Open-source initiative aiding designers, artists, and researchers in transforming prototypes to actual products, documenting circuits, sharing, teaching, and PCB manufacturing.


The best open source alternative to KiCad is Fritzing. It's not free, so if you're looking for a free alternative, you could try Velxio or LibrePCB. If that doesn't suit you, our users have ranked more than 50 alternatives to KiCad and 17 is open source so hopefully you can find a suitable replacement. Other interesting open source alternatives to KiCad are eSim, Horizon EDA, MeowCAD and atopile.
Open-source initiative aiding designers, artists, and researchers in transforming prototypes to actual products, documenting circuits, sharing, teaching, and PCB manufacturing.


Emulate Arduino, ESP32 & Raspberry Pi. in your browser. Write code, compile, and run on 19 real boards — Arduino Uno, ESP32, ESP32-C3, Raspberry Pi Pico, Raspberry Pi 3, and more. No hardware, no cloud, no limits.




LibrePCB is a free EDA software to develop printed circuit boards. It’s currently under heavy development to bring out first stable releases as soon as possible.




eSim (previously known as Oscad / FreeEDA) is an open source EDA tool for circuit design, simulation, analysis and PCB design.




Horizon is a free EDA package. Contribute to carrotIndustries/horizon development by creating an account on GitHub.

MeowCAD is an online free and open source electronic design application tool. Its focus is on schematic and PCB design for electronic circuits.



atopile is a language and toolchain to describe electronic circuit boards with code. By replacing the point and click schematic interface with code, we introduce software development workflows like reuse, validation and automation to the world of electronics.

The gEDA project has produced and continues working on a full GPL'd suite and toolkit of Electronic Design Automation tools. These tools are used for electrical circuit design, schematic capture, simulation, prototyping, and production.




Circuit Diagram is a free application for making electronic circuit diagrams and exporting them as images. Design circuits online in your browser or using the desktop application.

PCB Elegance is a suite of circuit board design tools for Windows. Including schematic capture, board layout, and manufacturing file generation. First released in 1998, it was proprietary software until 2012, when it was released as open source software under the GPL.



pcb-rnd is a free/open source, flexible, modular Printed Circuit Board editor for design of professional and hobby boards. It has a strong UNIX mind set.

tscircuit is a framework for designing real electronics with Typescript and React. Your tscircuit code compiles into real-time previews for PCBs, schematics, 3D models and can be exported to fabrication files for manufacturing.

