Tuesday, September 12, 2017

JLCPCB

EasyEDA's sister PCB company

The last few orders from EasyEDA came in new packaging. It also came with a neat disposable pen.

The old boxes had some printing in Chinese. Google Translates it to this:

More of a company slogan than a brand.

I went to JLCPCB.com and it is another PCB ordering website. If you scroll down to the bottom you see the EasyEDA and LCSC logos. If you click on the forums button it goes to the EasyEDA forums. So it looks like another way to order PCB's from the same company as EasyEDA. When you login it gives you the option to login with your EasyEDA account.

The PCB order page looks different from EasyEDA but has similar options. The biggest difference I see is that you can get the $2 deal with colored PCB's. Even black is the same price. In fact there is no price change for the color of the PCB for regular size PCB's either. I hope this is not an oversite. There are also options to speed up production time for added cost.

JLCPCB now charges more for soldermask colors other than green. (10/24/2017)

One nice feature is that it will fill in the board dimensions after you upload your gerber files. Didn't work on a few that I tried though, so you may have to type in the dimensions manually.


The shopping cart is different and does not show the shipping costs. You have to click the Checkout button to see the total price with shipping. You can then click back to the cart, so just a few extra clicks to figure out how much shipping is going to be. On EasyEDA I would check the shipping to see if adding an extra 5 pieces would increase shipping or not, sometimes it would not and you can get a few extra boards for cheap.



The pricing models is different and seems to come out a little more. Will have to experiment more to figure out which is the better deal. You should price on both EasyEDA and JLCPCB and see which comes out cheaper.

For 10 green Gherkin PCBs + 10 green Foobar PCBs + DHL shipping the price came to:

EasyEDA $15.93 + $2 + $24.53 = $42.46
JLCPCB $21.95 + $2 + $21.09 = $45.04 See below.


JLCPCB is a few dollars more, but you can get any color PCB for the same price.

JLCPCB seems to have increased their prices (9/24/2017). It is now $26.32 for 10 Gherkin PCBs.
$26.32 + $2 + $21.09 = $49.41

If you got the same PCB's in black instead of green at EasyEDA the price would be:
$32.34 + $24.63 + $24.53 = $81.50

For colors other than black, EasyEDA's pricing is cheaper.

JLCPCB now charges more for soldermask colors other than green. (10/24/2017)

You should comparison shop to see which will give you the best prices.

Big savings if you want different colors. I hope the color pricing doesn't change in the future.

I will be placing my next PCB with JLCPCB to try out some colors. I've never ordered black before due to the added cost.

My first order came in. It took 1 week from ordering to delivery.