I kept hearing about FreeRouting.net (a free online autorouter) so I decided to give it a try with a current design I have already manually routed, just to compare.
It was very easy. Learned to use the system in about 10 minutes.
Took about 1 minute to route (brushless DC driver, pretty simple 2 layer design - 32-pin microcontroller, a few MOSFETs, MOSFET driver chips, and passive filters).
Then I came to the shocking realization that I think it did a better job than me
.
Routes were a lot cleaner, only 11 vias vs 18 vias, and very few tracks on bottom layer (good ground plane). If I haven't sent my board to fab already, I would probably use this over my manual routing.
I wouldn't say I'm very experienced, but I have manually routed about 5 moderately complex 2-layer boards (a few high pin count chips).
I didn't look into autorouters much because I wanted to learn manual routing (which is a VERY good idea, like Dave said), and also because the only autorouter I tried (Kicad's builtin) was quite bad (put simply). FreeRouting.net router is very good, though.
I think from now on I will just route the high current/frequency traces manually, and let autorouter do the rest.
So, can you route better than an autorouter?