KiCad

KiCad is a cross-platform electronic design automation suite covering schematic capture, symbol and footprint libraries, PCB layout, interactive routing with push and shove, design rule checking, 3D board visualisation and Gerber and IPC-2581 output. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, is released under GPL, and imposes no restriction on board size, layer count, component count or commercial use. Development is organised under The Linux Foundation, with funding from donations and sponsors. The fact that changes shortlists is the funding model and what it implies about support. There is no licence fee and therefore no vendor obligated to you. CERN, historically the largest single contributor, ended its donation programme and now pays for support contracts directly with KiCad Services Corporation, a commercial company that sells support around the open source project. So paid support does exist, it just is not the default, and an organisation that needs a supplier to escalate to has to arrange it deliberately rather than assume it comes with the software. Users are hobbyists, hardware startups, academic groups and a growing number of professional teams who found Altium and OrCAD seat costs disproportionate to their board volume. The trade-offs are ecosystem rather than capability: high speed analysis, rigid-flex, advanced constraint management and simulation integration lag the commercial tools, third-party library and part sourcing integrations are thinner, and design data management for a multi-engineer team is largely something you build yourself with Git.

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  FreeCAD

  FreeCAD: If the design problem is mechanical rather than electronic and you want the same open source terms

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  Fusion 360

  Fusion 360: Includes PCB design alongside mechanical CAD, useful when the enclosure and the board are designed together