Altium

Raised as a usability problem by 14 people on Hacker News over 13 years (2014–2026), in 14 threads.

People raised many different problems with Altium, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 16 complaints

Automating Altium requires lots of GUI work to guide the models along2026-01-12
Setting up a parts library needs lots of fiddling; the defaults are bad2025-11-08
Constantly fights the user, making simple tasks a battle2025-06-17
Interface is outdated and awkward, unchanged for about 20 years2024-04-13
Autorouter is terrible; constraint mechanisms and large designs are slow2024-02-16
Moving and aligning hundreds of FPGA pins across schematic blocks is tedious and painful2024-02-06
Routing differential pairs is so confusing that new users need outside tutorials to learn it2023-05-25
Releases keep introducing new bugs instead of fixing existing ones2021-12-18
Commenter found the interface terrible to use; maintainers dismissed the complaint2021-06-14
Custom component revisions become uneditable, an ongoing bug for years2021-06-08
EDA tooling is buggy and unpleasant to use in many ways2021-02-27
Clicking a component freezes the app for 1-10 seconds while loading parameters2020-05-04
Uses 10% CPU even with an empty schematic and no PCB open2020-05-04
Database library gets corrupted and must be closed to add parts2019-03-26
Video clicks trigger pop-ups with tiny, badly placed dismiss buttons2018-12-20
Trace redrawing lags so badly when moving traces it's borderline unusable2014-01-28