AllSpice vs Altium365
Hardware development is hard, which is why engineers spend so much time researching and evaluating tools to help manage and improve their designs. Tools such as Altium 365 and AllSpice Hub seem similar, but there are some important differences between the tools.
AllSpice is for automation
Automate repetitive, low value, and error prone tasks.
AllSpice is for automation
Altium 365 is for teams that want to manually interact with their ECAD tool and format. AllSpice is for teams that want to automate repetitive, error-prone, or expensive processes. AllSpice’s CI/CD tools allow teams to turn time consuming product release processes into regular automated experiences.
Although A365 allows users to create automations like outfiles, with AllSpice, you can automate anything including commits, merges, releases and consistent, automated checks on your design.
"There were separate comment streams per reviewer.
It was a godawful spaghetti mess."
replace
Better reuse
A365 requires you to manually manage and assign your design reuse. With AllSpice and git, you can swiftly yet rigorously include reused design, and manage edits and deviations between variations.
It's every designer's goal to reuse designs that have been validated and have field experience. AllSpice allows you to coordinate and track your component libraries and designs, rather than allowing bugs to creep into your designs.
With AllSpice, you can push changes to some, or all of your repos to manage common libraries, dependencies, and documentation. Finally track which components and subcircuits have been validated and are qualified for reuse.
Extensibility
Because AllSpice Hub uses git, engineers can create the development process they want using command line scripts, git, python code, webhooks and more.
A365 is more for users who are manually clicking and checking in code and AllSpice hub is more for users who want to create advanced, reliable, and repeatable workflows.
"AllSpice is modern source control for hardware. It's a system to allow controlled evolution of our
design files."
Current state
Another reason to use AllSpice is git is well established and not going away in the next decade or two. Altium seems to keep dithering between tools in this space and creates new versions of existing functionality in Vault and Concord and moving away from and back to SaaS. It’s hard to plan your design process when your toolchain is always a moving target. If the past foreshadows the present, Altium might have a completely different tool in two years throwing out the work invested in adapting to their transient tool.
AllSpice is based on git which has a proven track record, and isn't going anywhere.