KiCon Asia 2026 is coming to Shenzhen November 5-7!
Get your tickets now to join the KiCad community for a factory tour and 2 days of presentations and collaboration.

External Tools

These are tools that KiCad users have made to aid in development of their projects either within or outside KiCad. The tools are not necessarily stictly cross platform.

inventree-kicad

afkiwers

inventree-kicad is a plugin for InvenTree which allows InvenTree to act as an external part database for KiCAD.

View Tool

KiCad StepUp

easyw

KiCad StepUp is a FreeCAD Workbench aimed at helping both KiCad and FreeCAD users in collaborating with electrical (ECAD) and mechanical (MCAD) design.

Main features:

  • Load kicad board and parts in FreeCAD and export it to STEP (or IGES) models

  • Load kicad_mod footprint in FreeCAD to easy and precisely align the mechanical model to kicad footprint

  • Pull a pcb edge from a kicad_pcb board, edit it in FreeCAD Sketcher and push it back to kicad

  • Push & pull 3D models positions between FreeCAD and KiCAD

View Tool

kicad_firmware_generation

Christopher Besch <[email protected]>

When you design hardware, you often develop firmware, too. That firmware needs to know which controller pin controls what functionality. So you adapt the firmware to the specific hardware, e.g., with a pin definition C header. What if you didn’t have to do so manually? kicad_firmware_generation is a tool suite for generating (parts of) the firmware based on information from KiCad schematics.

View Tool

KiCanvas

theacodes

KiCanvas is an interactive, browser-based viewer for KiCAD schematics and boards. It is written in modern vanilla TypeScript and uses the Canvas element and WebGL for rendering.

View Tool

KiCost

Dave Vandenbout (author), Hildo Guillardi Jr. (collaborator)

KiCost is intended to be run as a script for generating part-cost spreadsheets for circuit boards developed with KiCad. It works by scraping part distributor websites to get part pricing. Additionally, KiCost supports other bill of material files from other EDAs which is useful for older projects and it can even handle hand-made CSV files. KiCost also comes with a graphical user interface in addition to command line.

View Tool

Part-DB

Jan Böhmer (@jbtronics) and others

Part-DB is an open-source web-based inventory management system for electronic components. It supports the HTTP library format of KiCad 8+, meaning the components in available your storage can be directly viewed and placed inside KiCad. This is especially useful in teams, where Part-DB can be used as a central database of available components for designing PCBs and what symbols and footprints should be used for them in KiCad.

View Tool