What is Altium 365? #
Altium 365 is a cloud platform from Altium, the PCB design software company based in San Diego, California. Renesas Electronics completed its acquisition of Altium in August 2024. Altium launched Altium 365 in May 2020 with Altium Designer 20.1. Its documentation calls it “a cloud-based infrastructure platform that connects all the key stakeholders and disciplines, from mechanical designers to parts procurement, to fabrication and assembly.”
Altium Designer is the desktop application engineers use to draw schematics and lay out boards, and that work happens on their own workstation. Altium 365 is the cloud platform behind it. It stores the design data, tracks each revision and lets reviewers, supply chain and manufacturing open and comment on a design in a browser. They don’t need an Altium Designer seat to do that.
At its core sits the Altium 365 Workspace, “a dedicated cloud-hosted server for all your managed content.” Altium 365 version control keeps each release as a separate revision instead of overwriting the last one. The Workspace also holds the Altium 365 component library, with library management and BOM tools built in.
You can’t buy Altium 365 on its own. It comes with the Altium Develop, Altium Agile Teams and Altium Agile Enterprise plans.
The name Altium365 means the cloud side of Altium licensing. “A server managed by Altium” serves the On-Demand seats, and administrators manage them in the Altium Dashboard. That dashboard is what Open iT reads.
Which license types does Altium 365 support? #
Altium sells three license types, plus a roaming mode, and each one fills or drains the pool in its own way.
| License type | How it works | What it means for the pool |
|---|---|---|
| On-Demand | A user holds a seat “only while you are signed in to Altium Account” and releases it on sign-out. Administrators allocate the license to Company Account User Groups. | A shared, concurrent pool. Anyone who stays signed in keeps a seat. Once every seat is leased, the next user gets “maximum usage reached.” |
| Roaming (On-Demand and Private Server) | The user takes a seat for a set time and works offline. “When the roaming period elapses, use of that seat will stop with no grace period.” | The seat is gone from the pool for the whole period, whether anyone designs on it or not. |
| Standalone | A license file (*.alf) activates on one workstation, then runs offline. | No pool at all. The seat belongs to one machine. |
| Private Server | A Private License Service (PLS) runs on a PC on your LAN or WAN, through Altium Infrastructure Server or Altium On-Prem Enterprise Server. It’s built for sites cut off from the internet. | The pool lives on your network, not in Altium’s cloud. |
Two Dashboard settings matter most to anyone watching the pool. The first releases a seat automatically when the client machine goes idle, and you set the check interval anywhere from 1 to 12 hours. The second is the License Usage Report, with real-time and historical usage, activity logs and CSV downloads.
Which applications Altium 365 licenses, and which vendors connect to it #
Altium’s licensing is first-party, it covers the vendor’s own software. That means Altium Designer, licensed per Author, and the Altium 365 Workspace for projects, libraries and collaboration. It also covers BOM Portal, the Workspace application for procurement-ready BOMs.
Several other vendors’ tools exchange data with Altium 365, but none of them get their licenses from it. MCAD CoDesigner swaps 3D data with Autodesk Fusion and Inventor, SOLIDWORKS, PTC Creo and Siemens NX. PLM integration covers PTC Windchill, Arena, Oracle Agile, Aras Innovator and Siemens Teamcenter. The Altium 365 Jira integration keeps tasks in sync between the two. Renesas, Altium’s parent, made Renesas 365, Powered by Altium, generally available on 11 March 2026.
Altium doesn’t license any of those tools. Each one answers to its own vendor’s license system. So the engineer holding an Altium seat often holds a SOLIDWORKS or Creo seat too, and you’ll find the records for each in a different place.
How Open iT supports your work with Altium365 #
Open iT sends the processed data to the Open iT Core Server for historical reporting. You don’t depend on what the Altium Dashboard shows on a given day. You can look back over months of usage when it’s time to renew.
The reports answer the question every renewal turns on: how many seats do you actually need?
Max Available vs Max in Use compares the seats you own with the most your engineers ever used at once. A persistent gap may indicate underused seats that should be reviewed before renewal. If there’s no gap, users are about to hit “maximum usage reached.”
Feature Elapsed Time per User shows who holds a seat and for how long. It tells you where seats sit unused and who might need training.
The real-time view shows who has a seat checked out right now.
Usage comes broken down by user and by user group. That lets you see which teams draw on the pool. “Historical usage records may support internal reviews, renewal analysis, and audit preparation.” Do not guarantee that the records will be accepted as formal vendor-audit evidence.
Altium doesn’t sit on its own island either. Open iT supports 100+ license managers, so your Altium seats appear on the same reports as the rest of your engineering software. If you run Altium on your own servers rather than in Altium’s cloud, Open iT covers that setup too.
Your IT team will find the full setup in the Open iT documentation.
For license managers: check the gap before you renew #
Two numbers decide an Altium renewal. One is the seat count on the contract. The other is the peak your engineers actually draw. Open iT puts both on one report, alongside the rest of your engineering licenses across the 100+ license managers it supports.
