Eagle Reviews

Before you order your circuit boards, visit our PCB Price Calculator. You can enter the size, layers, and quantity of your board and get prices from 19 different PCB manufacturers instantly.

Visit the download page for Eagle.

There are 4 reviews with an average rating of 3.8.  

To ensure high-quality reviews and ratings, we moderate every review. To write a review, you must include a valid e-mail address. We will not post your e-mail address, and we will never give it to anyone else or use it to spam you. We might send you an e-mail to verify the information in your review.


Submit your review
1
2
3
4
5
Submit
     
Cancel

Create your own review

Eagle Lite
Average rating:  
 4 reviews
 by Alan
It will do what you need

There are a lot of people who dislike EAGLE, but it will do what you need and there are youtube videos you can watch to get acquainted with it. One thing that is an issue with any layout software is where do they get their footprints from. I always use another free tool called pcb library expert lite that allows you to punch in the dimensions of a part and it will create the eagle package for you to import. EAGLE does everything I need and I am a fan.

 by Brett Holden
Room for improvement

Eagle is very capable if you are willing to devote the time. But Eagle has loads of inconsistencies and annoyances. EAGLE is an acronym for Easily Applicable Graphic Layout Editor. It is not easily configurable, there are several configuration files in play and it takes some time to learn their interactions (which Cadsoft fails to adequately describe in the documentation). Running two versions on the same machine is trouble, keeping an old version while trying a newer version will result in one version overwriting the other's settings.

I think Cadsoft intends to address that issue but they have dragged their feet on that for way too long.



To get the most of Eagle there must be heavy reliance on its User Language Program, based on the C programming language. How simple can C be if you have not pursued a degree in computer science?



Simple things like allowing the repeated strokes of the ESC key to terminate a given command are not fully implemented. When working in the library editor, letters within some of the different windows may be underlined - suggesting that keyboard shortcuts are available... but no such shortcuts exist, you must click with the mouse. On that same note, there is the capability to map keystrokes for the most commonly used commands (instead of clicking icons), but absolutely NO possibility of using a single key to invoke any command, with the exception that the twelve function keys can be mapped. Anything more than those twelve requires that either the CTL, Shift or ALT key(s) be pressed in conjunction with another key, which leaves many keystroke combinations difficult to remember or else difficult to finger. There just aren't enough easy shortcuts to go around. Eagle's dedicated old timers howl every time somebody suggests that having single keystroke shortcuts would be superior to their preferred method of typing out commands. It can't go both ways because of the way the command line is integrated, so the klunky interface wins, or loses depending on how you look at it.

 by Whitham D. Reeve
Eagle Cad is a Good Software Tool

I am not a daily PCB Cad user so ease of use and relearning is very important to me. Eagle Cad has some quirks that take some getting use to but overall I think it is a good software tool. Modifying components seems to be overly cumbersome and tedious and I am never really sure that I have done it correctly.



Library management also is somewhat difficult to get used to and I have ended up with too many libraries, many of which are redundant. There has got to be a better way.



The Eagle Cad tutorials are terrible and not really tutorials at all. A user is much better off searching the web for tutorials from people other than Eagle Cad. That is what I did and I doubt I could have learned to use Eagle Cad without them.



My only other complaint is the routing tools. The autorouter seems to work well, at least on relatively simple layouts, but when you need to make manual adjustments, the manual tools just do not seem to work intuitively. It takes much more time than should be necessary to make a simple route change. Also, Eagle Cad autorouter insists on making 90 degree branches in the middle of a trace. If there is a way to change this I have not yet figured it out.



One must invest a fair amount of time in learning to use PCB design tools, and that usually precludes learning more than one. So, now that I know how to use Eagle Cad, I am stuck with it, good or bad.

 by John
Great beginner tool

I started out using Eagle a few years ago to begin developing my own PCB's for projects. I found it to be a fairly easy to use tool along with some of the PCB houses, like OSHPark, which accept eagle files without converting to Gerbers first. I highly recommend it for first time and hobby users with small sized boards.



CONS: I have moved on to other [free] software since I now create commercial boards with larger sizes. However, if I had to settle on commercial paid packages my choices would be DipTrace or Eagle.