Fritzing vs Eagle?

[rs14smith]

I randomly stumbled upon a piece of free software today that I did not know existed and looks very promising called Fritzing. I was curious if anyone else here has used it and what their take is on it?

I have primary been using only Eagle for PCB/schematic work, but with Fritzing they have an interface that shows the breadboard layout as well. They also appear to have a decent active community. I have not looked much further in the Fritzing software yet, but wondering what some of your thoughts are and how it compares to Eagle?

 

[cr0sh]

I've only dabbled around in both - so I can't give a really fair assessment, but I would say that Fritzing is "good enough" to play with, but I am not sure you could do anything super-serious with it (but it is maturing rapidly). It might be a good tool to design and build simple circuits or whatnot for an Arduino shield or such - but could you design an Arduino-clone or similar with it? That is difficult to say.

Eagle, on the other hand, is something that (as you know) you can do serious design work with - but it comes at a price; to gain a larger board size (or more layers - if that is what you need) will set you back a bit of money (but I have heard that if you are needing these kinds of features, you are generally going to sell them, and be able to make the money back quickly).

If you want to do more serious design work, but don't want to spend the money for the better versions of Eagle, then you might want to check into KiCAD and/or gEDA - just note that both have their own issues (heck, for that matter, so does Eagle - none are "perfect"); gEDA's main issue is the super-steep learning curve, as well as the lack of "point-and-click" integration (a lot of command-line-fu is needed, so if you aren't comfortable using a lot of extra command line tools, in addition to everything else, gEDA probably isn't for you).

Note - all of these above should be taken with a "grain of salt" - I've only dabbled in all of these packages, and have never designed anything serious with any of them. Most of what I know about them is based on that, plus what I have read from users and whatnot on the internet. Based on that, I think they all have pluses and minuses, and none are completely perfect. That said, if I were starting a company that had to do custom designs, I would probably invest the time and effort in Eagle; if I had the same needs, but was on a tight budget, and didn't mind the learning curve and effort, then gEDA would be my choice. KiCAD would follow that, then Fritzing for "play"...