Affinity Designer vs Illustrator are graphic design tools that are two hot choices for debate for professional designers. When it comes to creating professional and beautiful vector designs Affinity Designer and Adobe Illustrator are the two reliable alternatives. This Affinity Designer vs Illustrator comparison guide will give you complete information about how compelling and impressive these tools are.

• Affinity Designer Trial
• Affinity Illustrator Free
• Illustrator Affinity Designer
• Affinity Illustrator Ipad
• Illustrator Affinity Designer

It's not all that often that you come to a moment in life when you end up feeling stuck, gasping for a breath of fresh air while every cell in your body keeps telling you to make a change. Affinity Designer makes a distinction between artboards and canvases, a document without any artboards is a canvas and always clips all shapes. Uncheck View View Mode Clip to Canvas to turn off clipping or use the “” Hotkey. Artboards also clip shapes. In this article, we will take a look at Affinity Designer as an alternative to Adobe Illustrator for designing vectors in motion design. Affinity and kinetic data analysis was performed using Scrubber 2.0 (BioLogic Software). The response was referenced to blank (buffer) injections and normalized using the molecular weight of the ligand (in kDa). With the exception of cropping and contrast adjustment using Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Adobe Illustrator CS3, was applied.

Affinity Designer vs Illustrator: What are they ?

I am sure by the end of this guide you will be able to make your choice between Affinity Designer vs Adobe Illustrator web design software. Let’s begin the comparison and learn the differences and similarities if they have any. When you want to create a website make sure you choose the best things.

What is Affinity Designer?

Affinity Designer is a robust vector graphic design program to cater to all your professional design needs. Various designers, creatives, artists use this tool to create their own innovative piece. It was developed by UK-based Serif labs. Affinity Designer is an ideal solution to create UI designs, web graphics, icons, vector illustrations, mock-ups, typography, logos, and more.

Furthermore, Affinity Designer comes with an asset management feature that eases the process of organizing your projects. It is compatible with Windows, macOS, and iOS. This software has a plethora of features along with an impressive zoom of over 1,000,000% for smooth and quick effects without losing the image quality.

What is Adobe Illustrator?

Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphic software developed and distributed by Adobe. It was originally built for Apple Macintosh. And the recent release of Illustrator CC 2020 was released in October 2019. You can easily run this software on both Windows as well as macOS platforms. It comes with a great set of drawing tools.

It can be effortlessly used in several areas of printing, advertising, illustrations, logo design, photography, graphs, charts, web design, and more. Adobe Illustrator has an amazingly simple interface with superb features and functionality.

When to Use Affinity Designer?

Many professional designers use this vector graphic design software because of the fact that it combines Illustrator and Photoshop into one single program. It comes with plenty of features and various useful shortcuts to help you get started quickly.

• You can use shape and pen tools to create vector pixel designs.
• When you want to create professional logos for your business.
• When you want natural and responsive brushes for painting.
• It is 300 % faster than Adobe Illustrator.
• If you want to make use of both raster and vector graphic tools under one place.
• You may consider Illustrator vs Photoshop for better understanding.
• When you want to include various impressive effects in your project.

When to Use Illustrator?

Adobe Illustrator is a versatile vector-based graphic design software to help you create graphic designs, logos, and many other basic to complex creative designs for your business. You can easily create and scale them as and when required. Even if you want to create anything small or large scale design elements.

• It lets you create multi-page documents such as brochures, banners, annual reports.
• You can easily create innovative and unique web designs using Adobe Illustrator.
• When you wish to create professional vector designs for your business.
• It gives pixel-perfect results effortlessly.
• When you need to craft complex design and you need to alter it, resize things repeatedly.
• When you need to design images with creative text.
• If you wish to work on pixel photographs.
• If you are working on print documents and multiple documents at a time.

Key Features of Affinity Designer

Affinity Designer is a powerful tool that enables you to create and edit web design. It allows users to create designs with precision. While using the on-screen dynamic feature you can quickly create graphics and designs with ease. However, below are some of its top features.

