Affinity Photo is a software solution for photography and creative professionals, a fully-loaded photo editor integrated across macOS, Windows and iOS, from Serif Ltd.
$21.99
one-time fee
CorelDRAW Graphics Suite
Score 9.7 out of 10
N/A
Corel Corporation, headquartered in Ottawa, offers the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite, a graphic design studio and library of tools.
For small, fast-changing design/photo editing teams, it's a no brainer. More seats for less cost and an almost unnoticeable difference in the feature set. For older, more established or antiquated teams, you almost have to stick with Adobe. I know which side we're on. Innovation, a.k.a. Affinity. If you or your clients require specific formats like .psd, .ai, or .eps, Affinity can give you an alternative or more robust options to manipulate those files.
It is a perfect suite of applications to finish presentations and create beautiful layouts for design. It is very useful both for graphic design and for architecture design when you want to draw a realistic idea of a project without being a rendering or when you need to present both images and vectorial drawings.
Ease of use is a major factor in our choice for the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite. With intuitive interface terminologies, users are able to jump right into the applications with ease and confidence.
The ability to customize the Suite to fit your particular needs is a major strength of the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite. CorelDRAW customization abilities are endless and can turn the default Graphics Suite into a fully customized powerhouse application catered to a designer's specific wants and needs.
If you're a long time Adobe user of Photoshop or Illustrator, there is a learning curve, but it's not too major. This learning curve was well worth the cost of admissions for our organization.
I'd like to see them use the same names for certain features as Adobe's products, but feel like licensing/copyright concerns as the reasoning behind this. Overall, the transition has been smooth from Adobe to Affinity.
They just recently released their Publisher program for print designs, similar to InDesign. They're a little late to the game in this arena, but I'm very interested in a low-cost alternative to Adobe. I wonder how they'll compare to other competitors like Canva in the space?
For a regular user of Photoshop, Affinity is a very easy transition. It has all the same features and once you adapt to it, and it provides a quick return on investment.
Just like any design program or suite, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who doesn't do graphic design professionally. If you're not adept at learning a program or experience, it isn't a program you can just pick up and start using easily. Outside of the learning curve, it's a nice program with a decent user interface.
I don't have direct experience with a member of Affinity's support, but their forum and YouTube videos that other users have made make it relatively easy to find similar features in Affinity that are available in Photoshop or Illustrator. The differences are negligible for our small, yet experienced team.
Overall, CorelDRAW meets all my needs as a researcher and allows me to create beautiful and clear graphics to illustrate the main ideas for publications. It does not lack any functionality for my needs; however, it has some bugs that impact productivity, such as the color drag and drop that sometimes stops working and needs restarting, and crashes, especially when working with large bitmaps.
I think Affinity Photo is on par with Adobe PhotoShop. They are very similar products with both bringing many features users need. The main reason I picked Affinity Photo was its pricing of it. I didn't require Adobe products all the time. And felt they weren't offering me as much value.
I feel Corel is just as powerful as the Adobe suite. I started using Corel back when I worked for a government organization that was PC based (and at the time, you couldn't get the Adobe suite on PC). I found that Corel was just as powerful. Over time, you can now get the Adobe Suite for PC but Corel is a better price - which for a non-profit is very important. Of course, I am more comfortable with Corel because I have used it for so many years as well.
Ease of use reflects on less time to train new users, a positive impact in investment and productivity.
The practicality to make new designs results in less time needed to do them, again a positive impact.
The integration with other graphic programs could be better if needed to finish a rendering using the design made in Corel Draw it's needed to export in formats that don't carry all information and the process is not that simple.
