I recently decided that Eagle was just getting too expensive (I'm stuck on version 4, and they're up to 7 or some such), and KiCad was starting to look viable. So I decided that for my next project I'd give KiCad a whirl.
KiCad, in it's current version, is a pretty good basic EDA system. It's not super-zoot, but my boards run to smallish two-layer things without BGAs or other challenges, so I don't need super-fancy. As a bonus over Eagle
4, you can put custom fields in the component definitions (like, part numbers), and KiCad will group similar components when you make a BOM. So all dozen or so 100nF bypass caps on a board, for instance, will be grouped together with one part number in the BOM.One thing that Eagle has but KiCad lacks is an autorouter. There are open- source autorouter initiatives out there that supposedly work with it, but I hesitated to try one. Mindful of the chit-chat on this group slamming autorouters, I decided that I'd try hand-routing, which I hadn't done since the early 90's (ironically, because the then-Orcad autorouter sucked).
So, to my chagrin, I've found that on the bigger boards hand-routing is no slower than the autorouting on Eagle, and on the smaller boards hand- routing makes a much nicer-looking board.
The latest effort involved a board that's 35x41.5mm, and has about 40 components on it -- one 48-pin PLCC, three 16-pin chips, various connectors, and a mess of passives. It took me two days to route -- but it took me two days to get the previous version to autoroute with Eagle because I kept having to tweak parameters and move components around.
To add to the slam on autorouters, the new version has more components (I added more I/O), more difficult components (I changed a surface-mount connector to through-hole), and all but one of the components on top of the board (Eagle needed me to put all the passives on the bottom for it to be able to route). So -- no more time spent, cleaner board, and more features, all in the same board footprint.
So. FINE. You're right. Autorouting sucks -- or, at least budget autorouting sucks.