Quilter vs DeepPCB: Choosing an AI Autorouter

This is the most useful thing to understand before comparing them. Neither Quilter nor DeepPCB creates your schematic, sources your components, or fixes a footprint. They start from a board that already exists and automate the physical work of arranging and connecting it. If your bottleneck is upstream, in capture, part selection, or library gaps, neither of these solves it.

That also means they slot into an existing flow rather than replacing it. You design elsewhere, hand off, and bring the routed result back into your own tool for checking.

Test both on the board you actually have. The free tiers exist precisely so you can do this, and the limits, board size, layer count, connection count, are where the two diverge in practice far more than in their marketing. A design that sails through one service's free tier can exceed the other's on a single dimension.

Then judge the output the same way for both: open the routed board in your own CAD tool, run DRC with your fabricator's real capability rules, and look at how the critical nets were handled. That is a comparison you can trust, unlike a generic verdict from someone routing a different board.

Both services require uploading your design. For a lot of work that is entirely fine. For pre-release hardware under NDA, defense or medical work, or a company whose policy simply forbids it, it is a hard stop, and no amount of routing quality changes that.

ProtoFlow's ProtoRoute engine routes on your machine, in the same free desktop editor that does schematic capture, part import, ERC, and DRC, on native KiCad files. It is a different trade, a local engine against dedicated cloud services that specialize in nothing else, but it is the option that exists when uploading is not permitted.

Route the nets that carry real constraints by hand first: high-speed differential pairs, RF, and heavy power distribution. Lock them. Then let the automation handle the dense digital and the fan-out, which is where it genuinely saves hours.

Afterwards, always re-run DRC in your own tool against your fabricator's published capability rather than the defaults. A service checks against the constraints it was given; only you know what your fab can build.