• It’s blazing fast.
• Never underestimate the zoom power. It provides you pan and zoom at 60fps
• It provides you real-time gradients, blend mode, and various effects.
• You can switch between light to dark modes.
• It comes with great file compatibility such as HDR, EXR, PNG, JPEG, PDF, SVG, TIFF, EPS, GIF format.
• Affinity Designer comprises both vector and pixel tools in one single tool.
• This software is available for both macOS and Windows.
• It constantly provides important updates and improvements.
• You can add scalable text for impressive headlines and other graphic design projects.
• It comes with live OpenType feature previews.
• You can use different color palettes as per your project needs.
• It automatically scales your content once you resize the document.
• Affinity Designer has 16-bit per channel support.
• You can enjoy various live effects such as
  • Inner shadow
  • Outer shadow
  • Inner glow
  • Outline
  • Gaussian blur
  • Color overlay
  • Gradient overlay and many more
• You can get access to many blend modes
  • Reflect
  • Glow
  • Subtract
  • Hue
  • Hard light
  • Vivid light
  • Normal
  • Multiply and many more
• It lets you manage stroke stabilization for smooth effects.
• Seamlessly resize documents with or without resizing the artwork.

Key Features of Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator contains vibrant advancements. Anybody from professionals to novices can use Adobe Illustrator without a hitch. The latest version of Illustrator contains amazing features and enhanced tools for greater productivity. You can easily use this software to create small to larger designs. And below are some of the top features of Adobe Illustrator.

• Adobe Illustrator enables you to make use of real-time editing and drawing.
• You can scale the objects and all the scaling effects will not be shown as outlines.
• You can easily drag & drop artboards between two open documents.
• The cut, copy, and paste features can be applied via keyboard shortcuts.
• The facility to use the drag & drop tools between the toolbar and the drawer.
• A newly added auto-spell-check feature helps you to create the correct brochure, resume, posters, and other artworks.
• All the files are saved and exported in the background.
• Various newly improved effects such as blur, drop shadow, inner & outer glow will give you amazing results.
• Adobe Illustrator enables you a faster rendering of feather effects, gaussian effects in preview mode.
• You can easily create color blends to create innovative web design with ease.
• It comes with color synchronization and file packaging.
• Various built-in templates are there to choose from.

Affinity Designer vs Illustrator Comparison Table (2020)

Advantages of Affinity Designer

• Affinity Designer lets you create artboards of any size with a lot of details.
• It’s a great collaboration of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.
• It perfectly works with both Mac and Windows.
• You can easily create professional illustrations, vector designs, and many other projects that need a zooming feature.
• It’s an ideal choice to make isometric video game graphics.
• You can have correctly aligned and measured designs with Affinity Designer.
• It lets you create precise objects with ease.
• You can easily create both pixel and vector graphics with Affinity Designer.
• A wide selection of colors helps you craft beautiful designs.
• The advanced creative tools can help you handle complex jobs with ease.
• It also includes vector creation tools and image editing tools.
• You can flawlessly create dynamic symbols and responsive items with Affinity Designer.

Disadvantages of Affinity Designer

• Affinity Designer does not have any free trial for iPad.
• It doesn’t offer any plugin capability. Thus, it can not be tailored to specific purposes.
• Some users may find it difficult while selecting objects and layering.
• It treats all objects as filled.
• It has a steep learning curve.
• At times it gets complicated to use it, especially for beginners.

Affinity Designer Trial

Advantages of Illustrator

• Adobe Illustrator has a user-friendly interface.
• The in-panel editing feature of Illustrator makes the designing process smooth.
• It is also one of the best logo design software out there.
• Adobe Illustrator is highly scalable.
• It perfectly integrates with other Adobe products.
• There are various options for sizes such as pixel, point, and inches.
• It is a highly flexible tool.
• Anybody related to print marketing can benefit from this software.
• You can smoothly scale your vector files without losing any detail.
• It is one of the lightweight vector design software.
• If you want to try your hands on type combo then, nothing can beat Adobe Illustrator.
• While creating any two-dimensional design, you can thoroughly enjoy the incredible precision.
• It comes with a wide range of tools to use.
• You can head to tutorials and how-to guides for a quick understanding of the flow.
• Creating animations with Adobe Illustrator is a breeze.
• It lets you change or alter existing images seamlessly.

