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Alternatives

Cherry Blossom vs Quilter: a Quilter alternative

Quilter and Cherry Blossom both use AI to produce a PCB, but they pick up the work at different points. Quilter takes your finished schematic and board outline and returns placed, routed layouts in your own ECAD format. Cherry Blossom takes a sentence and returns the whole board, schematic included.

By Arnaud and Anass

The short answer

The best Quilter alternative is Cherry Blossom if you do not have a finished schematic yet: you describe the board in plain English and get the schematic, PCB layout, BOM and fab files, checked against manufacturing rules before you order.

It runs in the browser with nothing to install, takes footprints from real part data, and exports an editable KiCad project.

Quilter suits engineers who already have a complete schematic in Altium, Cadence, Siemens Xpedition or KiCad and only want placement and routing done in their native format.

The difference

Why look for a Quilter alternative?

Usually because you are earlier in the job than Quilter expects. Quilter describes itself as physics-driven AI for placement and routing, and its product page is clear about the boundary: it does not do schematic capture. You bring a complete schematic and a board outline from your ECAD tool, with connectors, mounting holes and other mechanically fixed parts already placed. Quilter returns layout candidates as native files for Altium, Cadence Allegro and OrCAD, Siemens Xpedition and KiCad.

If you have no schematic, no ECAD tool, or no wish to set a stackup and net classes, that is a lot of groundwork before Quilter can help. Cherry Blossom starts at the beginning. There is no schematic to import: you write what the board is for, and an agent running in a cloud sandbox writes the design as tscircuit code, picks parts, builds it, and renders the schematic, PCB, 3D view and BOM. Footprints come from real part data. Every AI edit goes through a verification gate, and a DRC check runs before ordering.

If you are starting from an idea, that means you get the whole board, schematic first, from one tool. See prompt to PCB for how a first message becomes a board.

Side by side

How do Quilter and Cherry Blossom compare?

  • Starting point

    Cherry Blossom

    A plain-English description

    Quilter

    Your finished schematic and board outline

  • Schematic capture

    Cherry Blossom

    Yes, drafted by the agent

    Quilter

    No, you bring it from your ECAD tool

  • Placement and routing

    Cherry Blossom

    Done by the agent as part of the build

    Quilter

    Its core job, with many candidates per run

  • Where you work

    Cherry Blossom

    Browser

    Quilter

    Your existing ECAD tool plus Quilter's cloud or self-hosted service

  • Outputs

    Cherry Blossom

    Gerbers, KiCad project, BOM, pick-and-place, STEP, Circuit JSON

    Quilter

    Native Altium, Cadence, Siemens and KiCad files

  • Pricing model

    Cherry Blossom

    $20/mo Pro, $140/mo Ultra, AI included

    Quilter

    Per project, based on unrouted pins; free version available

Quilter details from quilter.ai/product and quilter.ai/pricing, September 2026. Quilter does not print dollar prices on its pricing page.

Fit

What kind of board suits each one?

Quilter's product page says it handles up to 10,000 pins, with the sweet spot at 2,000 to 5,000, and that it suits low-voltage (under 48 V), low-current (under 10 A) designs at low to medium pin density. It asks you to set the stackup, DRC rules and net classes for power nets and differential pairs. That is the vocabulary of an experienced layout engineer.

Cherry Blossom is aimed at smaller boards, and at people who would not know where to start with a stackup: a sensor breakout, a microcontroller board, a small power stage. That is where most first prototypes live, and where going from idea to an orderable board in one sitting matters most. For boards with thousands of pins and controlled impedance, Quilter is built for that scale.

We built one

How much does placement decide the routing?

RP2040 4-layer board schematic, sheet 1 of 4: Block diagramRouted PCB layout of the RP2040 4-layer board
The RP2040 4-layer board. The four 100 nF caps beside the QFN had to move out before the board routed clean.

More than any router setting did on our board. An AI agent built this dense RP2040 board with tscircuit, the open-source engine Cherry Blossom runs on, using the same tscircuit version and review tool as Cherry Blossom's agent, on our own machine. In every full build, each DRC failure traced back to where parts sat.

  • With decoupling caps 0.6 mm from the edge of the QFN's pads, the router had no room beside the pads and put two vias inside them. Giving four caps 0.6 mm more room fixed it.

  • That fix has a cost. Those four 100 nF caps now sit about 2.4 mm from their pins, farther than you would want. At 1.8 mm, the vias went into the pads.

  • Moving the two USB resistors by 0.10 and 0.15 mm pushed the problem to the other side of the chip: two vias 0.091 mm from the flash chip-select pad, under the 0.1 mm minimum. Going back to the earlier placement fixed it.

  • Fixes from an outside review of the circuit later added five parts, and the new route left a GPIO trace 0.094 mm from a pad. Moving two test pads 0.5 mm gave identical copper, and a router clearance setting was ignored. Moving one 100 nF cap 0.15 mm cleared it: 139 of 139 connections, 0 DRC errors, no shorts.

Quilter places and routes together and returns several candidates, so it can try placements side by side. Our build gave one placement per run, and each change meant a full rebuild, the slowest of which took 21 min 24 s. The board scored 84 of 100 on our first rubric, under our 85 target. After that review the circuit scored 91 and the relaid board 86. It has not been fabricated.

