Graphic Design

Fashion Design

Vector Graphics

CorelDRAW

CorelDRAW screenshot

The Trouble Shooting  criteria is worst in CorelDraw, and that is after few hours or some uneven period getting known to the problem nothing going to be fix this issue.

I like how easy it is to use and how my pictures come out. I tend to draw for my stories so it helps that I can visualize it in such a clean and colorful format.

But the more you use it, the more you’ll realize how user friendly it is. I was so fascinated with Corel draw I even enrolled for a comprehensive tutorial.

Great software, I have used this for over 10 years, great with a tablet, great features and easy to learn.

After 4 hours and 5 days with customer service, they tell us that it's a known problem and nothing is being done to fix it. This is by far the worst experience you will have with any software company.

This program is just fantastic. It interfaces seamlessly with my Laser cutter which makes my life really easy.

I reconcile this software to finish my work perfectly, I have always been successful and the more I work the more I discover new finishing techniques leaving the final result more professional.

It also gives as so many wonderful full options to use from the colour to the shapes to the fonts. You can blend as many colours as possible to give your design that beautiful look.

I can make great graphics for presenting my work, the tools are great for marketing my digital store, putting texts is very easy.

In late 2020, I bought the Humble Bundle bundle that included CorelDRAW and I was immediately star-struck. It is now a beautiful, modern, and very user friendly piece of software.

Overall CorelDraw is a good vector graphics program and has good capability for the price point.

The worst part about CorelDRAW is that you have to do a complete research to start understanding the features and how to use it.

Its a wonderful product overall and covers all needs for anyone needing a design software. The costing is so much better then Adobe and its much easier to use.

I have tried the 2020 version and it way too complex, found it difficult locating some my drawing tools. I got confuse when applying gradients.

Very well featured, comes with an amazing tool set, plus a separate but integrated  full featured photo editing software, similar to Photoshop, and a font organizer, and other optional goodies.

Very rich in features and a well-respected product in the graphic arts community.

Ease to use and also to buy through the website. Offers integrated applications that streamline the flow of services.

Some business problem like logo creating, illustration for kids and more, are some great piece I have been able to solve for client and my community.

2D Drawing

Watermarking

Search/Filter

Web Design

Canva

Canva screenshot: Get access to more than hundreds of professional templates via iPad and tweak them to suit any need

Canva screenshot

Canva screenshot: Share directly to social media channels including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and Google+

There is a problem with Arabic text when exporting the photo. It makes the design has a bad look and there is a problem with the pixels.

And, best of all if you are an educator you can apply for an education license giving you all the benefits of a pro version of Canva. Finally, Canva has amazing customer support.

Sometimes it will crash or slow down without warning while I am working on a more graphically-intense project, such as an animated image.

I hate the fact that we have to pay for certain fonts... thats very annoying and having to pay in general.

Super easy to use and learn, and the pro version adds a lot of extra features. Background remover is easily the best feature and worth the price if you do your own product photos.

You are able to change the text, colors, and layouts. It has been such a wonderful experience that I highly recommend this to anyone who owns a business and needs help with social media posts.

But styling is so important to make a good impression and engage your viewer, so it's great that CANVA does the work for you and you can focus on content.

I love this program and how easy it is to make professional looking graphics. I love all the options you can use, the functionality and ease of putting together flyers, booklets, etc.

I absolutely love everything about Canva. It is so easy to use and there are thousands of templates for creating great advertising and marketing material.

This is an amazing software that enables you to create and design off an already amazing template. I highly recommend this to anyone.

The software is super easy to use and helps anyone to create beautifully designed posters, leaflets etc. without any graphic design knowledge.

I'm not particularly talented with computers and design apps so I was thrilled with how easy it was to learn and use. The quality of the product is amazing and it's free.

I love Canva for making graphics and now they have added animation on there. They keep improving and I might try the paid version since the free version is so good.

There is nothing that I can say bad about this product. I have yet to have a problem with anything as of yet.

Fonts are pretty good as well. Definitely worth the price if you are creating ads for Facebook, Instagram or any kind of desktop publishing.

Very happy with everything. The price is affordable the software works well in the customer service is great.

I love this software because it integrates well a lot of the software we use at our firm. Very easy to use and actually fun to compose.

Canva is a great "swiss army knife" tool for designers and can help rapidly develop beautiful designs.