Disadvantages of Illustrator

• Adobe Illustrator has a steep learning curve.
• The limited support for raster graphics.
• It requires an enormous amount of patience to work with Illustrator.
• Getting started with Adobe Illustrator can be a little challenging for beginners.
• Some users may find the interface a little clunky.
• The snap-to feature needs improvements.
• It lacks the backward compatibility of files.

Affinity Designer vs Illustrator – Which is Better For You?

Certainly, there is no doubt that both Affinity Designer and Adobe Illustrator are powerful choices for creating vector graphic designs. But Adobe Illustrator is taking the first place. However, even the Affinity Designer also has an array of features to offer you. The fact that Affinity Designer is a little cheaper than Adobe Illustrator.

It is suitable for beginners to create their first easy and beautiful designs. But this by no means confirms that you should not use Adobe Illustrator for your projects. However, Affinity designer vs Illustrator which platform can serve your business needs better boil downs to your requirements. So, it totally is a personal pick and that may vary with your project’s objective. And don’t forget to share with me in the comments below.

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It’s been more than three decades since Adobe introduced us to Illustrator. All this time, Illustrator has been the go-to software for vector graphics design.

Ask any expert designer and they’ll tell you how they can’t even think of switching software. Illustrator is now part of their workflow and career. Adobe used this loyalty to their advantage, by converting their software licensing to a subscription plan.

You now have to pay a monthly price to keep using the software. For some people, it’ll still be a great deal. But for others, you’ll likely ask yourself if it’s still a good investment. That’s why you’re here, right?

Affinity Designer is everything that you want a graphic design software to be. Needless to say, it’s the best Illustrator alternative available today.

But, is it powerful enough to provide all the tools you need to do your work? Does it have all the essential features of Illustrator? To answer these questions, we compared Affinity Designer against Adobe Illustrator. Let’s find out which software is best.

What is Adobe Illustrator?

Since it’s initial launch in 1987, Adobe Illustrator came a long way to become the industry-leading software for vector graphics. It’s now used for all types of vector design work from logo design to stationery design, poster design, and much more.

The latest version of Illustrator CC packs quite a lot of amazing features and tools that make it powerful enough to serve all types of creatives from freelance designers to Hollywood movie poster designers and everyone in between.

What is Affinity Designer?

Affinity Designer, initially released in 2014 exclusively on Mac devices, arrived on the Windows platform in 2016 with a promise of a better alternative to Illustrator. It was quite a bold approach to compete with an industry leader such as Adobe with decades of experience. Somehow, Affinity made it possible.

Affinity Designer offers all the essentials you need for vector graphics design and possibly more. One of the reasons it became so successful is not just because of the affordable price, there are even free Illustrator alternatives out there, but because of the quality of the app.

Affinity Designer Vs Adobe Illustrator

Let’s take a closer look at the tools and features offered by both software.

Ease of Use

If you’ve ever gone to any sort of a design school or even learn graphic design online watching tutorials, you’ll notice that they all use Adobe software to teach you the ways of design. That’s mainly because everyone uses Adobe software. But also because of their ease of use.

Adobe Illustrator, on the other hand, has a very complicating user interface. It’s really difficult to find your way around the software without watching some tutorial videos.

The same goes for Affinity Designer. But, it has a simpler user interface than Illustrator. Probably because it lacks some of the more advanced tools offered in Illustrator, like the mesh tool, blend tool, knife tool, and the large collection of filters and effects. They are slated to be added in future updates. But of course, they are non-essential tools you can certainly learn to live without.

Unique Tools

Adobe had decades of research and development to fine-tune all its software, including Illustrator. It’s now a complete package that offers everything you need for any kind of design work. Especially the CC versions are much more advanced than it used to be.

Affinity Illustrator Free

Clearly you can’t expect that same level of tools and functionality with Affinity Designer, which is fairly new in the market. However, the software has a tool palette with all the necessary tools to make it a vector editor suitable for professionals. In a way, Affinity Designer is at a stage where Illustrator was at when the CS5 was released.

Artboards

Artboards quickly became an essential part of Illustrator. It’s especially a useful feature creative designers used to easily organize their work in one place. Illustrator has a dedicated tool for creating artboards on the fly and customizing them to your preference.

Affinity Designer falls short in this area. You have the option to enable artboards when creating a new document. However, the software doesn’t have a dedicated tool or options for better artboard management.

Drawing Pad (Tablet) Support

While vector editing apps aren’t the best option for drawing and artwork creations, many designers still use drawing tables to craft various graphic designs such as logos, typography, and hand-drawn icons.

If drawing pad support is essential for your work, Illustrator is the best choice. Adobe has made sure it supports all popular drawing tablets.

Drawing tablet support in Affinity Designer is still a work in progress. While it works well with popular tablets, many users have expressed their frustrations of tablet compatibility issues on popular forums such as Reddit.

File Types and Compatability

When it comes to supported file types, Affinity Designer is way ahead of Illustrator. Especially because of the shared file type used by Affinity Photo and Designer software. This allows you to easily edit and customize the same file on both software. In addition to all the other popular file formats, the software also supports Adobe Illustrator AI and Photoshop PSD file formats.

Affinity Designer also has a feature called Personas. Which lets you switch between vector and pixel designs. Like for working on shapes and images at the same time. It’s like having Photoshop and Illustrator in the same place.

Needless to say, Illustrator also supports all popular file types. However, having to keep both Photoshop and Illustrator opened at the same time to work on the same file can be frustrating at times.

Pricing Difference

The pricing difference is the main reason why many users lean towards Affinity Designer. It only costs a one-time price of $49. And you get to use the software for the rest of your life and get all future updates for free.

Adobe Illustrator comes as a part of Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. You have to pay $20,99 every month to use just the Illustrator software. It would cost over $250 to use Illustrator for a full year. If you want access to all Adobe software, you have to subscribe to the $52.99 per month plan.

Illustrator Affinity Designer

Templates and Resources

You’ll find resources in abundance for Adobe Illustrator. There are thousands of templates, UI kits, icon packs, vector graphics available in various design marketplaces.

Affinity Illustrator Ipad

Affinity Designer assets and resources can also be found in abundance. But not as much as Illustrator. Since the community is still growing, we’ll surely see more support for the app. On the plus side, all Illustrator files are compatible with Affinity Designer. So you can still use those Illustrator templates in Affinity Designer as well.

Undo Mistakes

If you tend to make a lot of mistakes or prefer to have a backup plan in case something goes wrong, Affinity Designer will have you fully covered. It lets you undo your changes for up to 8,000 times. And it includes history snapshots as well.

Illustrator has a limited amount of Undo’s allowed by default. You can change this in settings.

Clearly, no one would be crazy enough to spend hours clicking the undo button for 8,000 times. But, it’s nice to know you have the option.

Which Vector Editor is Better?

Even though we absolutely love everything about Affinity Designer, we still have to award the crown to Adobe Illustrator as the best software in the vector design industry.

In terms of usability, tools, features, community support, development, and overall functionality, Illustrator is still way ahead of all other vector design apps. For professionals, it’s the best app to use and to build a career around it.

However, you can still use Affinity Designer without all those unique traits of Illustrator. It will take some time to get used to the new environment and shortcuts, but Affinity Designer is a great alternative that’s worth giving a try. Especially if you’re new to graphic design, you should get started with Affinity Designer instead of Illustrator.

A free trial is available with all Affinity software. Give them a try to see if it’s worth the investment. And be sure to read our Affinity Photo vs Photoshop comparison as well.

Illustrator Affinity Designer

Affinity Designer Templates

We're covering the basics of Affinity Designer, helpful tutorials, comparisons with other apps, and the best templates and assets to use.