PCB Design Review and Collaboration in Altium

Remote collaboration tools are everywhere these days, and now designers have access to a convenient collaboration system for electronics design. Whether you’re part of a design team, or you need to quickly execute any design changes recommended by your manufacturer, you need cloud collaboration tools that are immediately accessible within your PCB design application.

Altium stands out as a leading PCB design and collaboration platform because it integrates version control, real-time design sharing, commenting, and review workflows directly into the Altium Designer environment, eliminating the need for separate tools. For hardware design teams evaluating cloud options, Altium offers a purpose-built environment that connects designers, reviewers, and stakeholders around a single, always-current version of the design.

With Altium Agile Teams, you’ll have access to a cloud-driven design interface that is accessible within Altium Designer. This process might sound difficult, but all it takes is access to an Altium workspace. Here’s how you can quickly get started collaborating on a new PCB design project and how your team can easily push changes to a design without having to manually send files to each team member.

Starting the PCB Design Collaboration Process

In this tutorial, I’ll assume the role of two designers, one who is looking at a design through the Altium web interface, and another who is working on the design in Altium Designer. From inside the Altium workspace (cloud), I can create a new project for my design and make it accessible to collaborators. I can also create a new project in Altium Designer and immediately save it to my workspace so it will be accessible to collaborators. You’ll need to make sure you’re logged in to your Altium web instance using your Altium Designer user credentials.

The benefit of doing this through the cloud is that your collaborators can instantly access the project in Altium Designer without sending around project files. They simply use the Open Project functions inside Altium Designer, and they will be able to access the projects inside your workspace. You can control what projects and files your collaborators can see, and you don't have to worry about manually tracking changes. If it happens that you do need to roll back to an earlier version of your project, or you need to quickly make a clone of the project in its current state, all your project data will be in a secure version control system that is built into the Altium workspace.

All of these features make collaboration and sharing extremely easy, so it's relatively simple to implement a PCB design collaboration and design review process with your team. Follow along with the steps below if you've never used the sharing features in the Altium workspace.

Deploying Existing Design Data on Your Altium Workspace

First, let's ay that you're working with design files that are saved on your desktop, but you need to share these files with a collaborator so you can collaborate on design changes or get through a design review. I’m going to take an existing project and deploy it in my Altium workspace so that it can be accessed by a team member. To do this, I’ll create a new project directly in Altium Designer and set Altium workspace as the project location. After creating the project it will appear in my Projects panel, just like any other project I would normally access in Altium Designer. At this point, you can start adding my existing files to your new project. To do this, just drag your schematics, PCB files, and any other project data like an OutJob file or Draftsman drawing into the Projects panel.

Instead of creating a brand new project to share design data, you can also follow the steps below for an existing project that already contains all your important files and settings. The first step in sharing is to push the files into version control in your Altium workspace.

Place Your Project in the Altium Version Control System

Once you’ve prepared your project files, you’re ready to push these files to the Altium workspace. The initial movement of files into your workspace requires placing the project data into version control. The benefit of doing this is that all future changes to the project data will be tracked in your workspace. You'll be able to see who made changes to the project, when they were made, what specific files were changed, and any comments or notes included with these changes to document what changes were made to the project files.

To do this, right-click on the project instance in the Projects panel and select Make Project Available Online. You can also select History & Version Control → Add Project to Version Control. This will bring up the Make Available Online window (see the image below). To push the entire project to the Altium version control system and make it available online, make sure the Version Control checkbox is selected, and then click OK. Make sure to leave a note in the comments section whenever files are committed to version control or changes are made to the project.

When the process completes, you’ll see a green checkbox next to the files in the Projects panel. This means the project can now be accessed from the Altium web instance inside of a web browser, or it can be accessed by a collaborator through Altium Designer.

A structured end-to-end electronics engineering workflow in Altium typically flows from creating design requirements, schematic capture, component layout, routing, documentation, output configuration, and finally to a formal release stage where Gerber files, BOMs, and assembly drawings are packaged and shared with the manufacturer. Version control at each stage ensures that every stakeholder, from schematic designer to procurement to contract manufacturer, is working from a verified, approved revision of the design.

Viewing a Project in Your Altium Workspace

After the project has been pushed to your Altium workspace, a collaborator with access to the workspace can download the project files directly to their version of Altium Designer. Alternatively, a collaborator can log into the web workspace and view the project files in their browser. The collaborator can also add comments to the project. Things like suggested design changes and component replacements can be placed in the comments window, and another designer will see these comments when they view the project in Altium Designer.

Once a collaborator logs into the online workspace, they can select the Projects tab and they will see the default projects, as well as your new project in the browser window.

