Alternative To Adobe Illustrator For Mac

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Brief: In this article, we list the best Adobe alternatives for Linux. These Adobe Creative Suite alternative for Linux are also free and open source.

Adobe provides a number of applications under Adobe Creative Suite, now under Adobe Creative Cloud. It’s not just limited to Photoshop but contains various other software that helps primarily in Web design, logo making, video editing, pdf editing and more.

However, Adobe Creative Suite is a proprietary software costing you a good amount of your money and if you are a Linux user, even if you are willing to spend that money, it’s not available for your OS.

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  • Featuring both a clean and intuitive user interface, but packed with advanced features (such as alpha blending, object cloning and very accurate bitmap tracing), Inkscape comes as a highly recommended free alternative to Adobe Illustrator.
  • Adobe is among the most popular software which offers amazing master collection for different purpose. When it comes to graphic designing, every professional designer opt for adobe Illustrator in order to create any logo, sketch or any other graphic.
  • The potential candidate that is alternative to Adobe illustrator is Inkscape. It is a feature-packed editor that’s a true substitute for illustrator. Main highlights of Inkscape include- a Comprehensive toolkit and Excellent format support.
  • Headlines for Illustrator, for example, include a performance boost and a (currently) limited update to the charting tools. The former comes thanks to improvements to the Mercury Playback Engine and support for GPU acceleration, allowing real-time click-and-drag is panning and zooming – just like Photoshop, in other words.
  • IDraw – A Cheaper Alternative to Adobe Illustrator [Mac] By Laura Tucker – Posted on Nov 17, 2011 Nov 16, 2011 in Mac Casual digital artists now have a cheaper app than Adobe Illustrator.
  • 10 Best Alternatives To Adobe Illustrator. April 11, 2017 in Design by OXP Editorial. It now costs $19.99 a month to get access to Adobe Illustrator CC. That’s $240 per year! Most graphic designers can’t afford a price like this. (Mac only) alternative to Photoshop btw, you simply cannot beat Pixelmator! Eric S, May 27, 2015 / Reply.

6 great alternatives to Adobe Illustrator By Creative Bloq Staff 2014-09-10T14:58:00.252Z Graphic design Adobe's tool isn’t the only vector image editor in town –.

In this article, we are going to cover some of the best Adobe products alternative for Linux.

Best Adobe alternatives for Linux

If you are not in a mood of reading the article, you can watch this video from our YouTube channel. Do subscribe to our YouTube channel for more Linux related videos.

I have included one non-FOSS item in this list. This is because I really couldn’t find a decent alternative to Adobe Acrobat in Linux.

For the rest, here we go!

Alternative To Adobe Illustrator For Mac

1. GIMP: Alternative to Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is the most popular and widely used graphics editing tool both for regular and professional users. It’s an excellent tool for photo editing, website design, and graphics creation.

When it comes to an alternative to Adobe Photoshop, GIMP provides the best replacement.

GIMP is a free and open source image editor available for GNU/Linux, Mac, Windows and other Operating System. It provides a handful of sophisticated tools that make a graphic designer and photographer’s work easier.

From high-quality photo manipulation to original artwork creation, GIMP includes options to create icons, graphical design elements, color management features etc. And the customization options along with third-party plugins make your work a bit easier.

Adobe Illustrator Cs6

Most likely GIMP is already installed on your system. If not, you can search in the official software repository to install it.

2. Inkscape: Alternative to Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator is a standard tool suited for vector graphics editing and design. With an impressive set of drawing tools and effects, it is widely used for vector editing, posters creations etc.

Inkscape is a very competitive, free and open source tool to Adobe Illustrator. A powerful vector editor, Inkscape has flexible drawing tools, various file format compatibility, powerful text tools and support for Bezier and spiro curves. It supports advanced scalable vector graphics features like markets, clones and blending.

3. Scribus: Alternative to Adobe Indesign

Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing application used primarily for creating posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers, books etc. It supports exporting a file to epub format for creation of e-books. When it comes to an alternative to Adobe InDesign, Scribus provides a powerful and easy alternative.

Scribus is a free and open source application available for all major operating systems and is based on the free Qt toolkit. From creating layouts to typesettings and creating animated and interactive PDF presentations and forms, Scribus is used to write newspapers, brochures, newsletters, posters, and books.

4. OpenShot: Alternative to Adobe Premiere

Adobe Premiere Pro is video editing application from Adobe System which is used for high-resolution video editing, audio sample-level editing, 5.1 surround sound mixing and more.

OpenShot is a powerful and easy to use video editor which serves as the best replacement for Adobe Premiere Pro.

With a simple user interface, OpenShot provides a large number of features.