Multi-Channel Marketing

Templates

Label Designer

Innovation Lab Specialist (grades 3-5)

Great upgrade from trying to design in Microsoft products 

Karee S.:                                              Hi, my name is Karee and I'm a teacher that also writes curriculum and I first used it Adobe Illustrator, but now switched over to Canva. For more information, click the link below.
			                                                       Both of these products solved a problem for us by allowing us to easily make different professional looking documents for our curriculum, for classroom materials and posters and other promotional items for our organizations.
			                                                       Canva's best for a free application and even if you do upgrade, it has a really lot of great features, but it's best for if you want images embedded already into the software. They have images that are ready. They have templates that are ready. They have ideas and inspiration in it already, that you can choose from and that you can modify. I would also say it's also a more user-friendly and easier to pick up and learn then Illustrator is, in my opinion.
			                                                       Adobe Illustrator, I'd say, is more of a professional software. It has a lot more in-depth capabilities, and there are a lot of things that you can't necessarily do within Canva, such as like creating your own images and adding in tables and being able to edit in a lot more detail, especially if you're creating journals or booklets or really large scale projects.
			                                                       Getting started with Adobe for me was honestly really overwhelming, but I came to love it once I got used to it but I was just more used to Microsoft products and it was very different. The shortcuts were very different. The tools, the icons, the keyboard shortcuts, all of those things were very new to me and I had to do a lot of research and little trainings and YouTube videos. Once I learned from my coworkers, I was able to pick it up but it took a lot longer to get started to use it.
			                                                       Then I use canvas second, but overall that one was a lot easier for me to pick up and learn and you can still create things that are really professional looking through it. It just might not have as many capabilities, but I was able to pick up Canva almost right away. There were a few things that I had to figure out, but overall it was much easier for, I think the average person, to be able to pick up and learn.
			                                                       I think the top considerations for looking for this kind of software is just the ability to make things look really professional and neat and organized and so any tools that are able to allow you to do that. So whether that's an easy way to put in high quality images, or to add in graphics and tables and texts and being able to maneuver. So just a product that I would look for like this, is something that's easy to manipulate and maneuver and play around with, until you get the product that you desire.

Operations Manager

Adobe Illustrator vs Canva: Why I switched from Canva to Adobe Illustrator

Jeannie V.:                                            Hi, my name is Jeannie. I'm a sales operations specialist. I was using Canva and I switched over to Adobe Illustrator. For more reviews, just click on the link below.
			                                                       So we started using Canva for promotional materials, marketing, and newsletters for our business. We used it for about a year, year and a half. All of our sales team really gravitated towards it because it was a really easy software to use, but we recently switched over to Adobe Illustrator because we found that the quality that we would get from the work that we did in Illustrator was much, much better than what we can get in Canva. Now, Canva is a free program and it's a great starter program, but when you're going into the more technical aspects of marketing, using Illustrator really just bumps up the work.
			                                                       So for us, Adobe Illustrator has been really wonderful for just editing different photos and adding a lot of layers and creating graphics from the bottom up. So for example, like we redesigning our logo, you're not able to do that in other programs the way you're able to do it in Illustrator. You can add a lot of different layers, you can play with the coloring. You can do everything fairly simply in Adobe Illustrator once you learn the key commands. And we really love that about the program.
			                                                       So I personally really love Canva. I started using it to build resumes for myself and then other team members that needed small things like newsletters and quick flyers and stuff like that. So I trained my team in Canva and we got everybody in our company up to the skill of being a basic graphic designer with Canva. And again, we didn't leave the software because we didn't like it. We just graduated to the next level, but we still use Canva on and off for very quick things. So if you need to do just a really quick edit, you want to put together a quick newsletter and little things like that, you can just jump on the Canva website and within 15 minutes you have a product that looks fairly professional on there.
			                                                       So when we started using Canva, it's very, very simple. You can easily just login on the web. You don't have to download a program, which makes it really nice. And there's a lot of free features on there. There's backgrounds, there's stock images, there's a bunch of different fonts, templates as well. So it's just a very easy program to get your feet wet if you're starting to learn about graphic design or just want to do basic layouts. Now, if you're going to do Illustrator, you do have to sign up for a monthly program with Adobe, monthly membership, and you have to download it onto your computer. So you need to make sure that you have enough room.
			                                                       And it just takes a little longer with Illustrator because there are a lot of things that you need to learn. I suggest you really learn the key commands and taking a tutorial before you get started with Illustrator because it can get very frustrating if you don't know how to use all the tools. But once you have a really clear understanding of what each of those tools does, you can really just fly with the program.
			                                                       So when considering a software like Canva or Illustrator, for us it's really important that the software that we're using be known by other people because compatibility wise, we work within the State of California, but then we also have a region. We work with people in all across the US. And so these programs that are more well-known are more likely for other people in our team to be able to know how to use them. So that's really number one. We've tried other softwares that weren't as popular and weren't as well-known and it just became difficult for people and for us to train people in using them because not everybody was familiar. At this point, I believe most people have heard of both Canva and Adobe Illustrator. So yeah, the name and the popularity for us is important.
			                                                       The other thing that's really important for us is being able to... Like with Adobe Illustrator, it's very easy for us to just purchase the monthly membership and for other people to use the software, and Canva, which is a free software, same thing. It's just very easy for somebody to open it up and use it and for us to train them and it's just well-known. It's well-known and people like using it. I really have to say the people on our team that are much more technical really enjoy using Illustrator and the people on the sales team really love using Canva because it's much more basic. So both of these softwares do the same thing, but it's almost like different levels of what the intricacies that are involved in actually using the software and putting together these promotional materials.

Affinity Designer

Affinity Designer screenshot: Affinity Designer adjustment layers

Affinity Designer screenshot: Affinity Designer isometric

Affinity Designer screenshot: Affinity Designer pen tool

It is an excellent piece of software I recommended to all of my colleagues and they are very happy with it. I can definitely recommend Affinity Designer, you will not regret buying it.

They were not only the best, but the most human and kind. And that is the kind of company I want to give my money to.

Wonderful program, easy to use, great in connection with the two other programs from Affinity, superlow price. I'm so happy I discovered these programs from Affinity.

Here is a piece of software with great customer support and an amazing community behind it. It is very intuitive and the learning curve is not steep at all.

The best thing about Affinity Designer is not that it is feature rich, but that it has all the essential features for designing/illustration.

The visualization of the outline without the colors is a positive point that I have not seen in other software and that this one has and is very good.

Thank you so very much for the excellent software, I'm eager to see what else Affinity has in store for the future.

The layers functionality was confusing. No auto trace which was the huge disappointment for us.

Affinity Design is a software that has great usability and is very light for the operating system, so it is better at solving your daily jobs.

The software is fully comprehensive of what it can do. Full funtionality and great options.

Library of plugins, brushes, fonts, gradients... own and third party. Very good community to ask questions and excellent tutorial channel.

A few, very few, features that I would expect in a high-grade design program are missing or difficult to use.

This is a fantastic alternative to Adobe's Illustrator, especially at Affinity's pricepoint.

A little confusing initially mostly because transitioning from other software.

The way that layers are arranged or not arranged can be frustrating. It is merely a learning curve, though.

Affinity's perpetual licensing is particularly attractive for people coming from Adobe. The software has all of the features you'd want, but is even more intuitive than competing products.

Easy to download more brushes, typefaces, and anything else you need. Now integrated with copyright-free photo services like pixabay, pexles, and unsplash.

Its strong point is in printing, because it offers a complete control on color profile and, if you are designing with Pantone print support, the complete ICC and CMYK color management is integrated.

Multiple Format Support

Data Import/Export

Sketch

Sketch screenshot: Sketch - collaborate

Sketch screenshot: Sketch - dark mode

Sketch screenshot: Sketch - design

Sketch screenshot

Sketch screenshot: Sketch - prototype

Sketch is good one tool for making awesome web design components and you can also export graphics in multiple formats for different purpose. I highly recommend you to use for web designing.

Sketch managed to create an awesome tool that has amazing UI, and the features as well. It is easy to use, especially if you have worked with previous software for UX/UI design.

The fact its vector based retains quality for use in other softwares and The amazing ability it has in handling pixel friendly photos.

Frequent updates, affordable price, and ease of use are the biggest reasons we love this software. We tried it out on a couple of client jobs and immediately fell in love with it.

The biggest disadvantage of Sketch is the lack of versions for other systems such as Windows.

Sketch is a super robust software for product design, and I love that there are plenty of plugins generated by the community for all your needs (makes designing efficient).

Overall, Sketch is an amazing design tool and has had many years to mature into a powerful competitor to Adobe XD and Figma.

It helps in scaling your content automatically and fit it with its various responsive components. It helps in designing live data, animations etc through its integrated tools and various plugins.

I used to love using this for creating UI and visual designs for digital applications. In the early days it was much better than applications like illustrator or photoshop.

It is very simple and practical to use and super intuitive. For those who are used to other applications in the same segment, it will certainly have even better usability.

The plugins available are great so for example you can integrate css with sketch and have great control over your web design.

Overall love using this tool - despite a number of other great options out there on the market.

The user experience is terrible. Also the prototyping feature is poor.

Versatile and effective - Sketch is amazing at giving tech product a visual to work off of.

It has been the leading tool in the industry for a long time and has a lot of support and plugins and a good community.

