Say ‘Illustrator alternative’ to the creative community and most will think of Affinity Designer, Serif’s flagship vector app approaching four years of age and counting.

A highly respected app for all those of years, it latest 2019 update impressed us with its optimisation for iPad, Windows and Mac.

Vector shapes now possess an unlimited number of strokes and fills, with more freedom to interleave different attributes and control how they are blended together.

Its upgrades also mean Mac users now have end-to-end Metal compute acceleration to take full advantage of the Mac’s discrete GPU, making all raster layer and brush operations up to 10 times faster than ever before. 

Existing Illustrator users should know they can open AI and EPS files in Affinity. Note though that you can’t save back to AI, with files only exportable to Photoshop.

Curious iPad users can check out our review of Affinity Designer for the iPad from Tobias Hall.

You probably know this app simply as Corel Draw, one overshadowed perhaps by both Adobe and Corel’s own masterly Painter program.

But Corel Draw fans are legion, tempted by the lack of subscription and the software’s solid reputation for vector work.

Its 2019 app saw CD come to the Mac recently, and we were also excited by its web browser version that lets you edit your Vector work on the trot. Now there’s something Adobe doesn’t have.

Users can now also utilise new features like Non-Destructive Effects and a new Objects Docker offering direct control over the structure of a document plus quick access to all of its components.

Good to know – users can import AI files into CD, but they’ll open as Corel Draw files.

You can’t use Vectornator on your desktop, but we felt we needed to put an iPad option on this list, especially one that comes at this level of quality for free. It’s essentially desktop-like performance a few rungs below the paid for experience of Affinity Designer on the iPad; artists can edit an 8K Canvas with millions of elements and encounter zero lag.

With Vectornator, you’ll also have access to your Creative Cloud library. With its Adobe CC integration, simply start working on your desktop and continue working on Vectornator on iPad or vice versa.

Vectornator also has a great UX, coming with no popovers and persistent panels, nice accurate sliders and even nicer animated buttons that provide feedback while tapping.

With Live Gradients meanwhile you can control the gradient composition directly on the shape itself.

Android mobile users looking for a similar app could go with Infinite Design instead, but the Vectornator experience is a hard one to beat. Try a download here.

Sketch is a UX app which does allow for vector graphic creation; artist Thalia Train can explain a bit more about that.

Like with Illustrator, there’s the option for multiple artboards (as pictured). It also has a full range of editing tools, built-in grid options for 960px and a pixel preview mode that shows your output when rasterised for the web.

While it is a paid desktop app, you can download a free trial version from the Sketch site.

Note that AI files have limited support, and can only be opened as a single flattened layer.

Mac users won’t like this as there’s no real Apple version as such (besides a source binary), but Windows and Linux creatives looking for a free alternative to Illustrator will be in seventh heaven.

The interface may be simple, but Inkscape provides for great SVG integration, and has a robust set of tools including alpha blending, cloned objects, markers and bitmap image tracing.

While you can open AI files with Inkscape, to save them you’ll need to export as PDF, then change the extension of your file by renaming it with a .ai. 

You can download Inkscape here.