It has a lot of similar features to Illustrator, including a freehand drawing tool that smooths the paths as you draw, the ability to create custom shapes and the equivalent of the Pen tool. Gravit Designer is a tool that allows you to work on a diverse range of design tasks, including illustration, UI and screen design, printed artwork and logo design. If you’ve never used it, you might want to take advantage of the free trial and just see how it feels in practice. CorelDRAW is available for a one-off fee, but the upfront cost is fairly steep, so you’d have to use it for a number of years to make it cheaper than an Adobe Illustrator subscription. Alternatively, you can subscribe to CorelDRAW for £16.67 monthly, billed annually, which is only slightly cheaper than an Adobe Illustrator subscription.Įssentially, the main reason to choose CorelDRAW over Illustrator would be if you prefer the interface and workflow. The two tools can’t easily be separated on price, either. Because the interfaces and approaches are quite different, fans of each tool will argue, with equal vehemence, that theirs is the easiest to use, but there’s no real objective way of settling this.Īn objective fact is that Illustrator is the standard software for the design and illustration industry, but that said, you can easily import and export AI and PDF files to CorelDRAW. Both are packed with features and both have their passionate advocates. There’s no easy way to say whether CorelDRAW or Illustrator is the 'better' tool. For most of this time, it was Windows-only, but there's now a Mac version as well. First launched in 1989, CorelDRAW is a vector drawing program with a big following among artists and illustrators.

Mac sketch equivalent on linux