5. Synfig: Alternative to Adobe Animate

Adobe Animate is useful for creating interactive animations that work on everything from mobile devices to the ultra-high resolution displays. When it comes to an alternative to Adobe Animate, Synfig is an awesome open source replacement.

Synfig is a free and open source 2D vector graphics and timeline-based animation program for animation designing and rendering. The goal of the application is to provide quality animation with fewer resources and provides manual tweening, hence saving you from the pain of drawing each and every frame.

Synfig can simulate soft-shading using curved gradients and provides a wide variety of real-time effects which can be applied to layers or a group of layers. You can control and animate the width of lines at their control points and link any related data from one object to another.

6. darktable: Alternative to Adobe Lightroom

Adobe Lightroom is a photo processor and image organizer which allows viewing, organizing and retouching large numbers of digital images. With Lightroom, you can enhance and your photographs, punch up colors, remove distracting objects and straighten skewed shots.

Alternatives To Adobe Illustrator For Mac

When it comes to an alternative to Adobe Lightroom, the best free and open source software is Darktable.

darktable is a photography workflow application and raw developer which manages digital negatives or RAW images, lets you view them and have features to enhance them.

It provides basic image operations like crop and rotation, highlight reconstructions, white balance, invert operation and exposure control. Tone image operations include modification to the exposure, level adjustments, changing lightness, recreating contrast for HDR images etc.

darkable also includes color image operations for correcting overexposure and color, contrast, enhancing saturation and manipulation of RGB channels. The Correction modules helps you manage sharpening of details, noise level, spot removal, chromatic aberrations and more.

7. Natron / ButtleOFX: Alternative to Adobe Aftereffects

Adobe After Effects is a visual effects and motion graphics application used for filmmaking and television production.

Natron provides a perfect alternative to Adobe After Effects with motion editing and multi-view workflow. With an intuitive user interface and a quick rendering, you can work with keyframes with a very accurate curve editor.

It can be used as a command line tool and the command line version is executable from ssh on a computer with any display. It supports smooth zooming and panning for large images, and includes a full-featured dope-sheet to quickly edit clips and keyframes in time-space.

You can download a deb/ rpm package or a portable archive form the page below:

ButtleOFX is another open source composition software which provides an intuitive Graph Editor to connect nodes, Parameters Editor to customize effects and three different Workspace layouts to switch in-between according to your needs.

The project is still in alpha state so there will be bugs. If you are willing to try, you can grab a copy from here.

8. Ardour: Alternative to Adobe Audition

Adobe Audition is a digital audio workstation from Adobe Systems for editing and mixing audio contents. When it comes to open source alternative to Audition, Ardour is an excellent application.

Ardour is a free and open source, cross-platform application to record, edit and mix different audio files with ease. Let us look at the features which Ardour provides.

0. Master PDF: Alternative to Adobe Acrobat [Non-FOSS]

Adobe Acrobat is another application from Adobe Creative Suite which is mainly used to view, create and modify PDF files. The Adobe reader supports viewing, printing and annotating of PDF files while the Acrobat is used to create, edit, convert, digital sign, encrypt and export PDF files.

It’s difficult to find a fully functional open source PDF editor. LibreOffice can be used edit a pdf file with some limitation, and so can Inkscape. However, Master PDF, the only proprietary software in this list supports all the features for editing a PDF file.

It allows creating, editing, encryption and signing the PDF documents with ease. You can comment documents with stamps, notes, text underlining and fill PDF forms easily.

There are both commercial and free versions available for Linux.

You can download a .deb package from below link.

You can check some other PDF editors for Linux.

Final Words

Adobe Creative Suite is a commercial product with continuous development and release. When it comes to open source alternative to Adobe products, we have several choices some of them are at par with the Adobe products while some are lagging a bit. However, there is always an application which can make things work for you, you just have to find it.

Let us know in the comments, which open source product you use as an alternative to any Adobe Products.


Most of you reading this have probably used or are currently using Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. The software is great, but the most frustrating part is the cost! As someone who works from home, there is no way I am paying $40 a month for Adobe Creative Cloud. If I was a full-time designer perhaps, but I am a blogger. I have finally found some good alternatives though and left Adobe altogether. Check out these top 4 cheap Adobe Illustrator alternatives.

The problem with Adobe Creative Cloud

As a blogger, I have a few different sites. Here on woorkup I primarily use vectors. On one of my other sites, I primarily use photos. It really depends on the niche you are in and the type of audience you are marketing towards. But because of that, I bounce between Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop a lot. They each have their own little tricks that I have used over the years.

