In this article, we will tell you about some best Adobe Illustrator alternatives which include paid and free ones.
The best Illustrator alternatives will shake things up if you want a break from Adobe. The Adobe app should be the industry norm, with the artistic force of the past few decades dominating the realms of digital art, animation, and graphic design, if you want to do anything different you have absolutely viable choices.
Graphic designers are operating in context to two types of static image formats: vectors and rasters. Lines, curves, and forms are composed of vectors (plus some machine learning magic). Rasters are made up of pixels.
You’re in the right place if you’re looking for a vector editor for digital graphics, logos, illustrations, and animations for print, web, and interfaces for your marketing material .
What is Adobe Illustrator?
Adobe Illustrator is the free vector graphic designing and editing tool used by millions of professional designers for free of cost. The software uses mathematical expressions to create beautiful images, lines, and perfect shapes and to precision. Adobe Illustrator creates scalable graphics that can be drawn to the board and size according to the billboard with no pixelation.
The software is a complete set of tools to create professional-looking flyers, logos, and mock websites for business purposes. The users can also add effects and colors to the design and make their design look professional.
What’s the need to choose a Adobe Illustrator alternative?
Adobe Illustrator is the industry-standard software that is used by professionals for designing graphics. But by using Adobe Illustrator, you are charged for expensive Creative Cloud Subscription, which is not feasible for all professionals. Fortunately, there are many options available online that offer similar features, user interface, and toolset to create seamless and professional designs for your business. Adobe illustrator free alternatives mentioned here are industry standard and provide graphic designing with many file support features and bundled with many other kinds of software. However, these alternatives are a good option if you do not want to spend money on the Adobe Illustrator subscription.
Our list of picks of Adobe Illustrator alternatives for you:
Affinity Designer
Developed as the resistance component of Serif and constantly enhanced, Affinity Designer is built to be intuitive for the expert Adobe user. With one of the largest resources in the series, plus raster finishing, Affinity Designer may be the solution you are searching for.
Affinity Designer follows the 10-bit, CMYK, CIELAB, and Pantone specifications of Adobe’s compatibility Suite. Affinity Designer has some features, including bitmap functions, similar to Photoshop. Users like the part that this doesn’t take too much RAM and the program is not too heavy.
Operating System/Device:
macOS, Windows, and iPad
Compatible Format:
EPS, JPEG, PDF, SVG, PSD, PNG, TIFF, and GIF
Pricing:
Affinity Designer lets you try free for 90 days. After that, it costs a one-time payment of $49.99 (for both Mac or Windows) and $19.99 for iPad.
Pixelied
Many people who use Illustrator reliably build illustrations easily using software like Canva. And Pixelied is one of the leading Canva alternatives on the market. While this tool does not have the same deep vector editing functions as Illustrator, it provides an amazing variety of assets, vector icons and templates.
From Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, you can import your vector files into Pixelied to use in your design.
Operating System/Device:
Cloud-based web application
Pricing:
Free and with Pro package, pixelied would start at $7.95 a month. But you can get Pixelied Pro from $59 for a lifetime in AppSumo for just a limited time.
Vecteezy
Vecteezy is also a free browser option, alternative to Adobe Illustrator (the developing company gains premium-selling illustrations, and the BBC, Amazon, McDonald’s, and Dell are among its customers).
You can import and modify SVG files, or you can create your own designs from scratch. A selection of shapes and prepared clipboards are available to pick from and a wide variety of text-based designs.
Vecteezy provides a pen tool for drawing and modifying current paths and a specific color picker. All are refreshingly easy to use, and even brand new users can understand the fundamentals in few minutes.
There are just a few points you can be aware of: to save your work, you will need to create a Facebook account or log in. Vecteezy warns you that this can cause your browser to freeze if you open a particularly large file. This is a concern for every related web app though, and Vecteezy is so open to tell about it.
Operating System/Device:
Windows, macOS, Linux (in browser)
Pricing:
Vecteezy is free
CorelDRAW
CorelDRAW provides a great range of vector graphics consistent with other Corel graphic suite tools like Photo-Paint, a Photoshop rival. Prepare vectors for simple and fast printing, edit multi-page documents, transform vector bitmap non-destructively, and generate QR codes.
Check the LiveSketch feature in touch-enabled devices for accurate vector graphics. For several print industries in many parts of the world, CorelDRAW is the go-to program.
Operating System/Device:
macOS and Windows
Compatible Format:
AI, PSD, PDF, JPG, PNG, SVG, DWG, DXF, EPS, TIFF, and more
Pricing:
CorelDRAW offers a 15-day free trial. You can get its annual subscription for $198 per year or a full license for $669.
Also see: Best Canva Alternatives
Sketch
Built for the creation of user interfaces, designs and wireframes, Sketch also offers users strong vector graphics edits. Users say that the program is relatively simple and has good organizational/breadcrumb characteristics. Moreover, Sketch has a wide selection of learning opportunities.
