Electric is free, open-source software, available here and at GNU (see here for more). There is no better way to get to know a CAD system than to use it. And there is no charge for this, ever. If you like it, keep it. If you don't, you've lost nothing.
Why are we doing this? Because we believe that software should not be proprietary, and we want everyone to be able to use Electric.
Electric is written in Java, so the download is a ".jar" file that will run on any platform with Java 17 or later (available from Oracle or Apache Harmony). For more information about running Electric on your system, see here. You can get a ".jar" file with or without source code. Both versions are runnable and have the built-in user manual and some supporting libraries:
GET THE GNU ELECTRIC BINARY RELEASE,
version 9.08
GET THE GNU ELECTRIC SOURCE RELEASE,
version 9.08
For those who wish to examine the Subversion source code repository, it can be found at GNU Savannah.
Please note that these distributions are controlled by the GNU General Public License (GPL), which requires you to make your source changes freely available when you redistribute the system.
Due to copyright restrictions, GNU is unable to distribute those parts of Electric that come from external sources. None of these features are necessary for the design of interated circuits. For more information, read the plugins manual page. These are the extras that enhance Electric:
If you simply want to run Electric and don't care about source code, you can download a full version of Electric with these facilities already included:
GET THE FULL ELECTRIC BINARY RELEASE WITH EXTRA FEATURES, version 9.08