Last updated on May 2, 2020
CorelDraw vs. Adobe Illustrator
Like Apple Mac OS and Microsoft Windows, Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw are top well-known competitors in the graphic design industry. Which one is better?
CorelDraw
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It depends. Both of them are sophisticated and professional for vector graphic design. In my opinion, I prefer CorelDraw because Adobe Illustrator has a steeper learning curve. I feel more comfortable with the icon-based GUI layout, layer and object control, a multipage system in CorelDraw, etc. Those functionaries in CorelDraw reduce my operation mistakes and save my time and my energy.
Another reason that you may need to choose CorelDraw is the compatibility with printers, plotters, laser cutters and so forth.
- First, Adobe Illustrator no longer supports HPGL format that used in many plotters and old printing machines.
- Second, CorelDraw supports Hairline, which has zero line-width and unaffected by rescaling. This property is important to correctly control the path for plotters and laser cutters. Incorrect line width/stroke size setting in Adobe Illustrator can result in wrong printing operations. For example, laser cutters process thick lines as fill areas resulting in engraving instead of cutting through as lines.
- Third, CorelDraw supports printing only selected objects in its print dialogue. This print option is convenient to print selectively from a layout that contains many parts. You can also save the stack of printed objects. You can append new objects to this previous layout, thereby unnecessary to measure the remaining regions on the cutting material.
You can purchase CorelDRAW Graphics Suite from Corel’s online shop. In addition, two brand new versions for Windows have launched since 2020, i.e. CorelDRAW Essentials and CorelDRAW Standard. It’s great news for home and student users. The Essential package is remarkably affordable, starting at $129, compared to the full Graphics Suite package. You can use a smaller account of budgets to get the core of CorelDRAW.
See the full comparison of the CorelDRAW family
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