Operating System/Device:
macOS
Compatible Format:
PNG, JPG, TIFF, WebP, SVG, EPS and PDF. AI and PSD with limited support
Pricing:
For 30 days, you can try Sketch. After that, it is $99 one-time payment per contributor for the person or $9 per contributor for each month for their team plan (or $99 paid annually).
Figma
Figma is not a direct rival for Adobe, but it may be worthy of your attention as a collaborative wireframing and UI design tool. Share linked files, instead of exporting each time you choose to look at your work.
With respect to coordination, Figma may be better known to deliver team-friendly opportunities in real-time. This alternative to Adobe Illustrator focuses on Web design, such that its tools for pure vector graphics are simple. However, the pen-tool, vector networks and smart components are still accessible.
Operating System/Device:
MacOS with cloud-based web application (no downloads required)
Compatible Format:
PDF, PNG, JPG, SVG, and more
Pricing:
Figma is free for up to 2 editors and 3 projects. Paid plans start at $12 per editor per month, billed annually.
Boxy SVG
Boxy SVG is a free tool to create scalable, Google Chrome-extension graphics vector files. It contains a variety of fundamental instruments including pens, bezier curves, text, simple shapes, stroke and fill, layers, ability to add type, groups, transformations and paths.
Boxy SVG’s key point of sale is its simple operating system. It allows the experience of making vector graphics to be limited to a very limited number of choices. This effectively limit you to what the SVG format is useful for. It is therefore faster, simpler to compile than the illustrator, and its files are clean and effective.
Operating System/Device:
MacOS and Linux, but also comes with a cloud-based web application (no downloads required)
Compatible Format:
PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, PDF, AI, and more
Pricing:
Boxy SVG comes with a 15-day free trial. Paid plans start at $9.99 per both web or Mac version. It’s free on Linux.
Graphic
Graphics began with a vector drawing app for an iPad, but since then it has also moved to an iPhone and Mac OS X. You can also use this vector application’s tools like layers, editable brush strokes and IT components.
Operating System/Device:
MacOS and IOS (iPad and iPhone)
Compatible Format:
SVG, PDF, and PSD
Pricing:
You can get Graphic from Apple App Store at $29.99 for Mac, $8.99 for iPad, and $2.99 for iPhone.
Gravit Designer
Gravit Designer is a free vector graphic design app that is developed for professionals. Choose from a large catalog of shapes, illustrations, etc., and export vector graphics that can be exponentially scaled. The paid PRO edition includes much more vector graphic properties, including cloud file synchronization and offline mode and also more import/export file choices.
Operating System/Device:
MacOS, Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS
Compatible Format:
PNG, JPG, PDF, SVG, EPS, AI, and more
Pricing:
Gravit Designer offers a free version of its app with limited features. The PRO plan costs $49.99 per year.
Inkscape
The free, accessible, and spectacular Inkscape offers versatile drawing tools, integrated bitmaps, transformations, gradient editing, boolean operations, etc. However with Inkscape, you can easily design, edit, draw, build compatible SVG files in 2D, and transform images from bitmaps into vectors.
Operating System/Device:
MacOS, Windows, and GNU/Linux
Compatible Format:
SVG, PNG, OpenDocument Drawing, DXF, sk1, PDF, EPS, and more
Pricing:
Inkscape is free.
Vectonator
Vectornator is a pretty interesting and free option starting with an iPad app with advanced vector editing software, including boolean operation, grouping, pen, anchoring and masking. Moreover, this is a tool to look at, as there will soon be real-time collaboration.
Operating System/Device:
MacOS and IOS (iPad and iPhone)
Compatible Format:
AI, SVG, and PDF
Pricing:
Vectornator is free.
SVG-edit
If you want to produce SVG files for websites, then SVG-Edit could be what you need. Inside your web browser, you can use this free vector software to build and edit existing SVG files.
SVG-Edit operates in any modern browser, offering simple features such as hand drawing tools, shaping Tools, text tools and paths. The tool is open-source, so that contributing users always add new features.
It’s based on HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript and has no server-side features, but you can import and update code to build a version for yourself.
Operating System/Device:
Any modern web browser
Pricing:
SVG-Edit is a free editing solution.
OpenOffice Draw
While Apache’s flagship (OpenOffice Draw) vector illustrator looks a little outdated these days, that’s purely a cosmetic concern. It’s still packed with features and is especially geared towards diagram and object manipulation. It also comes with the very handy feature of being able to create Flash (.swf) files from your document.
Operating System/Device:
Windows, Linux, Mac
Pricing:
Openoffice Draw is free.
How to pick the right Adobe Illustrator alternative?
Understand your needs and workflow before you decide to commit to any paid tools
Sign up for the free trial to test the software out. You can use this time to find if the tool has a well-established tutorial to guide you through the learning process.
While you’re testing out a new tool, don’t forget to keep browsing to find the best software Good luck! We hope you find an Adobe Illustrator alternative that you love a tool that can scale with you!
Other useful resources: