i like it much better than adobe. up until a recent update in illustrator it even performed better but now AI seems to have surpassed it. but i find affinity designer’s tools much more useful, although there’s been a bug that pisses me of with the contour tool for quite a while now. but i tolerate it because overall it still allows me to design icons much faster.

in case you’re interested in specifics:

• the pixel persona in AD allows me to work on raster images without leaving the program most of the time (not all affinity photo features can be used but still having a limited raster editor mode feels much better and smoother than switching between programs). AI simply doesn’t have this in any capacity.

• AD’s corner tool instead of AI’s corner rounding with the direct selection tool is much more capable and useful because it’s nondestructive. you can change the original shape with the rounding still applied, which is something you cannot do on AI.

• AD’s contour tool, despite the bug that doesn’t properly round corners when you expand, is still much more fluid to use than AI’s extremely clunky, 1998-ass-feeling offset path. apart from not requiring entering fucking numbers into a fucking dialog box and instead allowing you to offset the path with simple scrubbing… it’s also nondestructive so it can stay on an object even as you edit its original shape. so i still prefer to do workarounds for the bug rather than dealing with that terrible experience in AI.

• gradients are so much better in AD than AI i don’t even know where to begin. it’s just easier to use and more importantly you can use transparency gradients separately from color gradients (but also can have opacity info on a regular color gradient as well). so you can have an object that goes from 100% blue on the left to 0% green on the right but also add transparency gradient that goes 80% from top right to 20% on the bottom left and see the combination as a result in one object.

• AD has “erase” as a blending mode which is small but can be very useful if you’re designing something to be exported to png. Has a couple more modes that AI doesn’t have but this one’s the most straightforward and useful imo.

• It’s nothing huge but I like the vector crop tool in AD, you can just crop anything without thinking about it.

• consistency between programs when using affinity is a great experience you don’t get to have when working across Adobe tools which even for the most closely related ones feel like they aren’t being developed within the same company but different … I wanna say planets? yeah it’s like they’re being developed in different planets instead.

• one time payment for major versions only. i bought affinity 1.0, got all the updates for free up until 2.0, which i was able to buy on discount for upgrading. now i get all the updates on 2.x for free.

there are things that AI does better and i use it when i plan to use those, and sometimes use one and copy paste to the other to use the best of each. best highlights are repeat function (Ctrl+d). now there’s also radial repeat which can be great. blend can be very useful… most of the time though i go with AD.