It's truly interestering. We considered it, and we didn't like it. It seems something born to be "vendor lock-in" plus the fact that it looks super volatile (a bad combination). We are sure that our current EDA tools will at least stick around for a while.
And it's browser based. Opening any of the examples on the main page with firefox lifted up my PC like a hovercraft by the way the fans started to spin, with several seconds delay for any interaction (on a PC that's capable of running Altium and Orcad).
PS: I love the animation on the main page and how the mechanical engineer has no idea on what's going on!
Yeah, performance is on our radar now that the core product is mature enough to manufacture boards. Our goal is to get 200 component projects to work well on a regular 2017 generation machine and get to 1000 by end of year.
About vendor lock-in: we def don't want to lock anyone in...so data portability is big focus and we have import/export support for kicad and other formats like STL or Collada already. Planning to add support for Netlists, Altium, Eagle, etc too as well as a REST API.
You can also export your project as a json file today
Ultimately the power of flux is connectedness the collaboration that enables but we do plan to ship a standalone app that's unbundled from your web browser in parallel to the web version.
We also have plans to offer some amount of offline capabilities so solve for use cases such as being on a airplane.
Good points there about longevity. If you're doing any EDA work you need to drag the EDA product through the lifecycle of the design. I have seen whole computers with OrCAD for MSDOS dragged along with a product just so the toolchain didn't get shafted.
I'm using Altium as my major tool for professional electronic design but I looking for something LESS expensive. And I've already done one paid project on Flux.ai. If you beginner in electronics I recommend you invest your time in something progressive like Flux rather than KiCAD or EAGLE. Yes, KiCAD and EAGLE are good tools and you will still find a lot of projects for a few years before they become complete dinosaurs but at some point, you will hate working in them(oh, gods, how I hate EAGLE, sorry for everyone who loves it)
I joined the beta about 6 months ago and these guys develop fast. When I just signed in there was no PCB at all and now a bunch of people made their PCBs in Flux and even assembly. Definitely worth to at least trying this tool.
It’s a modern take on electronics design with slick UX
Comes with a free tier as well as paid
Software engineers here are gonna love that components in flux are fully programmable from schematic/PCB all the way down to simulator models