When it comes to professional vector design software, Adobe Illustrator is widely considered the gold standard. With a huge feature set and massive level of design power, it’s the software of choice for most professional graphic and web designers.

The best alternative to Adobe Illustrator is by far Corel Draw. Unfortunately because it is a name brand and is so good it isn’t really that much cheaper. It allows you to do pretty much everything Illustrator does; like experiment with colors, compositions and brush strokes.

However, Adobe’s recent move to a subscription-based billing model with the CC (Creative Cloud) product suite has made many former Illustrator users search for something without the hefty monthly price tag.

These five Illustrator alternative applications each have their own benefits and downsides. However, each can serve as a solid replacement for graphic designers that need a powerful, user-friendly vector application for Windows or Mac.

Would you like to learn the basics of Adobe Illustrator, and of vector-based graphic design in general? Enroll in our Illustrator CC Fundamentals course to learn how to design beautiful logos, page layouts and more using Adobe Illustrator CC.

Inkscape

Want an open source Illustrator alternative? Inkscape is a completely free vector graphics editor available for Windows and OS X, making it the perfect alternative choice for budget-conscious designers on both mainstream operating systems.

Inkscape’s interface is easy to use but still packed with useful features that make it an excellent choice for print designers, web designers and illustrators. It’s also well optimized and fast, making it a better choice than Illustrator for low-end PCs.

Some of Inkscape’s most useful features include its opacity settings, transformations and excellent selection of gradient options. While it isn’t quite as powerful as Adobe Illustrator, it’s hard to pick out faults in software that’s completely free to use.

Although professional designers will likely want to stick with a paid application for their vector designs, Inkscape’s features make it a great choice for casual designers looking for a free alternative to Adobe Illustrator.

Would you like to become a graphic designer? Download Inkscape and use the skills and techniques in our Learn Real Graphic Design tutorial to start designing your own logos, magazines, branding materials and more.

CorelDRAW

While Inkscape offers a free alternative to Illustrator, CorelDRAW is its primary paid competitor. A professional vector graphics editing application, CorelDRAW is one of the most popular professional vector design applications on the market.

CorelDRAW isn’t just one application – it’s actually a suite of applications including a bitmap image editor, photo editor and more. Priced in line with Adobe’s software, its primary audience is professional designers looking for an Illustrator alternative.

Unlike Inkscape and Illustrator, which are both available for Mac and Windows, the entire CorelDRAW software suite is only available for Windows. With a price that’s similar to Adobe’s, CorelDRAW is really only suitable for professional designers.

Would you like to learn how to design beautiful logos, banners, business cards and more in CorelDRAW X6? Learn the basics of CorelDRAW with 5 Essential Designs for Your Business With CorelDRAW X6.

DrawPlus X6

DrawPlus X6 is the latest edition of DrawPlus – Serif’s professional vector drawing software. Available in free and professional editions, it’s a powerful piece of design software that includes most of the features found in Adobe Illustrator.

With a wide variety of pre-built templates, DrawPlus X6 is a good software choice for new graphic designers looking to familiarize themselves with the structure of business cards, brochures and more before designing their own from scratch.

Like CorelDRAW, DrawPlus X6 is only available for Windows. With a fantastic user interface and enough features to satisfy the amateur designer, it’s a good option for amateur designers seeking a user-friendly, inexpensive vector graphics tool.

Do you want to build a career as a designer using DrawPlus? Learn how to create animated whiteboard-style videos to promote businesses using DrawPlus in our course, How to Create Whiteboard Animations That Boost Sales.

iDraw

Who says you need a computer to use graphic design software? iDraw is a vector design and illustration app for Mac and iOS, making it a little different from most Adobe Illustrator alternatives.

Despite being available for Mac and iPad, iDraw’s interface is packed with useful features and doesn’t feel at all ‘dumbed down.’ The iPad version is less powerful, which is understandable, but it remains good enough for basic graphic design.

All of the basic vector editing features – fonts, shapes, arrows and lines – are easy to find in iDraw’s interface. Although it’s not made by Apple (as its name may suggest), it’s fully compatible with iCloud, making it easy to sync designs on Mac and iPad.