It only sucks when your teammates don't have Macbook so you can't collab with them by Sketch.

Elevates all the design work we do. Terrifically priced, first rate software.

The biggest problem is that the format is not compatible with PCs, which makes it difficult to work together in certain situations.

Image Library

Content Library

Preview Functionality

Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop screenshot: Adobe Photoshop stock

Adobe Photoshop screenshot: Adobe Photoshop image editing

Adobe Photoshop screenshot: Adobe Photoshop histogram

The excellent customer support with a  whole arsenal of video tutorials. Great Corporate logos and print designs for advertisement, brochures and personal cards are just great.

It's intuitive and robust. The user community is brilliant and they have built great plugins, brushes, templates and other tools to help you achieve your goals.

Overall my experience with photoshop has been great. I would definitely recommend it, and the fact that it comes with the tool suite subscription makes it worth the cost.

Adobe Photoshop is the best photo editor around, whether you need to touch up your photos or manipulate them to your desired needs, photoshop is great.

It's great software and each update brings very new amazing features. Adobe's name itself is enough to prove this.

I've been working with photoshop since 2018, so it works perfectly and I have fun using it for a while and it gives us new features every year.

Now Adobe Photoshop is the best software to create beautiful graphics and photographys.

Even the training is well done. I appreciate the time the developers have taken to create such an amazing tool and I can't wait to learn more about it.

I use this tool daily for creative solutions and creating content. Super easy to use after lots of practice.

It is easy to integrate with other business platforms I use for design works. I gladly recommend it to anyone aiming to achieve the best photo editing experience as long as he/she is ready to learn.

Sometimes I dislike that there are just SO many tools that it is hard to learn them all. A class would probably do wonders for someone looking to be versatile in the program.

The program’s strength, ease of use, and positive speed, with the strong features of photo and 3D editing, with the transmission of the image’s accuracy without losing its accuracy.

Like this year's Photoshop version we have an image enhancing integrated which is kinda cool since you don't need to use 3rd party software anymore to enhance the quality of the image.

It's also suitable for Pixel Art. In short, you get a little bit of everything with this program; all you have to do is study and work, and you'll be rewarded.

It delays work and make you feel uncomfortable, especially when you don't know where to do it settings.

All the features in this software are very helpful in the image editing process for everyday and professional needs. The price offered is also comparable to the features in it.

Photoshop is hard to master, with all of the intricacies contained in one program.

The required storage file can be up to GB. When used to print results, the paper used is relatively difficult.

Image Editing

Design Management

Text Editing

Adobe Creative Cloud

Adobe Creative Cloud screenshot: Adobe Creative Cloud files

Adobe Creative Cloud screenshot: Adobe Creative Cloud fonts

Adobe Creative Cloud screenshot: Adobe Creative Cloud tutorials

Adobe Creative Cloud screenshot: Adobe Creative Cloud share images

Bad, i still to this day dont know how it works so i save everyting to my computer and ive been using adobe for years now. I have a fear that things will go missing so i dont bother with it.

In the past, it was often cost-prohibitive to have the latest and greatest versions and the various software I needed. Now, for a very decent price, I can have the best of the best for all my needs.

Its really helpful to create different types of content, really useful and easy to manage, the difference between this platform and others its really helpful and easy to use.

Love love love the product and it has come a LONG ways from the old days. I have the whole package and couldn't imagine not having it.

Adobe Creative Cloud is a powerful software to learn and discover your creativity. It has amazing features and functions.

I like that the pictures are very clear and realistic. The photos had great definition and quality.

The sheer potential and scope of projects that Creative Cloud can help you complete. Their customer service is pretty good as well.

Is a very powerful tool and is easy to use. Very elegant and the UI interface is very smooth and the work with this package is very solid.

I love Adobe Creative Cloud with all the free updates and pricing it's one of the best value software suites out there.

I love these programs, they are AMAZING tools for graphics, printing, and publishing works. What do I like about them.

The only thing that has frustrated me is the times that the program won't open a file and states that it has been damaged or moved.

The integration was really easy and necessary, my business wouldn't exist without adobe creative cloud. I also like the updates and how they become smarter and smarter.

Overall I am very happy with my experience with Adobe Creative Cloud. I highly recommend it to other people.

I have been an avid Adobe user for years. From the Creative Suite to the Creative Cloud, I love what Adobe Creative Cloud offers.

Their enterprise licensing, deployment, and customer service is terrible. The process to get device licensing and user provisioning working is time consuming, and the Adobe support staff are clueless.

The launch process tends to be slow, which is often frustrating. The product also crashes occasionally without any warning.

