Multisim Live Is Shutting Down — Free Browser Alternatives
Multisim Live reaches end of life on 15 September 2026. After that date the site is no longer accessible and existing subscriptions are discontinued. NI is consolidating around Multisim Desktop, which is a paid, installed application rather than a browser tool.
If you have been using Multisim Live for coursework, teaching or quick checks, you need somewhere else to go — and if you have circuits saved there, you need to export them before the date, not after.
First: get your circuits out
This is the part with a deadline. Once the site is down, saved designs are not retrievable from it.
- Open each circuit you care about and export it. Multisim Live circuits can be imported into Multisim Desktop.
- Take a screenshot of anything you cannot export cleanly. A picture of a schematic is enough to rebuild it — including in tools that can read a schematic photo back into a working circuit.
- Note the component values. A screenshot without readable values costs you an hour later.
Do this first. Everything below can wait; that cannot.
What to look for in a replacement
Not every simulator does the same job, and the honest answer to "what should I use" depends on which of these you actually need:
- Runs in a browser, nothing to install. This is why most people used Multisim Live in the first place — a lab computer or a school Chromebook cannot always install software.
- Real SPICE underneath. Some browser tools use their own approximate solver. If you need results that match a bench measurement, you want a real SPICE engine.
- Microcontrollers. Arduino and AVR circuits are a large share of what students simulate now, and most classical SPICE tools cannot run firmware at all.
- Sharing. Handing a link to a student or a marker is very different from emailing a file.
The free browser options
Falstad Circuit Simulator — free, fast, and excellent for seeing how a circuit behaves: current is animated along the wires, which makes it a strong teaching tool. It uses its own solver rather than SPICE, and it has no microcontroller support. Best when the goal is intuition rather than exact numbers.
EveryCircuit — polished and interactive with real-time animation, and it runs in a browser. The free tier is limited; the useful version is paid.
CircuitLab — capable and browser-based, with a genuine simulation engine. Free use is limited and full access is a subscription.
LTspice — free and extremely capable, and the reference many engineers trust. It is a desktop install, not a browser tool, and the interface is famously unfriendly to beginners. If you are allowed to install software and you need accuracy above all, it is hard to argue against.
CircuPilot — free, runs in the browser, and uses ngspice — the same open-source SPICE engine used in professional flows — so the numbers are real rather than approximate. Two things it does that the others do not: you can describe a circuit in plain English and get a working, editable schematic, and you can upload a photo of a schematic — from a textbook, a whiteboard or a Multisim Live screenshot — and get a simulatable circuit back. It also runs Arduino and ATmega16 firmware alongside the analog simulation, which classical SPICE tools cannot do.
It is a younger tool than the others and does not try to be Multisim: there is no PCB layout, no instrument bench with a dozen virtual instruments, and the component library is smaller. What it does cover is the analog and embedded teaching circuits most coursework is built from.
If you are a teacher with a class mid-term
The awkward part of a mid-September shutdown is that it lands in the first weeks of the academic year in the northern hemisphere. Two practical notes:
- A browser tool with no signup is worth a lot here. Anything that requires thirty students to create accounts costs you a lesson.
- If your assignment sheet says "simulate this in Multisim Live", the sheet needs editing too. A tool that accepts the assignment text itself — "a voltage divider with a 5 V source, 1 kΩ and 2 kΩ" — saves rewriting the exercise around a new interface.
Rebuilding a circuit you lost
If the deadline passed and all you have is a screenshot, you are not stuck. Upload the image, and the schematic is read back into components and connections you can edit and simulate. It is not magic — a blurry photo of a dense board will need corrections — but for the kind of circuit that lived on Multisim Live, a clear screenshot is usually enough.
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> [!IMPORTANT]
> ### ⚡ Try CircuPilot free, with no signup
> Describe a circuit in plain English, upload a photo of a schematic, or draw it yourself — then run a real ngspice simulation in your browser. Free to use, nothing to install.