KiCad 10.0.0 shipped in March 2026, and it's a big one — the release leans into professional workflows: design variants, a graphical way to write DRC rules, a proper time-domain tuning system, and refined jobsets. If your articles or habits are still anchored to KiCad 9, here's what changed.
Short answer: the standout additions are design variants, a graphical DRC rule editor, time-domain track tuning, PCB design blocks, new importers (Allegro/PADS/gEDA), unconstrained pin/gate swap with bidirectional annotation, and native dark mode on Windows — plus jobsets got a dedicated project-manager tab.
Design variants
The headline feature. Variants let you track different versions of a single project that share one schematic but differ in properties — think a "populated" vs "depopulated" build, or region-specific BOM changes — without maintaining separate projects. For anyone shipping more than one flavor of a board, this removes a whole category of copy-paste error.
A graphical DRC rule editor
KiCad 10 adds a graphical DRC rule editor — you can build custom design rules in a graphical workflow instead of hand-writing the rule language, and it's compatible with the existing text syntax. Custom rules used to be a power-user feature precisely because of the syntax barrier; making them graphical brings them to everyone.
This pairs neatly with the pattern we describe in writing custom design rules: when a fine-pitch component trips clearance, you relax it locally with a rule rather than loosening the whole board. KiCad 10 just made writing that rule easier — and you can still hand-edit the .kicad_dru text.
Time-domain track tuning
The track-tuning system was overhauled to work with time-domain constraints instead of just length constraints. For high-speed work, matching propagation delay (which depends on the stackup and dielectric) is more correct than matching raw length — this is the same reasoning behind controlled impedance, now reflected in how you tune.
Refined jobsets
Jobsets arrived in KiCad 9; KiCad 10 gave them a home. Open a jobset and it appears in a dedicated tab in the project manager, with the list of jobs in the middle and jobset destinations on the right — including a destination that saves outputs to a folder. It's a cleaner way to define "here's how this project gets released."
Everything else worth knowing
| Area | KiCad 10 additions |
|---|---|
| Schematic | Variants, hop-over wire display (arcs over crossings), jumpers, grouping ported from PCB, local power symbols, pin-table CSV import/export |
| PCB | Time-domain tuning, PCB Design Blocks, inner-layer footprint objects, pad-per-layer graphics, barcodes, hatched fills, 3D PDF export |
| Both editors | Unconstrained pin/gate swap with forward/back annotation, lasso selection, undo/redo inside dialogs, customizable toolbars |
| Import | Allegro .brd, PADS .asc, gEDA/Lepton importers |
| General | Native dark mode on Windows (follows the system), graphical DRC editor |
| Libraries | STEP-only 3D format (smaller install); 952 new symbols, 1,216 new footprints, 386 new 3D models; 78%+ of footprints now data-generated |
The new importers are quietly strategic: moving off Allegro or PADS (as many teams evaluate) got materially easier — a companion to our Altium vs KiCad comparison.
What it means for your workflow
KiCad 10 is a professional-workflow release: variants for multi-build products, graphical DRC for approachable custom rules, time-domain tuning for high-speed, and jobsets you can actually see and manage. The tooling around your design keeps closing the gap with the premium suites.
The one thing KiCad still leaves to you is running that pipeline automatically on every change and storing the results somewhere shareable. Define your outputs in a jobset — then let GoForFab run the equivalent via kicad-cli on every push, so your Gerbers, BOM, CPL, DRC/ERC reports and 3D renders are always current and always a link away. Free forever.
Source: KiCad 10.0.0 release announcement.