My PCBWay Review

I recently ordered my tenth batch of PCBs from PCBWay. I’ve ordered a number of boards from other manufacturers including JLCPCB and OSH Park, and have had good experiences with them, but PCBWay has been my primary supplier for a couple of years now, and I’ve hand-assembled well over 100 boards they’ve manufactured for me.

Overall, for me, PCBWay seems to have the best blend of speed, options, and cost out of the popular PCB suppliers. They have a fantastic number of options for boards (the only thing missing is OSH Park’s super-cool transparent solder mask)

And for all of this, on average, a batch of 5 boards only costs around $20 including shipping. Across my ten orders, I believe I’ve ordered boards for a total of three different projects – I iterate quite a bit and being able to get new batches of boards quickly and cheaply really helps me make progress on my projects (although I still tend to take forever to complete them)

PCBWay is also super helpful in general. I’ve never had issues with boards from them, however, I have had issues with the designs I’ve sent them, which they’ve helped me to resolve painlessly. They’ve also implemented features on their website that I’ve requested – most recently, the ability to simply upload a batch of Gerbers and have them analyzed, rather than manually selecting dimensions and tolerances when ordering a batch of boards. This wasn’t a huge deal, but it could be error-prone in the past, and it was neat to see a feature I requested be implemented.

While typing out this review, I actually placed an eleventh order with PCBWay. Did I mention that they’re fast? Here’s a timeline of that order from being placed to shipped