Affinity designer Review. Adobe Illustrator VS Affinity designer

Every designer or any other person who is in design area familiar with Illustrator and for what you can use it. Adobe Illustrator sharing leadership with CorelDraw in Vector design software. As it is a for some people it can be expensive especially for people who use it not for business. Also, Adobe Illustrator gets more and more heavy with every new release.

Here I want to introduce you very young and in same time powerful Design Software Affinity Designer. Affinity Designer developing by UK company Serif. Current version 1.5.3 and in compare to 21 version of AI its very young software.

Of course, you can say that how you can company AI to small software that nobody knows? Yes, of course, AI is huge and without controversy, it has big benefits front of other software especially in design process.

But ask yourself what you need? Do you need to use most popular software and pay for it much more or do you need to do work? If you are answering “I need to do my work” then you can start to use Affinity Designer.

What about features?

As Adobe Illustrator very old software (Not older than CorelDraw) it has a wide range of tool and feature and collected through all these years. But think about that do you always use all features that AI has? Most of the user even don’t know which features it has.

Affinity Designer has less features that AI but it has all necessary tools that can help you create your work.

One big thing that I don’t like in Adobe Illustrator is It’s almost impossible to export big print files. Is has a very small list of supported file formats. That’s why all printing companies use CorelDraw.

Affinity Designer gives you ability design and export big files to print on big plotters.

How to migrate?

If you are AI user and want to migrate to AD then for you it will be easy. You can watch Affinity Designer interface review here

The interface of Affinity designer very close to Illustrator and most of the tools also acting like in Adobe Illustrator. But some familiar tools from illustrator working a little bit different. Most of the tool boxes are similar. Affinity Designer tools less that abode illustrator but here you can find tools that can be alternative to the few tools that you can find in Illustrator.

In affinity designer, you open .ai and eps files and work with them like native files. But you’ll need to save them in affinity designer file format. You can export files to many most popular formats.

What about price?

As you know Adobe Illustrator now available with a monthly subscription for 19.99 usd. That’s making too much if you are rarely using it for design.

Affinity designer cost about 39.99 for a one-time purchase that making it available for more users.

Conclusion

An affinity Designer very good cheap alternative to more popular vector design software like Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw. It's easy to use, light and functional.

It has powerful vector editing tools and easily can be combined with photo editing tool Affinity Photo.