The Mac and iPad versions of iDraw are priced differently – the iPad version costs $8.99 and the OS X version is $24.99. Although there’s no need to buy both, they’re obviously designed to complement each other and work very well together.

Along with iDraw, there are hundreds of great image and vector editing apps for iOS and Android. Complete your mobile graphic design suite using our blog post on the best free photo editing apps for iOS and Android.

Sketch

While Illustrator and CorelDRAW are ideal for designing magazine layouts and print media graphics, they can fall short when it comes to digital design. Sketch is a vector design application for Mac that’s built from the ground up for digital design.

From websites and application interfaces to icons and buttons, Sketch is perfect for designing the essential elements of modern software. It’s also amazingly easy to use, especially for designers already familiar with software like Adobe Illustrator.

With a design that’s unbelievably polished and streamlined, Sketch is more than just an alternative to Illustrator – it’s also a great complementary application for graphic designers that want to focus on the digital side of graphic design.

From being able to export CSS styles and custom properties to automatically syncing up with iCloud, Sketch is a fantastic piece of software. Available only for Mac, Sketch is priced at $79.99 and delivers plenty of value for the modern digital designer.

Which Illustrator alternative is best?

Each of the above applications replicates (or, in some cases, improves on) the main features offered by Adobe Illustrator. Some, like iDraw and Sketch, are designed to achieve a specific purpose, while others are more specific Illustrator alternatives.

If you’re searching for a professional Illustrator alternative, CorelDRAW is arguably the best choice of the above. However, open source applications like Inkscape and specialized design apps like Sketch also deserve a place in any designer’s toolkit.

Updated: May 18, 2019 Home » Freeware and Software Reviews » Photoshop & Image Editing

How to get Adobe Illustrator for free? There are many open source vector graphics editor with capabilities similar to Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw, why pay for a commercial software when the free open source alternatives are as good as the paid version?

Alternative Article ➤ 7 Free Online Photoshop Alternative Photo Editor

A number of vector graphics editors exist for various platforms. Potential users of these editors will make a decision based on factors such as the availability for the user’s platform. Below is a complete list of the best Adobe Illustrator alternatives. If you are a poor student, a small business owner or a print shop owner, just give these free illustrator alternatives a try and avoid pirated software from torrent.

↓ 01 – Inkscape | Open Source | macOS | Windows | Linux

Inkscape is a professional vector graphics editor for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It’s free and open source. It is an open-source vector graphics editor similar to Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Freehand, or Xara X. What sets Inkscape apart is its use of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), an open XML-based W3C standard, as the native format.

Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more. We also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development. Works great on Microsoft’s Windows 10 and Apple’s macOS.

• Fully anti-aliased display
• Alpha transparency support for display and PNG export
• Complete “as you drag” rendering of objects during interactive transformations
• Live watching and editing the document tree in the XML editor
• PNG and PostScript export
• Command line options for export and conversions
• Perfectly compliant SVG format file generation and editing

↓ 02 – Krita | Open Source | macOS | Windows | Linux

Krita is a professionalm free and open source cross-platform application that offers an end-to-end solution for creating digital art files from scratch. Krita is optimized for frequent, prolonged and focused use. Explicitly supported fields of painting are illustrations, concept art, matte painting, textures, comics and animations. Developed together with users, Krita is an application that supports their actual needs and workflow. Krita supports open standards and interoperates with other applications.

It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone. Krita is a complete creative sketching and painting application with advanced, commercial quality features. Krita has been in development for over 10 years and has had an explosion in growth recently. It offers many common and innovative features to help the amateur and professional alike.

• Full Color Management – Krita supports full color management through LCMS for ICC and OpenColor IO for EXR, allowing you to incorporate Krita into your existing color management pipeline. Or let it be the start of one: Krita comes with a wide variety of icc working space profiles for every need, with a color space browser to visualise and explore them.
• OpenGL Enhanced – Krita takes advantages of OpenGL for some of its operations. With OpenGL enabled, you will see increased canvas rotation and zooming speed. The canvas will also look better when zoomed out.
• PSD Support – Open PSD files that even Photoshop cannot open. Load and save to PSD when you need to take your artwork across different programs.
• HDR Support – Krita is the only dedicated painting application that lets you open, save, edit and author HDR and scene-referred images. Furthermore, with OCIO and OpenEXR support, you can manipulate the view to examine HDR images, and use it in the most cutting edge workflows from the film and visual effects industries.

