

On the downside, its decades-old codebase and interface are becoming a little bloated and well, there’s that monthly subscription. Find out more in our Illustrator review. On the plus side, its ubiquity makes it a good tool to learn for your career, and the integration with the Creative Cloud can help make your workflow smooth and speedy. More broadly, the issues that apply to Photoshop apply to Illustrator too. Illustrator has also now launched on the iPad see our Illustrator for iPad review), and the updates to this app make it much easier for you to share your work with colleagues and collaborators. The biggest additions in recent years have been a Freeform Gradients tool that makes it super-easy to create rich gradients, a Global Editing feature that lets you simultaneously make changes across all instances of a similar object, and a smart cropping tool that automatically suggests crops based on AI.

In the most recent update, we especially like the new 3D tools, elegant vector editing and the cloud teamwork function. That dominance is starting to ebb a little, with a rush of new rivals into the space. But it remains one of the most sought-after design apps for Windows, and our recent testing showed exactly how good it is (we gave it a strong four and half stars).Īs with Photoshop, its rivals are largely competing on price, and for those whom money is less important than efficiency, Illustrator remains a hugely powerful and versatile tool, that Adobe is constantly making efforts to improve further. First launched in 1987, Illustrator has been the natural companion to Photoshop for generations of illustrators and designers, and it’s long been considered the standard vector drawing tool for the industry.
