I've watched people search "free PCB design software," click the first result, and hit one of three walls: a trial that expires, an install with a real learning curve, or a page that asks for an account before it'll show you anything. None of those are lying exactly — they're all "free" in some sense — but they're not the same promise, and finding that out after you've started is the whole reason this search feels untrustworthy.
I build PCBEditor, a free one, so let me be specific about what free means before comparing it to anything else.
The three kinds of free that get called the same thing
Open source means the code itself is public — you can read it, change it, and run it yourself. KiCad is the reference case: it costs nothing because nobody owns the distribution, and nobody can ever decide to start charging for it. The cost is a real desktop install and a learning curve that a browser tool doesn't have.
A hosted free tool — PCBEditor, EasyEDA, CircuitMaker's community tier, Flux's free tier — is closed-source software you use through the vendor's app at no cost. You never install anything, but you're trusting a company to keep it free, and you can't audit what it's doing.
A "free trial" is neither of those. It's paid software with the meter not running yet. That's a legitimate business model, but it's a different word doing the same job, and it's usually the one that burns people who searched "free" expecting the first two.
Neither open source nor a hosted free tool is better in the abstract. If you want something nobody can ever discontinue or paywall on you, open source is the only real guarantee. If you want to open a tab and start, a hosted free tool gets there faster — you're just trading that ownership for convenience.
Where the specific tools land
If you want the tool most people will point you to, it's KiCad — free, open source, genuinely excellent, and a desktop install with real depth to learn. If you want parts search tied straight to LCSC's catalogue with a one-click hand-off to JLCPCB for fabrication, EasyEDA's free tier is built for exactly that. If what you actually want is a slice of Altium's routing engine for nothing, CircuitMaker gives you that — in exchange for your designs living publicly on their platform, which is worth knowing before you put something you'd rather keep private into it. Altium itself, worth naming since it's the tool everyone eventually compares against, isn't free at all: pricing is per-seat and starts in the thousands a year.
Where PCBEditor sits in that: free, browser-based, no install — closer to EasyEDA's or Flux's model than to KiCad's. The honest caveat, the same one I'd want told to me: the free tools (calculators, the Gerber viewer) need nothing at all, and opening the editor itself needs no account either — but actually having it generate a circuit does ask for a free email sign-in, because that's the part that costs compute. Not a credit card. An account. I'd rather say that here than have someone find out after they've started typing.
There's no paid plan behind any of this today, for what it's worth — no pricing page, no checkout. If that changes later it should be a separate, clearly priced thing, not a quiet lock on something that's free right now.
The Linux and Chromebook case, since it's a real one
If you're on Linux, this whole question gets sharper: most desktop EDA either has no native build or needs a compatibility layer to run something built for Windows or macOS. A browser sidesteps that completely, because it's the one thing every platform already has. It's the same reason a browser tool is the only real option on a Chromebook, which can't install desktop EDA at all, and it's a decent option on a phone or tablet for a quick edit or a DRC check on the go, even if a bigger screen still wins for a dense board.
If you're evaluating a "free" PCB tool, the questions I'd actually ask are: is this free-as-in-open-source, free-as-in-hosted-tier, or free-as-in-trial-that-ends? What happens the moment you try to actually use it — does it ask for anything before or after it delivers? And is there a live pricing page anywhere, because that tells you whether "free" is the current state or a funnel.
If you want to check the answers for PCBEditor specifically: open the editor first and look around — that part needs nothing — and sign in only once you're ready to have it generate something.
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