OrCAD price drop

[Bassman59]

In today's e-mail, an offer for OrCAD at a ridiculously low price. I guess the writing is on the wall?

[mstevens]

Hardly! Staying strategically competitive. I have this Orcad license and a Professional license. Believe me, its worth it!!

[chris_leyson]

Allegro was a huge improvement over Orcad PCB and I for one was happy to see Cadence take them over. Not sure if it spells the end for Orcad/Allegro, perhaps they're making more from their Silicon design tools.

[olkipukki]

USA only, right? 

The offer done by "EMA is a Cadence® Channel Partner serving all of North America", why non-US local distributors cannot do same in other places?! 

[stn8188]

I see this price once or twice a year, so it's not totally new but I do think they are realizing the huge market share Altium is taking... I'm pretty sure AD18 is the only reason they added dark mode to OrCAD!

[PlainName]

USA only, right? 

Try it and report back. You might be surprised

[Ranayna]

From Germany, not logged in to the store:

"Sorry, this product cannot be purchased."

EDIT: Scrolling down to the contact form gives me an odd choice of countries:

United States
Canada
Mexico
France
Great Britain
Ireland
Italy
United Kingdom ( )

[chris_leyson]

Works from the UK 

[PlainName]

That is an odd list. Perhaps it's just where the CEO has been on holiday, hence he knows their names.

[Sal Ammoniac]

Based on the current low price offer for OrCAD, I downloaded the trial version to give it a test run. I noticed that the build-in symbol and footprint libraries are tiny and don't really contain much.

Does OrCAD have something like Altium's Vault, which is an on-line library with thousands of parts?

[chris_leyson]

You get 6 months free access to Ultra Librarian https://resources.ema-eda.com/datasheets/ultra-librarian-for-orcad

[AndyC_772]

I always draw my own symbols. It's a small part of the job in terms of the time it takes, but as a way to make me actually check the data sheet in detail, it's an invaluable discipline and one I'd highly recommend getting into.

[chris_leyson]

@AndyC_772, I would second that. Work from the data sheet, use the manufcturers recommended footprint or maybe use a tool like Library Expert as another check. 3D models are a great help as well.

[mstevens]

You get 6 months free access to Ultra Librarian https://resources.ema-eda.com/datasheets/ultra-librarian-for-orcad

I'm no professional pcb designer; but all the professionals say NEVER trust another's libraries.

[Alex Eisenhut]

You get 6 months free access to Ultra Librarian https://resources.ema-eda.com/datasheets/ultra-librarian-for-orcad

I'm no professional pcb designer; but all the professionals say NEVER trust another's libraries.

Trust, but verify. I once trusted, but didn't verify. Footprint was mirrored.

[Alex Eisenhut]

From Germany, not logged in to the store:

"Sorry, this product cannot be purchased."

EDIT: Scrolling down to the contact form gives me an odd choice of countries:

United States
Canada
Mexico
France
Great Britain
Ireland
Italy
United Kingdom ( )

Nothing odd about it, Cadence has another rep in Germany:

https://www.flowcad.com/en/products.htm

[Ranayna]

Yes, I saw that when I was looking for german pricing, and assume that this list is at least a partial list where they don't have a local partner.
But it's an odd looking list anyway, especially considering the redundancy of "Great Britain" and "United Kingdom".

[PlainName]

Note that 17.4 appears to be Windows 10 only, so if you're running W7 you might want to check that it will install and run before taking advantage of this (or other) offer.

[amiq]

Note that 17.4 appears to be Windows 10 only, so if you're running W7 you might want to check that it will install and run before taking advantage of this (or other) offer.

17.4 will work on win 7.

[PlainName]

OK, thanks. I happened to look at the requirements and 17.2 listed W7 but 17.4 dropped that.

With Microsoft buying up products solely to stiff the W7 support, the possibility is that they could've persuaded Cadence to not just not support W7 but actively prevent it.

[Dubbie]

Regarding drawing footprints. I find it is a major part of my time.
The largest is routing, next drawing symbols/footprints and then lastly schematics.
Of course reading datasheets is more than all of them. 

[EEVblog]

Seems like a permanent price drop?
What's Altium going for these days, at least an order of magnitude more?

l remember the day in the Altium staff cafeteria when founder Nick Martin announced the permanent 80% price drop and said "We are burning our bridges, we can never go back to high priced software" 

[jeremy]

I think the list price is somewhere around $7k USD + $2k per year, but I could be remembering wrong.

[chris_leyson]

Orcad 17.4 for Windows is Win10 64-bit only, I think release 17.2 might have run on Win7,8.
Linux version is RedHat only, might be 64-bit but it's good to see that Linux support.
Pricing is about $3.5k for the USA or £3.5k if you live in the UK, not sure why exchange rates don't come into play but Orcad has been at this sort of price level for quite a while, Orcad 9 cost me £3.5k nearly 20 years ago.

[asmi]

What's Altium going for these days, at least an order of magnitude more?

I recently got AD for ~3600$ (12 payments of $300 per month). But AD needs to be compared to Orcad Pro, which I got few years ago for $1800, and they are broadly on par feature-wise. If you look at MSRP, Orcad Pro I think is $5000 (+$1800/year maintenance sub), as for AD I think it's $9000 (with 1 year of maintenance included), but I don't think anyone actually bought AD at MSRP as they seems to be much more into these cheesy "we will charge how much I think you can pay" sales tactics than competitors. But than again - AD is the end of the line, while Orcad Pro is merely a step towards much more capable Allegro license level. And this is why Cadence seems to be giving away Orcad Standard for cheap - they see it as a way to get you into the ecosystem, so that when Standard license feature set will not be enough for you anymore, you will upgrade the license to Professional (or Allegro) and have a next-to-zero learning curve, because at all license levels it's still the exact same product.