Altium offers their hacker/hobbyist circuit maker for free, it uses the same engine as Altium just lacks some of its advanced features and parts library. https://www.altium.com/circuitmaker

I’m kind of getting started with PCB design, would you recommend circuitmaker over KiCad? As in, is the improvement worth going from free software to proprietary?

If you intend to work in the field, KiCAD has very little penetration as of this moment. It’s better than nothing, but mot companies will prefer people with experience in Altium.

If you just want to start doing some projects, KiCAD is mature enough and you’ll find more tutorials and content.

I use Altium Designer almost exclusively now (Was OrCAD/PADS previously)......if I were starting over, I'd get much more into KiCAD. Higher learning curve but you can get legitimate professional-grade PCBs designed in it.

The long-term answer is that you'll eventually want to try all of them. In my opinion, half of PCB layout is tool-agnostic and the other half is getting fast/proficient at a specific tool.

When I moved to Altium, I knew that I wanted to "pour copper" to make a power plane, so I just had to google what the Altium equivalent was. The PCB concepts of layers/routing/grounding/clearance/vias/stackups and all that are universal, the terminology and shortcuts are just changed between tools.

I absolutely love Diptrace. It has a free version with all libraries included. Over the years though I have progressively upgraded it to the "standard" level (which allows 6 layers and 1000 nodes) when they have sales. My own microcontroller designs with GPS and bluetooth, OLED displays, serial ports etc. have not passed 500 nodes.

Definitely KiCad unless you need really high-end features immediately.

My friends are making Flux[1] which is aimed at hobbyists and smaller teams.

1. https://www.flux.ai/

Nice thanks, checking this out and apart from some browser loading slowness this seems really cool. I'm stuck between booting up altium on my windows sbc and kicad on mac so this might be perfect. p.s. Crazyfrog! I remember hearing that first when I was like 11 haha, love it.

It gets a bit of a bum rep these days, but I've always liked Eagle and it's cross-platform between Linux/Mac/Windows. Autodesk made a lot of changes which people didn't like, but to be honest the software was stagnating under CADSoft anyway. There was a time when the UI would change weekly, but it's a bit more stable now and developers in the forum are pretty responsive.