I have a 4-year degree in web and graphic design, although to be honest, I spent the majority of my time in the computer support department working my butt off. However, I did have one teacher which was really great. He taught photography and Adobe classes. He forced us to memorize shortcut keys, where things were located, go through tutorials, etc. Thankfully, what I learned in those classes stuck with me today. I still use all the shortcut keys and it speeds up my work.

I have used Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator now since around 2006. However, this year I finally got fed up paying $40 a month for it. And that is if you pay annually, if you go monthly it is $60 a month for both pieces of software. That is a little bit ridiculous, especially when you compare it to other tools I use more which I pay less for. However, they are a necessity for me, paint just doesn’t cut it.

Yes, I know you can torrent these, but there are a couple of problems and pet peeves associated with that:

  1. I truly believe in supporting developers if they created good products. While Adobe is a huge corporation, I still don’t mind paying them a little for tools that are beneficial for me. The problem is, they have no entrepreneur/single plan that works. They pretty much have left out all bloggers in their pricing.
  2. If you torrent this software (which I never recommend doing), you are almost always a couple of versions behind. I am working on a 4k monitor, due to the fact that I needed to create retina images for one of my sites. Adobe pushed out a retina patch, but you can’t download it with the torrented copy. Also, I work so much right now I don’t have time to deal with that stuff anymore, I just need something that works all the time.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Many of us have to pay for our own tools and the team at @Adobe has forgotten that. #design” quote=”Many of us have to pay for our own tools and the team at @Adobe has forgotten that. #design”]

4 Options for a cheap Adobe Illustrator alternative

Alternatives to adobe illustrator for mac

This year I finally got to my breaking point and figured there had to be something better out there in 2016/2017. And to my surprise, there was! Check out the following Adobe Illustrator alternatives I recommend. Note: I am using Windows.

1. Affinity Designer

The first amazing option, and the one I am currently using every single day is Affinity Designer. This is by far the best Adobe Illustrator alternative I have ever found. These guys have been around for a while, but just recently have been making huge updates to their product lines. They also just recently launched Affinity Photo, which is their Adobe Photoshop alternative. I also use this every day.

The most amazing part about it is there is no subscription fee, it is a one-time purchase of $49.99. Yes, you heard me right. A one-time purchase! And they have both a Windows and MAC version.

I have yet to find anything I did in Adobe Illustrator that I can’t do in Affinity Designer. And one of the best things is that the Affinity software all uses way less RAM over time. I had horrible times with Adobe Illustrator crashing all the time (and I have 24GB of RAM), and this works beautifully all the time. Also, Photoshop had a recovery mode, Illustrator didn’t. Both Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo have recovery modes so you never lose anything.

Oh, and the migration away from Adobe is super simple! Because all the Affinity software lets you open up Adobe Illustrator files and Adobe Photoshop files. You can then save them into their respective .afdesign and .afphoto formats. Most shortcut keys are exactly the same as Adobe, only a few are slightly different, but for the better. You can even open .webp files.

2. Sketch

Sketch is the second Adobe Illustrator alternative I suggest you check out. They were founded in 2008 and based in the Hague, NL. I personally have not used it, since it is only available for MAC, however I have heard nothing but great things. I have many friends and colleagues who migrated from Adobe Illustrator to Sketch and they never looked back.

The great news is that this is also available for a just $99.00 annually (one year of updates included). You aren’t required to pay again.

Adobe Illustrator Replacement For Mac

If you are on a MAC and working with lots of vectors and SVGs, this is definitely a tool you want to check out.

3. Vectr (free)

We also have Vectr! This is actually one I just recently discovered. This is a completely free Adobe Illustrator alternative. They have versions available for Windows, MAC, Linux, Chromebook, online version, and just recently a WordPress plugin.

While this can do a lot of great stuff with vectors, I want to focus on the WordPress integration as this is pretty unique. You can use and create vectors from right within the WordPress post editor. Pretty cool! Just install the free Vectr plugin and you can then click into it in the visual editor.

It will then open up a new editor in which you can do all sorts of amazing stuff with vectors. You can see below in my example I uploaded the Vectr SVG logo and was able to easily manipulate the layer colors within a second. You could even design your featured image for your WordPress posts from right within WordPress.

Here is a great overview video. If you are on a tight budget, and need something to create high-quality vector images, I definitely recommend checking out Vectr. It’s definitely the best free solution I have ever come across, and their attention to the WordPress community is exciting.

4. Amadine

Last but not least, we have Amadine. A vector software tool for Macs. It costs $19.99.

Summary

Hopefully this list of some top options for a cheap Adobe Illustrator alternative was helpful. I have migrated to Affinity software and never looked back. It’s fast, it’s cheap, and there was almost no learning curve involved. I’m curious, what are you guys currently using? Let me know below in the comments!

Alternative To Adobe Illustrator For Mac

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