD but with a paid alternative (Altium Designer) through work it doesn't compare. The key to electronics design is the library. There are a few alternatives which are tied to vendors, like DigiKey's Schemeit. They have decent libraries of parts. I would have figured that KiCAD would too, but the last time I tried it was pretty bad. Hope that's changed.