Effective June 7, 2026, Autodesk will no longer sell nor support EAGLE

For folks who are considering Kicad, but not sure if it will be useful at a professional level...<p>We professionally design, engineer and manufacture accessible technology for disabled veterans and we are also developing robotic systems for industrial automation.<p>We have a half-dozen active projects running on Kicad and have been using it for almost 4 years now.<p>As with anything, there have been occasional frustrations with updates but overall, the tool consistently gets better over time.<p>The main decision to select Kicad was based on the plain text representation of project state which enables (1) improved workflows with Git, (2) scriptable bulk edits (3) simpler, sharable extensions &#x2F; plugins and (4) easier continuous integration for build artifacts.

They did not mention Linux at all in the notice. EAGLE supported Linux but as far as I know, Fusion 360 does not. Maybe I am their only user that cares, but this is the main reason I will be pushing my coworkers to migrate to KiCad.<p>When Autodesk claim Fusion 360 has the same functionality as Eagle and can replace it, that is a lie. It does not work on Linux so it is not a valid replacement.

Autodesk bought EAGLE in 2016, so just about ten years between acquisition and discontinuation.<p>EAGLE is the first PCB design app I learned (and had a harder onramp than React) so this is sad, but it is important to note that most hobbyists have already switched over to KiCad: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kicad.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kicad.org&#x2F;</a>

Not surprised. This guarantees Kicad all day long for hobby hackers going forward.<p>In other news, the &quot;free&quot; version of their Fusion 360 loses functionality to the paid version on a regular basis. Wonder if it will suffer a similar fate, or if the free version will end up to forever suffer as some emaciated skeleton of the real app.

Since you all are discussing kicad, please don&#x27;t forget that they accept donations to support future development<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kicad.org&#x2F;donate&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kicad.org&#x2F;donate&#x2F;</a>

Around mid 2018 I was working on a personal project that absolutely needed a custom PCB.<p>KiCad 5 had just launched, and so I flipped a coin to decide if I should make it in Eagle or Kicad. I ended up choosing KiCad. Looking back five years later, I could not be happier.<p>Now almost on a monthly basis I hear about Fusion360 receiving some kind of update that strips features away in lieu of running them exclusively in the cloud, or they just arbitrarily change things and make it qualitatively worse for the end user by upselling them features. I don&#x27;t want anything to do with that and so HP isn&#x27;t getting a dime of my money.

I&#x27;ve been happy with <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;horizon-eda.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;horizon-eda.org&#x2F;</a>

Autodesk has the honor of being one of the few companies that are so shitty I&#x27;m _happy_ to pay money to their competitors.<p>I paid for a full solidworks license for a year (before discovering the makers license) and grumbled only mildly.

Luckily, we went off Eagle a while ago. We used it mainly because we couldn&#x27;t justify 4 Altium Licenses for our department. Building system prototypes and measurement equipment just isn&#x27;t profitable enough inside a multi-billion USD super tanker of a company it seems.<p>We try to go open source to prevent stuff like that as much as possible. I would say we are around 80% there so far (excluding obviously manufacturer-specific stuff like STM Cube IDE). KiCad, Gitea, drawio, Python(and thank heavens for pyvisa), Octave, OpenProject. Next up is probably Eclipse Capella. The only stuff we currently can&#x27;t get rid of are Simulink and SolidWorks.<p>Well, maybe in the future.

“Can I work with my files locally in Fusion 360? Fusion 360 is a cloud-based 3D mode…” Ok bye, KiCad it is.

There is a great migration guide here from the flux team on how to onboard coming from Eagle<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.flux.ai&#x2F;Introduction&#x2F;eagle-to-flux---migration-guide" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.flux.ai&#x2F;Introduction&#x2F;eagle-to-flux---migration-...</a>

Kicad is where you want to go in the free price category of ecad programs.

Autodesk: one of the most despicable, anti-customer, anti-consumer companies on the planet.<p>I struggle with the quirks of FreeCAD happily to avoid putting a penny in Autodesk&#x27;s pocket. Too bad CAD is such a complex, niche product category.

KiCad is pretty good these days, and I hear OrCad is used by Apple and is inexpensive.

I just got into a great flow where I have a couple ULPs that export BOM and CPL files for JLCPCB, been very painless way of getting stuff made for a while<p>I don&#x27;t want to lock myself into EasyEDA, and trying KiCAD a few years ago wasn&#x27;t the easiest switchover...

looks like somebody saw the drama on the lack of notice to changes from reddit and decide to go another way.

Been a few years since I&#x27;ve worked with EEs, but isn&#x27;t EAGLE the industry standard? Like, would this be similar to if Adobe shut down Photoshop?

Others have mentioned the &quot;plain text files&quot; thing, so let me just mention the &quot;plain text files&quot; thing.<p>Everything is stored as a plain text file. It&#x27;s just text. Hell, it&#x27;s practically human-readable, if you&#x27;re a fairly nerdy human.<p>You can store them in git, or any other source code repository. You can email them or stick them up on a server, without them getting mangled, because they&#x27;re just text.<p>You can run scripts on them, or just plain open them in a text editor and do search-and-replace on them.<p>You can even write code to write files for you - take a bunch of stuff and programmatically design footprints and components, any way you like, because it&#x27;s just plain text files, describing lines and co-ordinates and stuff.<p>Can&#x27;t get any less locked-in than that!

We use kicad for large complicated projects. The tool works but you need to get creative (write scripts) to manage libraries and run simulations. It&#x27;s also missing some RF features that you need to integrate external tools for.<p>For smaller hobby project it&#x27;s really good and has all you need.

sorry to say it, but no great loss. i learned on EAGLE and even bought a license. (or was there no free version at all?) i dare say i became quite expert at it (not hard, it&#x27;s a very limited software) and liked the script&#x2F;macro capabilities which i used for BOM mgmt. but come on, it&#x27;s terrible.<p>that said, it&#x27;s too bad they don&#x27;t open source it. maybe they will.<p>now i use orcad. there was a price and mindshare war going on and orcad was offered for $400. it was something of a bronze age for EDA at the time.

I will also offer my praise for kicad.

Its not open source, but after trying a number of these tools (as a total noob hobbyist) I found Diptrace to be the most intuitive and they do offer a freeware for hobbyists

Why is Autodesk allowed to buy and kill off its competitors?

A typical acquikill stretched in time. They might have integrated worthy EAGLE ideas into their own product though.<p>Reminds me Macromedia Fireworks vs Adobe Photoshop situation - Fireworks had been acquired, good parts transplanted to Photoshop, then killed.

Corporations going to corporate.

Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.

They already effectively killed EAGLE as I knew it, so this isn&#x27;t really a surprise. What a wonderful piece of software. I&#x27;m sad to see it go.

They should open source it then

They still sell EAGLE? I switched to Fusion 360 ages ago. Also tried KiCAD but eh, it&#x27;s just not the same quality.<p>Still salty that Altium destroyed CircuitMaker with low-quality updates with show-stopping bugs, and absolutely failed to incentivize me to upgrade to CircuitStudio because it is wildly different from CircuitMaker.