What’s most important to you when deciding on a PCB manufacturer?
Is price your decisive criteria or quality and capabilities?
How about customer reviews?
When you search for “PCB manufacturer”, the number of search results can be overwhelming. To make it easier and less time-consuming to sift through the results, it would be ideal to know your selection criteria. Will you make your choice based on price, value, reliability, capabilities, responsiveness, what customer reviews say, or a combination of these factors.
Ultimately, you have to decide without knowing all you want to or need to know. So, you have to trust that your selected vendor lives up to their claims and does not unpleasantly surprise you with additional cost, or quality, or reliability issues.
What’s the best way to determine the trustworthiness of a PCB manufacturer?
Essentially trustworthiness has three components:
- Competence – does the manufacturer have the required capabilities, knowledge, and expertise
- Reliability – is the company dependable; do they do what they say
- Honesty – is the truthfulness in their communication
To help you in your selection process, we have compiled the table below, which shows some of the manufacturing capabilities and information about customer reviews for eight primary PCB manufacturers.
| Criteria | Advanced Circuits/4pcb.com | Sunstone Circuits | Bay Area Circuits | allpcb.com | jlcpcb.com | pcbgogo.com | pcbway.com | Camptech |
| # of Google reviews | 6 | 9 | 3 | 12 reviews on Trustpilot | 151 Facebook reviews | 17 reviews on Trustpilot | 57 reviews on Trustpilot | 10 |
| Avg. review rating (out of 5) | 3.2 | 4.2 | 5 | 3.2 | 4.5 | 3.6 | 3.8 | 4.6 |
| Extensiveness/depth of the information offered in reviews | Poor | Fair | Fair | Good | Good | Good | Good | Good |
| Overall do the reviews seem trustworthy | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Controlled impedance | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Minimum hole size | 0.1 mm | .15 mm | .08 mm | 0.2 mm | 0.2 mm | .15 mm | 0.1 mm | 0.05 mm |
| Trace width/Trace Spacing | 3 mil | 3 mil | 3 mil/3 mil | 4 mil | 5 mil/5mil | 3 mil/3 mil | 3 mil/3 mil | 3 mil/3 mil |
| Aspect ratio | 12:1 | 15:1 | 12:1 | 20:1 | 12:1 | |||
| Routing tolerance | ± .15 mm | ± .08 mm | ± 0.15 mm | ± 0.2 mm | ± 0.2 mm | ± .15 mm | ||
| Min. SMT Pitch | 0.25 mm | .1mm | 0.4 mm | .15 mm | ||||
| Blind & Buried vias | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Via in pad | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | |||
| Stacked micro-vias | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | |
| Flexible PCB | No | No | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Location | U.S | U.S | U.S | China | China | China | China | Canada |
| Overall score based on fabrication capabilities, quality & customer service reviews (10 being highest) | 6 | 6.5 | 7 | 7 | 7 | 8 | 8 | 9 |
| Advanced Circuits/4pcb.com | Sunstone Circuits | Bay Area Circuits | allpcb.com | jlcpcb.com/ | pcbgogo.com | pcbway.com | Camptech |