Altium has announced a new product structure centred around Altium Develop and Altium Agile, giving electronics design teams more flexibility while keeping Altium Designer at the core of the workflow.
For many electronics engineers, Altium Designer has long been one of the industry’s leading ECAD platforms for PCB design. From schematic capture and PCB layout through to manufacturing documentation, it has become the tool of choice for everyone from independent consultants to multinational engineering organisations.
As electronic product development has become increasingly collaborative, the requirements placed on PCB design software have changed. Today’s engineering teams need more than a desktop CAD application—they need cloud collaboration, component intelligence, design data management, manufacturing workflows and, for larger organisations, governance across multiple teams and business systems.
To address these differing requirements, Altium has reorganised its portfolio around Altium Devlop and Altium Agile, allowing organisations to choose the level of capability that best matches the way they develop electronics.
Altium Designer Remains at the Centre
One of the key messages shared by Lawrence Romine during his conversation with ipXchange is that the familiar Altium Designer experience is not being replaced.
Instead, Altium Designer now forms the foundation of Altium Develop and Altium Agile, with additional collaboration, lifecycle management and enterprise capabilities layered on top depending on an organisation’s requirements.
This means engineers continue using the same PCB design environment while selecting the additional tools needed as projects and organisations grow.
What is Altium Develop?
Altium Develop is designed for engineers and product development teams building production-ready electronics.
It combines Altium Designer with cloud-based collaboration through Altium 365, enabling teams to:
- Design PCBs using the full Altium Designer environment.
- Collaborate across electrical, mechanical, sourcing and manufacturing disciplines.
- Manage design data, revisions and version history.
- Review designs with internal stakeholders and manufacturing partners before release.
- Access live component availability and lifecycle information directly within the design workflow.
Rather than being simply a PCB CAD tool, Altium Develop aims to provide a unified environment covering design, collaboration and preparation for manufacturing.
Introducing Altium Agile
For organisations requiring greater control over electronics development, Altium has introduced Altium Agile.
Where Altium Develop focuses on collaborative product development, Altium Agile extends this with structured processes, governance and integration across enterprise engineering environments. It connects electronics development with systems such as PLM, Jira and other enterprise tools while maintaining traceability throughout the product lifecycle.
Altium Agile is available in two editions.
Altium Agile Teams
Agile Teams is aimed at smaller organisations and growing engineering groups that need more structure without the overhead of a complex enterprise deployment.
It provides an out-of-the-box platform designed to improve collaboration, centralise design data and reduce the risks associated with disconnected workflows, while requiring minimal IT administration.
Altium Agile Enterprise
Agile Enterprise targets larger organisations with more demanding governance and compliance requirements.
It adds deeper integration with enterprise systems, enhanced process control, traceability, security and data management, making it suitable for organisations operating within regulated industries or managing large multidisciplinary engineering teams.
A Platform That Scales with Engineering Teams
The new product structure reflects the reality that electronics development is no longer the same for every organisation.
An independent consultant designing a single PCB has very different requirements from a global engineering organisation managing hundreds of projects across multiple disciplines.
By separating collaboration and enterprise capabilities into different platform offerings, Altium is enabling customers to adopt the functionality they need without changing their core PCB design environment. Engineers continue working in Altium Designer, while organisations can introduce additional collaboration, governance and lifecycle capabilities as complexity increases.
Watch the Full Interview
In our interview with Lawrence Romine, we discuss why Altium has restructured its portfolio, the differences between Altium Develop, Altium Agile Teams and Altium Agile Enterprise, and what these changes mean for PCB designers, engineering managers and enterprise development teams.
Watch the full interview below to hear the announcement directly from Altium.
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