5 Best Graphic Design Software of 2021 (Paid & Free)

No matter what is the size of your organization, if its design doesn’t appeal to or speak to your target audience, it might not help you reach your target goal. Hence, you need to have access to the best graphic design software so you can edit your product photos.

However, by leveraging the best graphic design software or tool in the market today, you can take your brand identity to the next level.

While Adobe Photoshop has already been leading the products’ images editing world, over the years, many other visual design software programs have surfaced around and have been catering to the different preferences and needs of creative designers in the world.

Not only does a great graphic design software helps in enhancing efficiency, but lets you put remarkable creativity into real-world design.

This article will tell you about the best 5 graphic design software options, ranked high in the order of quality, features, use case, ease and efficiency.

Best Graphic Design Software?

1. Adobe Photoshop

For graphic designers, there isn’t as much better photo editing or graphic design software like Adobe Photoshop.

Being one of the most popular photo editing programs, this software is a complete package of easy-to-use features and comes with outstanding graphic design capabilities.

Key Features:

1. Open-Source GIMP Software
2. Creative Cloud
3. User Interface
4. Design Tools

Pros:

• A library and photo management with Adobe Creative Cloud
• Efficient file transfer between different programs
• Multiple design tools with responsive graphics
• Rich set of typography and drawing tools
• Complimentary mobile application
• Edit animation and video layers
• 3D design capabilities
• Slick user interface

Cons:

• Adobe currently provides Photoshop in addition to the subscription of Creative Cloud.
• The recurring payment is actually more pricey, and people who are looking forward to buying this outstanding software forever have to purchase a perpetual license.

Price

Avail Adobe Photoshop subscription for a price of US$33.99 per month per license.

2. Adobe InDesign

If you are in the business of publishing, you must have access to Adobe InDesign. It helps you with superb capabilities when it comes to designing stunning magazines, info sheets, and brochures while easily exporting them to PDF or HTML.

Key Features:

1. Sensei Technology
2. Adobe InCopy
3. Adjust Layout
4. Easy To Use

 Pros:

• It is a complete combination of texts and graphics to easily streamline and optimize files.
• It lets you add tags to indexes, keywords, anchor text frames, footnotes, table of contents, and captions with hyperlinks.
• It allows HTML exporting that lets web developers export simple and clean codes while implementing the website’s layout designs. It is perfect for WordPress websites.
• It helps in eliminating redundant div tags in HTML files in addition to irrelevant content grouping.
• It allows you to resize multiple objects and change the width and height at the same time.
• It allows you to use its Eyedropper tool to apply position or size instantly to another object within the document.
• It is an industry standard for desktop publishing.

 Cons:

• For new users, its less intuitive user interface can make things overwhelming.
• It is suitable for enterprise use only rather than for general users.
• PDF comment integration needs perfection
• Costlier than other likewise software

Pricing:

Subscribe to Adobe InDesign at a monthly price of $20.99. The full Creative Cloud costs $52.99 per month.

3. CorelDraw Graphics Suite

Packed with some pro-level features, CorelDraw Graphics Suite delivers a highly accessible and user-friendly interface. Its bundle of multiple applications offers robust editing features.

Key Features:

1. Content Exchange
2. Flexible Payment
3. Customizable UI
4. New Pointilizer

Pros:

• This graphic design software delivers app-wide workflow and under-the-hood performance enhancements and innovation accelerate productivity
• It allows you to choose GPU acceleration over the default CPU while working with system-intensive sophisticated vector graphics
• It allows you to smoothly transition from desktop to tablet mode to take advantage of touch features
• It delivers better EPS and third-party PDF importing capabilities and uses with their GPL Ghostscript feature
• It can export files in up to 48 file types such as AutoCAD, JPG, PNG, SVG, AutoCAD, JPG, and TIFF.
• It is also capable of opening 35 file types, such as EPS, HTML, AutoCAD, PDF, PowerPoint, SVG, and even old FreeHand files
• It works great without any lag with Surface Pen

Cons:

• Dissimilar to Adobe, there aren’t any complementary mobile apps that Corel offers.
• It confuses its users with lots of payment options.
• Beginners cannot operate it with ease

Pricing

CorelDraw is a free graphic design software but only for a 15-day trial period. But if you want to avail of its full version, you will have to pay $474. To avail of its annual subscription, you need to pay $198.

4. Inkscape

This open-source graphic design software is helpful for designers who want to produce scalable, stretch-free, and blur-free graphic designs during resizing.

This graphic design software works superbly for beginners or hobbyists interested in vector drawing.

Key Features:

1. Manual Improvement
2. Regular Updates
3. User Experience
4. Free of Cost

Pros:

• It allows you to easily make individual text lines without frames in addition to the paragraph type.
• It allows for plenty of gradients and is built-in with a separate tool to create complex combinations.
• It delivers several full-featured and well-designed tools to create, edit, and convert vectors.
• It has Bezier handles, which ensures much more effortless movement of nodes.
• It lets you use different preset categories of filters to save effort and time.
• It can also download or create ready-made plugins.

Cons:

• You need to convert its streaming text into plain text before export.
• Its processing is a little slower than other graphics software.
• Its compatibility with Illustrator isn’t bulletproof.
• Its Mac version doesn’t come without error.

Pricing

Open-source platform

5. Sketch

This vector-based graphic design software or tool works great for app, web, and interface design.

You can take advantage of Sketch to create interactive prototypes for UI/UX purposes.

Key Features:

1. Great For Mobile and Web
2. Screen Templates
3. Custom Plugins
4. Low Cost

Pros:

• It allows them to mirror designs on large-sized devices for team viewing to find out how the design would exactly look in a specific device.
• It can autosave all the changes in the design gradually to avoid any loss of design. It indeed gives significant relief to designers!
• It allows designers to use libraries with standard Android icons, iOS icons, and Mac icons.
• It helps designers rigmarole-free sharing and collaboration with the help of the cloud.
• It allows them to share the whole interface in the cloud via an easy file-sharing process.
• It allows designers to export any group or layer as a PNG file.
• It demands a low learning curve.

 Cons:

• Its limited illustration capabilities can hamper intricate illustration work.
• Screens don’t render in high resolution while accessing from the cloud.
• It isn’t wholly polished and requires lots of enhancement
• It has no automatic layout flowing option
• It  can be availed only by the Mac users

 Pricing

If you want to avail of the annual subscriptions of this great graphic design software, you need to pay $99 per year.

After reading this article about 5 Best Graphic Design Software of 2021 (Paid & Free), we hope that you would like to know more about graphic design software tools or programs that can best guide you in putting your best creativity out of your creative bent of mind.

If you have any questions about how a graphic design software can help grow your creativity and productivity,  we would be happy to answer all of them in the comment section below.