About Affinity DesignerĪffinity Designer is a vector design application developed by Serif Europe Ltd. Each application has a companion app for the iPad, although they both have limitations compared to the desktop version.Ĭheck out our video presentation (originally made for YouTube) comparing the two applications:.Illustrator will add more bloat to your device as it has a parent app (Creative Cloud) that runs in the background at all times.Illustrator is sold as a subscription service, whereas Affinity Designer is a one-time purchase.Despite that, either one can be used professionally for vector design.Each application has a handful of unique tools that the other doesn’t.Affinity Designer has a pixel-based image editing environment in addition to its vector capabilities Illustrator is primarily a vector tool.Application Affinity Designer V2 Adobe Illustrator Used For Vector design, image editing Vector design Supported Operating Systems Minimum Requirements Intel processor, Apple M1 OS X Mavericks 10.9 or later (Supported up to macOS Big Sur 11.0) 2 GB RAM 2.8 GB of disk space Minimum resolution of 1280 x 768 Multicore 64 bit processor 8 GB of RAM (16 GB recommended) 2 GB of disk space 1080p resolution recommended 1 GB of GPU VRAM recommended Price One-time purchase: $69.99 Subscription purchase: $31.49/mo with no contract, or $20.99/mo with yearly agreement, or $239.88/yr billed upfront Mobile App? iPad only iPad only Where To Purchase Official website Official website Key Takeaways: Affinity Designer And Illustrator Compared The main takeaway when comparing Affinity Designer versus Illustrator is that Illustrator is the industry-standard software that has more advanced features for working with vectors, whereas Affinity Designer has less of those features, but more image editing capabilities. In this article we’ll be comparing the two so you can decide which is best for you. Despite the fact that they both function in a way that is fundamentally similar, they also have a lot of differences between them, and those differences are significant enough to make choosing between them a real dilemma. Affinity Designer and Adobe Illustrator are currently the two heaviest hitters in the world of premium vector design software.

Affinity designer windows