Cost

What does each one cost?

Quilter's pricing page says it charges per project, not per seat, and that the cost depends on how many unrouted pins it has to route. A project includes unlimited iterations, parallel jobs and guided onboarding on your first board. You can use its managed cloud (listed as SOC 2 Type 2 compliant) or pay more for a self-hosted deployment. There is also a free version with the same functionality, on the condition that designs you upload may be used to improve Quilter's model.

Pro is $20 a month with 4M AI credits and 600 AI actions a day. Ultra is $140 a month with 32M credits and the frontier models. Usage past the allowance is $5 per 1M credits, only if you turn it on. The AI is included, with no API key and no per-seat licence. See pricing for the current plans.

Who should stay

When is Quilter the better choice?

Quilter can be the better fit if your project looks like this.

  • You already have a complete schematic in Altium, Cadence, Siemens or KiCad, and layout is the bottleneck.

  • The board is large, with hundreds or thousands of pins.

  • Your company needs a SOC 2 compliant cloud or a self-hosted deployment.

Who should switch

When is Cherry Blossom the better choice, and how do you start?

  • You are starting from an idea, not a schematic.

  • You want the schematic, layout, BOM and fab files from one description, in a browser tab.

  • You want a board checked against manufacturing rules and ready to order through the PCBWay hand-off.

  • You want to keep the result in open formats: an editable KiCad project and Circuit JSON.

There is nothing to migrate, because Cherry Blossom does not take a schematic file. Describe the board in your first message, including any parts you already know you want, and ask for changes in the same chat until it is right. If you later want Quilter to lay out a bigger revision, export the KiCad project; Quilter accepts KiCad designs, though we have not tested that round trip ourselves.

Current limits. Cherry Blossom is an early beta. You change a board by asking the agent, not by dragging traces yourself, so fine manual layout happens after a KiCad export. It is not a circuit simulator, it has no real-time multi-user editing, and it is not built for high-speed or RF sign-off.

Everything else

Where do both sit among AI PCB tools?

1Cherry BlossomOur product

Best for: Going from a plain-English description to a fab-ready board, in the browser

You describe the board in plain English and an AI agent writes it as code, builds it, and shows you the schematic, PCB layout, 3D view and BOM. Footprints come from real part data, and a verification gate checks the board before you can order it. Export Gerbers, an editable KiCad project, a BOM and pick-and-place files, or open Circuit JSON.

Platform
Browser, nothing to install
Pricing
Pro is $20 a month with 4M AI credits and 600 AI actions a day. Ultra is $140 a month with 32M credits and the frontier models. Usage past the allowance is $5 per 1M credits, only if you turn it on. The AI is included, with no API key and no per-seat licence.
2Quilter

Best for: AI placement and routing of a schematic you already have

Takes a finished schematic and board outline from your ECAD tool and returns placed and routed layout candidates as native Altium, Cadence, Siemens or KiCad files. It does not do schematic capture.

Platform
Cloud or self-hosted, alongside your ECAD tool
Pricing
Per project, priced on unrouted pins; free version whose uploads may train the model

The closest tool to Quilter is DeepPCB, and we compare the two directly in Quilter vs DeepPCB. For the wider field, see the full roundup of AI PCB design tools.

See it on your own board

The quickest way to judge any of this is to describe a board and read what comes back: the schematic, the layout, and what the verification gate says about it. It runs in the browser, with the AI included.

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Questions

The best Quilter alternative is Cherry Blossom when you need the whole board, not only the layout. Quilter is an AI placement and routing engine: you bring a complete schematic and board outline from Altium, Cadence, Siemens Xpedition or KiCad, and it returns layout candidates in your native format. It does not do schematic capture. Cherry Blossom starts before the schematic exists. You describe the board in plain English, an AI agent writes and builds the whole design, and a verification gate checks it against manufacturing rules before you can order. Footprints come from real part data, it runs in the browser, and there is no per-seat licence. The result exports as Gerbers and an editable KiCad project. For a large board whose schematic is already done, Quilter is built for that job. For a board you have not designed yet, Cherry Blossom takes you from idea to fab files.

No. Quilter's product page says it does not do schematic capture. You provide a complete schematic and a board outline from your ECAD tool, and Quilter handles placement, routing and validation against your constraints.

Quilter charges per project rather than per seat, based on the number of unrouted pins it has to route, and does not print dollar prices on its pricing page. It also offers a free version with the same functionality, where uploaded designs may be used to improve its model. Pro is $20 a month with 4M AI credits and 600 AI actions a day. Ultra is $140 a month with 32M credits and the frontier models. Usage past the allowance is $5 per 1M credits, only if you turn it on. The AI is included, with no API key and no per-seat licence.

In principle, yes. Cherry Blossom exports an editable KiCad project, and Quilter accepts KiCad designs. We have not tested that round trip ourselves, so treat it as a path to try rather than a supported workflow.

Describe a board. See what comes back.

Schematic, layout and a verification gate, in the browser. Exports to Gerbers and KiCad.

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