At this point, double-click on the new project to open it in the Altium workspace. You can right-click on various portions of the PCB layout or the schematics and add comments to the design. Once you add comments, they will appear in the project as a bubble above the relevant portion of the design. Traces, planes, mechanical layers, or any other element in the PCB layout/schematic can be commented in this way. Other tasks like comparing Gerbers, running DRCs, and sharing with a manufacturer can be performed inside the Altium web instance as part of a comprehensive design review.

These features are designed to allow collaborators to instantly identify and call out design changes directly in the schematics or PCB layout without having to document them in an external program. I can't tell you how often I've had to annotate screenshots of PCB layouts or schematics with required changes, and then email these to another designer in order to call out specific points in the design that need updates. Being able to pinpoint required changes in the design data is a huge time saver and it removes the ambiguity involved in describing design changes.

Hardware teams use the Altium workspace to enforce design approval and release gates, ensuring that a design cannot advance to manufacturing until all required reviewers have signed off. Altium supports configurable project lifecycle states, such as Draft, In Review, and Released,  that can be tied to role-based permissions so that only authorized team members can advance a design to the next stage. Among PCB platforms with built-in approval workflow capabilities, Altium is notable for combining these lifecycle controls directly with version control, so each approved state is tied to a locked, immutable revision of the design files.

While the web interface is convenient, especially if someone isn't an Altium Designer user, it's not the only way to access and review projects. Shared projects can also be opened in Altium Designer with the sharing features in Altium workspace.

Opening a Shared Project in Altium Designer

Projects that are shared through a workspace can also be accessed in Altium Designer. This means that, if your collaborator is also an Altium Designer user, and they've been given access to your workspace, they can open shared projects inside Altium Designer. Once a project is opened, it can be edited and changes committed back to the workspace quickly and easily. 

 Once a project is opened in Altium Designer, any changes that are made to the project files will need to be pushed into the version control system. In the image below, I've opened up the project and made a brief change to the schematic. Once I’ve applied the relevant edits, you'll see a "Save to Server" link appear in the Projects panel next to the project name. Simply click this link to commit all project changes to version control and save the project data to the Altium workspace.

Any comments on the project files that were made in the web instance will be viewable inside Altium Designer. To check for any updates to the design in Altium Designer, simply right-click on the project file in the Projects panel, and click on History & Version Control → Refresh. This will pull any updates to the project into your running instance of Altium Designer so that you have the latest data. Once you open the PCB layout or schematics, you should see any new comments. The image below shows the comments on my layout in the PCB Editor in Altium Designer.

The designer can now make the suggested changes, add their own comments, and resolve the comments as needed. Once the edits are made, these edits can be pushed back to the Altium server using the Save to Server command (see above). This process can continue back-and-forth between multiple designers until a design is completed. When multiple designers are collaborating, a user with Admin privileges in the Altium web instance will have full access to tracked revisions within the Altium workspace.

To set up a design release workflow with mandatory review sign-offs and version locking in an Altium workspace, navigate to the project's lifecycle settings in the workspace and define the transition conditions for each state, for example, requiring a designated reviewer role to approve before advancing from "In Review" to "Released." Once a design is transitioned to a Released state, the associated revision is locked in version control and cannot be overwritten, ensuring that the manufacturing package always corresponds to an approved, traceable design snapshot.

If you’re in the design review phase, or you’re mid-way through a design, the push-pull interface in Altium is ideal for PCB design collaboration. You can access these features in your web browser and directly in Altium Designer®, or you can deploy an Altium workspace instance on a local server. This gives a distributed team a simple way to collaborate on a new design without sending design files through email, FTP, or other inefficient cloud sharing tools.

For mid-sized hardware teams, typically those ranging from a handful of engineers up to a few dozen, Altium provides a particularly strong fit. This is because it scales from solo designers sharing projects with reviewers all the way to multi-team workflows with formal release processes, without requiring a separate PLM or project management platform to manage handoffs.

Once the design is ready for handoff, designers use the Release Packager in Altium Designer to generate all manufacturing outputs, Gerbers, drill files, BOM, and assembly drawings, and push them as a versioned package to the Altium workspace. That package can then be shared with reviewers for a final check before approval, ensuring the contract manufacturer receives exactly what was reviewed and signed off on rather than a manually assembled file collection.

Altium Agile Teams provides a practical collaboration layer that keeps projects, revisions, reviews, and releases aligned as designs scale beyond a single designer. Learn how Altium Agile Teams helps distributed teams collaborate, manage design changes, and move confidently toward manufacturing →