In the world of PCB design altuim is one of the best, but seriously the company is terrible, consider two flaws with the software, the price, and the 100 of bugs. I'm now in Altuim 16.1, and while I could update have found that with each update something breaks. I used it all the way up until another internship and got to use Altium 14. I then discovered Eagle during a summer internship at a SF startup, and fell in love. I started my EE carrier my freshman year using cadence, and the spice tool for homework assignments. There is a whole slew of services running ( version control, integration with supply chain, what was called Athena, etc ) As for licencing and pricing : i'm not at liberty to say. It contains much more beyond simply the database. Find a host : create a VM, deploy, connect. ) The nexus server van be deployed on-site in a VM, or externally like on Amazon elastic cloud or at some other cloud provider.

Nexus can connect in compatibility mode to Vault 3.0 (works perfectly fine. it is much more beyond the database only). Vault is gone and replaced by Altium Nexus Server (which is essentially vault 4.0, but vault is a wrong word. Uses existing licence (if on subscription) Altium Nexus 18 : for people that do use a vault and project management.

Release 18 is IDENTICAL in terms of schematic / pcb ( they are the same codebase ) There will be 2 flavors: Altium Designer 18 : for people that do not use Vault technology.

Altium nexus price