I haven't used any of these before, but this LibrePCB talk explains why they wanted an alternative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu-h5y6tK34

Horizon docs have this explanation: https://horizon-eda.readthedocs.io/en/latest/why-another-eda...

Same question -- I've been using Kicad on personal and light-duty professional projects for about 5 years (yeah, Altium is the real deal, but when you're making a small run of prototypes for a university lab, sometimes you use the tools you have). It definitely has some rough edges, but it's also got a very established ecosystem, so I feel like Horizon will have to be a massive improvement to compete.

I use horizon for more than a year now and have quite a few pcbs from it in production. What made me pick up horizon was mostly Autodesk's aquisiton of Eagle and kicads messy library concept.

Horizon misses nothing (for me) now and has a beautifully efficent UX compared to Eagle and KiCAD. Their library concept is also well thought through, so I don't have the feeling I am wasting my time when I am contributing parts.

The downsides are:

- you still have to create many parts yourself (but parts, packages, etc are json and generating them can help a lot)

- horizon supports only newer OpenGL versions, so if your machine is old it might not run

Other than that I'd take it over all the others every day (and I do).

I've been using Kicad for the same workloads as you, and Altium + Cadence for heavier ones over the years, and I must say they hit the nail on the head here with their comments about KiCad: https://horizon-eda.readthedocs.io/en/latest/why-another-eda...

I'll have to find a simple project to test this out on though, because as you say, It needs to be a huge improvement on KiCad to warrant a switch.

Thank you for linking to this. That's a pretty compelling story he's telling, I'll have to give it a go if I can find a low-pressure project to experiment on it with!

Some rough edges? Kicad has a lot of rough edges, and some of the biggest have to do with footprint libraries & sharing, which is the key piece of momentum in this space. Meanwhile, that's something horizon does very, very well. I could see horizon overtaking kicad.

It looks like they focused more on a streamlined parts manager, which to be honest is a weak point with kicad. In kicad you need to manage the symbols, layout, and manufacturing info all separately.

What about LibrePCB?

I'd like to ask the same question above.