I love having EVERYTHING I need to create professional graphics, videos, websites, and even application mockups. I love how well the programs integrate with each other.

The intuitive UI's and great customer support allow our team to be confident in creating above our client's expectations.

Figma

Figma screenshot: Figma auto layout

Figma screenshot: Figma canvas

Figma screenshot: Figma collaboration

Figma is an excellent and user friendly application for UI designing absolutely free of cost. Best thing about Figma is that one can easy collaborate and prototype using this.

Helped get much clear and better wireframes and prototypes with extra great plugins to create great prototypes with beautiful layout in a very easy manner.

Figma is super simple to get started with, but is packed with tons of features should you need them. Its own UI is great, and the software feels great to use.

When you design a component you can save it as a reusable component throughout the Figma project. Also, the auto-layout feature is a lifesaver that aligns the components like magic.

My favorite feature of Figma is the ability to view a page as someone from our team. This is very helpful because you can click on a member of your team and see what they are working on in the app.

Designers has to read the documentation because there is a painful misused of the software in terms of poorly understanding of concepts in components and styles.

Switching from other editors was incredibly straightforward, and I love the reliability and versatility of the software.

Before that, my team and I tried a lot of other programs but none of them satisfied us as much as Figma. When it comes to price, comfort, features & flexibility, Figma is by far the best.

Figma has given me the ability to translate ideas faster and more beautiful, starting from plentiful high quality templates (that we bought).

It has been quite a fun experience learning the capabilities of this site and what it can do for someone who's not too tech savvy.

Undoubtedly the learning curve, I believe it is a little high compared to other similar software, I believe that the lack of translation into my native language (pt-br) is also a negative point.

I am amazed by Figmas progress and ease of use. The auto-layout feature is ultra-fast in comparison to Sketch and even much more flexible.

Our designer likes it and we recently got a nice integration with another solution we use called Clubhouse which allows us to see the designs right in their respective tickets for the features.

One thing I particularly liked about Figma is that the support provided by the online community is pretty good, you'll always find blogs or sites with tips and tricks.

Figma Community files and plugins is my favourite and the most liked feature by many of the designers and product managers as it saves a lot of time in UX and UI design.

The way the commenting works it is hard to keep track of what comments you should be keeping track of and which you can ignore.

Sometimes has small usability issues and some tools are not easy to be discovered. Also some interface changes are not warning notified and you have to figure out how the change works.

This paired together with an extensive API makes Figma a great tool for rapid building MVPs and generating sites (and even apps) directly from Figma.

Performance Testing

Collaboration Tools

UX Prototyping

PicMonkey

PicMonkey screenshot: Start designs from  a template or a blank canvas and add design building blocks like graphics, fonts, textures,  stock photos and videos.

PicMonkey screenshot: Choose from thousands of designer-crafted templates when you want to kick-start your project and customize to your liking.

PicMonkey screenshot: Dial up the drama with fully featured photo editing that goes way beyond one-click filters.

PicMonkey screenshot: Add simple animations — in just a click — for extra style and movement.

PicMonkey screenshot: Create on the go, with the PicMonkey mobile app for iOS and Android.

IT is really nice that I don't have to have a subscription to a professional tool like Adobe Indesign to be able to make meaningful graphics for my business.

It is great if you're looking for variety, this software contains beautiful textures which is great if you're looking to stand out.

I'm very happy with what this software has to offer, it's very user friendly and a great editing software for anyone to use.

What I like most about PicMonkey is how fun and easy it is to use. It is a great alternative to other photo editing software.

I LOVE the design templates so modern and chic. I am happy they integrated videos into it as well.

I used PicMonkey software to make fun art for myself to share the community with everything. I really enjoyed the software very much like several years ago.

I really love the transparency option and the stickers it offers. Other of its great features is the option to erase any background the photography has.

Beautiful graphics have made our site content and social media pages much more impressive and have caused our site visitors to be much more and this has increased our sales and orders.

PicMonkey had always been a reliable tool for me when I need to edit photos. I highly recommend this program because with the free account, you can save other projects at no additional cost on it.

PicMonkey is a great photo editor that allows you to create some amazing designs, collages, backgrounds, and even stickers.

I'm satisfied with the ease of use and different features for the price. I dont need support very much so I dont have to contact customer  service just yet lol.

I dislike that I would have to pay to use the premium features, but I understand why. I probably would pay if I needed to use it more often.

It’s easy to use and simple. Does nice easy edits so you don’t have to hire anyone for graphics help.

Adobe Illustrator Alternatives & Competitors

Top 10 free alternatives

CorelDRAW

Canva