KiCad, the free open-source suite for electronic computer-aided design, announced new 9.0.0 release a few days ago.

KiCad 9.0 is a new major release that contains exciting new features, usability improvements, and hundreds of bug fixes.

The release added a feature that provides predefined sets of jobs (e.g., plotting, exporting, and running DRC) on schematics and PCBs. They are re-usable across projects, and can be run from either command line or graphical interface.

User can now embed various elements in schematics, PCB layouts, footprints and symbols that were previously linked to external files. And, tables can now be added to schematic, symbol library, and footprint library editors with editing support.

V9.0 also introduced component class feature, allows to group various symbols and footprints into classes with specific design rules applied. Symbols can have more than one component class. And, there are three new DRC expressions / functions to query, test component classes.

image from kicad.org

Like the PCB and footprint library editors, the schematic and symbol library editors now have object selection filtering, new highlight net colors option, and schematic design blocks to create libraries of reusable schematic blocks.

There are as well new sheet pin/hierarchical label synchronization tool, provides management of sheet pins and their associated hierarchical labels, and net class rule areas allows to draw a shape to which net class directives can be attached.

For PCB and Footprint Editors, there’s now new API for the board editor. It’s based around inter-process communication (IPC) that will eventually replace the current Python wrapper interface.

There are also new zone manager to easy preview and adjustment of zone priorities and other settings, new Shape Modification tool next to Fillet and Chamfer. And, layer pairs can now be added to a preset list.

image from kicad.org

Other changes include:

• New Bezier curve creation tool in the schematic and PCB editors.
• New scroll action (Shift+Alt+Scroll/Ctrl+Alt+Scroll) in the PCB, schematic, footprint and symbol editors.
• Raytrace 3D images in command line interface.
• Control over via tenting on top and bottom sides, at a board level and per-via overrides.
• Supports PTH pads with different copper shapes on different layers.
• Update the push and shove router to allow dragging of multiple tracks
• Export 3D models to XAO, STL, BREP, and PLY file formats.
• Net inspector panel, ODB++ export, and many more! See the announcement for details.

How to Install KiCad

KiCad has an official download page for Windows, macOS, Linux, Docker, as well as source code:

For Ubuntu users, there’s an official PPA contains the packages for Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 24.04, Ubuntu 24.10, and Linux Mint 22/21 running on modern Intel/AMD CPUs. See HERE if you don’t even know how to use PPA.

And, here’s an official Flatpak package for most Linux, though it runs in sandbox environment.