If you learned PCB design in Eagle, 2026 is the year you have to make a decision. Autodesk has folded Eagle into Fusion, standalone Eagle is winding down, and a lot of engineers are asking the same question: stay in the Autodesk world, or move to KiCad? Here's an honest look, without the tribalism.
Short answer: Classic standalone Eagle is end-of-life — Autodesk moved its electronics tooling into Fusion (now Fusion Electronics). If you don't want to live inside Fusion's subscription and cloud model, KiCad is the natural landing spot: free, no board-size or layer limits, and it imports your Eagle files directly.
What happened to Eagle?
Eagle spent decades as the go-to affordable EDA tool, especially for hobbyists and small hardware shops. Autodesk acquired it in 2016, and over the following years merged its capabilities into Fusion. The result is Fusion Electronics — the schematic and PCB tooling now lives inside Autodesk Fusion rather than as a separate application.
Practically, that means the standalone Eagle you remember is on its way out. New standalone subscriptions are gone, and the roadmap points everyone toward Fusion. If you're happy in the Autodesk ecosystem — especially if you already use Fusion for mechanical CAD — that consolidation can be a genuine benefit: your enclosure and your board live in the same place, with real ECAD/MCAD co-design. If you only want to design boards, you now carry a much larger MCAD suite to do it.
Pricing: subscription vs free
This is the sharpest difference.
Fusion Electronics is part of a paid Autodesk Fusion subscription. There's a limited free tier for personal, non-commercial use with caps on things like board area and layers, but commercial work means a paid seat. Autodesk sets and changes those prices, so we won't quote specific numbers here — check their current pricing before you commit.
KiCad is free under the GNU GPL. No seat count, no feature tiers, no license server, no board-size or layer caps. Whatever you design is yours to manufacture and sell, commercially, with no restrictions. For a solo engineer, a student, or a small team watching costs, that difference alone often decides it.
Feature comparison
For the everyday work most people did in Eagle, KiCad is at least a match — and in several areas it has pulled ahead.
| Capability | Eagle / Fusion Electronics | KiCad |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Paid Fusion subscription (limited free tier) | Free (GPL), no limits |
| Board size / layer limits | Capped on free tier | None |
| Schematic capture | Good | Excellent |
| Interactive router | Good, with autorouter | Very good (push-and-shove, length tuning) |
| MCAD / ECAD co-design | Deep, native in Fusion | STEP export, external MCAD |
| 3D viewer | Yes (via Fusion) | Yes (built-in, STEP export) |
| Libraries | Large, plus Fusion cloud libraries | Large built-in, huge community ecosystem |
| Platform | Windows, macOS, Linux | Windows, macOS, Linux |
| Command-line output generation | Limited | kicad-cli (full outputs, no GUI) |
| Licensing for commercial use | Requires paid seat | Free, unrestricted |
Where Fusion still has a real edge is tight mechanical integration — if your board and enclosure evolve together and you live in Fusion anyway, that co-design loop is hard to beat. For pure electronics work, KiCad's editors are more than enough, and the price is zero.
If you're weighing whether an open-source tool is truly ready for serious work, we go deeper in Is KiCad professional enough? and in our broader look at the best free PCB design software.
How to migrate from Eagle to KiCad
The good news: you don't have to redraw anything. KiCad imports Eagle files natively.
- In KiCad, choose File → Import → Non-KiCad Project (or import the schematic/board directly).
- Point it at your Eagle
.sch,.brd, or.lbrfiles. KiCad reads them and converts to its own formats. - Open the imported schematic and board, run DRC and ERC, and spot-check footprints, netlist, and any custom library parts.
- Fix the handful of things that didn't translate perfectly — usually exotic footprints or unusual library conventions.
For simple-to-moderate boards, the import is remarkably clean. On dense or heavily custom designs, treat the converted files as a strong starting point and review before you manufacture. Once you're in, KiCad's plain-text file format makes the project Git-friendly, which is a real upgrade over passing board_final_v2.zip around.
Who should pick which
Stay with Fusion Electronics if: you already use Fusion for mechanical CAD, you value native ECAD/MCAD co-design, and a subscription is acceptable to your budget and workflow.
Move to KiCad if: you mainly design electronics, you want a free and fully-owned toolchain with no board limits, you're a student or small team, or you simply don't want your PCB tool tied to a larger subscription suite you don't otherwise need.
For most people leaving Eagle, KiCad is the path of least regret — same-or-better editors, zero cost, and a direct import for the work you've already done.
The workflow gap — and how to close it
One thing neither Eagle nor KiCad fully solves out of the box is what happens after the layout: exporting Gerbers, drill files, a BOM, and a pick-and-place file by hand, every revision, and keeping them all in sync. KiCad ships kicad-cli to generate those outputs from the command line — but wiring that into a repeatable process is left to you. (If you just want the manual route, here's how to export Gerbers from KiCad.)
That's exactly the gap GoForFab closes. Connect a KiCad project and every push regenerates the full manufacturing package automatically — Gerbers, BOM, CPL, DRC and ERC reports, 3D renders — so your outputs are always current and always reproducible. It's free forever to start, and it works with the Eagle designs you just imported. Move off Eagle, keep your files, and let the outputs take care of themselves.