↓ 03 – Microsoft Expression Design | Free | Windows

Although discontinued, Microsoft Expression Design is a really good professional illustration vector and raster graphic design tool for web images based on Creature House Expression, which was acquired by Microsoft. Expression Design is a tool for creative professionals and developers who want to build graphics for application user interfaces, the web, or any other medium.

Alternatives To Adobe Illustrator For Mac

The convenience and ease of editing vector graphics in Expression Design can be a cornerstone of your Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Microsoft Silverlight, and web images. Whether you’re a veteran professional illustrator, a designer building a dazzling website, or a budding artist eagerly experimenting with various styles and techniques, you will find Expression Design an indispensable tool for your creative tasks.

• Drawing: pencil tool (freehand drawing with simple paths), pen tool (creating Bezier curves and straight lines), calligraphy tool (freehand drawing using filled paths representing calligraphic strokes)
• Shape tools: rectangles (may have rounded corners), ellipses (includes circles, arcs, segments), stars/polygons (can be rounded and/or randomized), spirals
• Text tool (multiline text, full on-canvas editing)
• Embedded bitmaps (with a command to create and embed bitmaps of selected objects)
• Clones (“live” linked copies of objects), including a tool to create patterns and arrangements of clones

↓ 04 – Vectr | Free | macOS | Windows | Linux

Vectr is a free graphics editor that you can use to create vector graphics – graphics that are scalable without the loss of resolution – easily and intuitively. Instead of using pixels, vector graphics use mathematical equations to draw your design. Of course, Vectr performs the math behind-the-scenes, so the only thing you need to focus on is what you’re creating.

Vectr is available online and on your desktop across multiple platforms, allowing for live collaboration and synchronization anytime, anywhere, and with anyone. With Vectr’s easy-to-use interface, anyone can unleash their creativity as an illustrator or graphic designer – we’ll show you how in no time.

• Node editing: moving nodes and Bezier handles, node alignment and distribution, etc.
• Converting to path (for text objects or shapes), including converting stroke to path
• Boolean operations
• Path simplification, with variable threshold
• Path insetting and outsetting, including dynamic and linked offset objects
• Bitmap tracing (both color and b/w)

Illustrator For Mac

↓ 05 – Boxy SVG | Free [ Limited] | macOS | All Chrome Browser

Boxy SVG is a Scalable Vector Graphics Editor. Vector graphics editor simillar to Adobe Illustrator®, Sketch™ and Inkscape™. Made with and for the modern Web Platform. Can do illustrations, icons, banners, mockups, charts, buttons and more. Works on Chrome OS, OS X, Linux, Windows and even inside the web browser.

• Affine transformations (moving, scaling, rotating, skewing), both interactively and by specifying exact numeric values
• Z-order operations
• Grouping objects, with a way to “select in group” without ungrouping, or “enter the group” making it a temporary layer
• Layers, with a way to lock and/or hide individual layers, rearrange them, etc; layers can form a hierarchical tree
• Copying and pasting objects
• Alignment and distribution commands

↓ 06 – Gravit | Free | macOS | Windows | Linux

Alternatives To Adobe Illustrator

UPDATE: Gravit is not free anymore. Meet Gravit – the cutting-edge design app that will take your creativity to new heights. Gravit offers the creative possibilities of a full-scale design suite – but in a snug app-sized package. Powerful yet easy-to-handle, Gravit has been custom designed from the ground up with an emphasis on versatility, fluidity and elegance – complex design tasks are made simple through its robust suite of tools and highly responsive smart work environment. Express yourself in a new way with Gravit – the new must-have tool for today’s pioneering design professionals! The Most Complete Design Platform. Create and share beautiful designs with the power, flexibility and speed of a free, lightweight and easy-to-use tool, right in your browser.

Adobe Illustrator Replacement For Mac