Phil's Lab is another great hardware design YouTuber who also produced some great Kicad content, until Altium paid him to partner with them too.
Sure, you can get a free trial through any of the altium.com/yt/<channelname> sponsorships, but if you want to continue to have access after the trial it's merely $12,000 for a perpetual license or $355/mo for a subscription. Just absurd for anyone who isn't using this professionally.
Some people pirate it - there are loads of Russian forums selling cracked license keys; be aware that the software with the cracked license will still 'phone home' and earn you a call from Altium legal in a few years with a lawsuit and your public IP/home network MAC addresses, especially if anyone with a legit license opens the files you produce. But it's just not better than Kicad, with the exception of the push router. It's sluggish, and constantly gets more sluggish... "Please wait a moment" is a blatant lie, it should say "I hope you saved recently". You get used to hitting Ctrl+Shift+Esc and force-quitting DXP.exe, because it hangs for 30+ seconds when you try to restart it the normal way. The scripting language is atrocious, but everything is built on layers of decades-old scripts. And when you run any tool that uses a script, you lose the ability to undo past that point. I hear it's no longer written entirely in Delphi, with the infamous "Ignore segfaults" option... but I've long since left for Kicad, when my education license ran out and resetting my VM stopped working I looked at the writing on the wall and ran.
I mostly do industrial automation - PLC, CNC, and robotics projects - and prefer to buy parts off the shelf for 10x the (actual) price of building my own PCB to avoid being the only person on the planet who can support that machine, but sometimes the shelf just doesn't have anything to do what you want. And Kicad has been perfect for that.
Yeah I have had the experience of really enjoying a Phil's Lab video, wanting to download the source files, and then seeing that they are in Altium format. That's so unfortunate for newbies who just want to learn!
Sure, you can get a free trial through any of the altium.com/yt/<channelname> sponsorships, but if you want to continue to have access after the trial it's merely $12,000 for a perpetual license or $355/mo for a subscription. Just absurd for anyone who isn't using this professionally.
Some people pirate it - there are loads of Russian forums selling cracked license keys; be aware that the software with the cracked license will still 'phone home' and earn you a call from Altium legal in a few years with a lawsuit and your public IP/home network MAC addresses, especially if anyone with a legit license opens the files you produce. But it's just not better than Kicad, with the exception of the push router. It's sluggish, and constantly gets more sluggish... "Please wait a moment" is a blatant lie, it should say "I hope you saved recently". You get used to hitting Ctrl+Shift+Esc and force-quitting DXP.exe, because it hangs for 30+ seconds when you try to restart it the normal way. The scripting language is atrocious, but everything is built on layers of decades-old scripts. And when you run any tool that uses a script, you lose the ability to undo past that point. I hear it's no longer written entirely in Delphi, with the infamous "Ignore segfaults" option... but I've long since left for Kicad, when my education license ran out and resetting my VM stopped working I looked at the writing on the wall and ran.
I mostly do industrial automation - PLC, CNC, and robotics projects - and prefer to buy parts off the shelf for 10x the (actual) price of building my own PCB to avoid being the only person on the planet who can support that machine, but sometimes the shelf just doesn't have anything to do what you want. And Kicad has been perfect for that.