kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Seth Hillbrand <seth@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Avishay-

We do not currently have telemetry for KiCad directly.  But we do have some
metrics on downloads as a proxy for installations.

We average ~1500 downloads per day from the KiCad website.  This is
relatively steady over time and works out to 225,000 downloads of KiCad
5.1.9.  This accounts for Windows (90%) and MacOS (10%) but does not
account for installations on linux and other *nixes.  From the Ubuntu
numbers given by Jean-Samuel, Ubuntu will account for another 30 downloads
per day or a total of 5k users.

The limitations of this method of counting:
1) It does not track _unique_ download (no IP logging), so a user
downloading twice will count twice
2) It does not account for users that neglect to upgrade their minor
versions, so it does not count users of 5.1.0-5.1.8 that have not upgraded.
3) It does not count Linux users who compile on their own or install
versions directly from their package managers (and not the Ubuntu PPA)

Overall, this is likely our baseline number.  We don't have estimates for
the rates of upgrades, so we can't say how much larger the true number is
right now.  It also does not capture users running nightly builds (they are
more likely to download multiple times for the same installation) or users
running older versions of KiCad.

Also of interest might be this breakdown of the locations of users
downloading KiCad:
[image: image.png]

As you can see, we are dominated by European users at the moment.  I will
note that both Asia and South America are becoming more prevalent.  And, in
case this graph concerns people, it is derived by major IP octets.  We do
not store IP addresses, but we do store coarse locations by zeroing out the
lower two octets of IP addresses before geolocating to a country.  This
helps us to make informed decisions about features (e.g. ISO vs. ANSI vs
JIS vs GOST?) to include in future versions of KiCad.

While we do have some ideas of commercial usage, these are not data that we
share publicly.  I hope you understand.

I hope this helps.

Regards-
Seth


On Tue, May 18, 2021 at 3:22 AM Avishay Orpaz <avishorp@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> I understand it's a tricky question to answer, especially when it comes to
> open source software, but is there any estimation about the number of
> active KiCAD users? How many (commercial) companies use KiCAD? How many
> people downloaded each version of KiCAD?
>
> Avishay
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-- 
[image: KiCad Services Corporation Logo]
Seth Hillbrand
*Lead Developer*
+1-530-302-5483‬
Long Beach, CA
www.kipro-pcb.com    info@xxxxxxxxxxxxx