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If you‘re a digital artist or graphic designer, you‘ve likely heard of Affinity Designer and Procreate. These two apps are some of the most popular and powerful tools available for creating professional digital art and designs. But while they share some similarities, they each have distinct strengths and are suited for different types of creative work.
In this in-depth comparison, we‘ll take a detailed look at Affinity Designer and Procreate to help you determine which one is the best fit for your needs. We‘ll examine their core features, compatibility, performance, ease of use, and pricing so you can decide which one deserves a place in your creative toolkit.
Overview of Affinity Designer and Procreate
First, let‘s start with a high-level overview of these two industry-leading apps:
Affinity Designer is a sophisticated vector graphics editor developed by Serif for creating concept art, illustrations, branding, icons, UI designs, and more. It‘s designed to be a full-featured alternative to Adobe Illustrator, offering professional tools for vector and raster design.
Procreate is a digital painting and illustration app created exclusively for iPad and iPhone. It‘s focused on replicating the natural experience of painting and drawing with physical media, with an intuitive multi-touch interface and huge library of highly customizable brushes.
While there is some overlap, Affinity Designer and Procreate occupy distinct spots in the world of digital art and design. Affinity Designer is geared more towards graphic design work like logos, interfaces, print assets, and scalable illustrations. Procreate‘s brushes and painting tools make it ideal for digital painting, sketching, and creating organic, raster-based artwork.
Key Differences Between Affinity Designer and Procreate
Let‘s compare some of the most important differences between these two apps:
1. Design Model: Vector vs Raster
The most fundamental difference between Affinity Designer and Procreate is the type of graphics they are built around.
Affinity Designer is primarily a vector graphics editor. Vector graphics are defined by mathematical paths and curves, making them infinitely scalable without any loss in quality. This makes Affinity Designer perfect for creating graphics that need to look sharp at any size, like logos, icons, and illustrations for print.
In contrast, Procreate is entirely based on raster, or pixel-based graphics. Like working with physical media, raster graphics are made up of a grid of pixels that have a fixed resolution. While you can resize raster artwork, enlarging it too much will result in visible pixelation and blurriness. Procreate is designed to create finished digital paintings and illustrations that look as natural as possible.
Affinity Designer does include raster painting tools as well, but they are more of a secondary feature compared to its robust vector toolset. The vector focus of Affinity Designer makes it much more versatile for graphic design work across print, web, and UI/UX design.
2. Compatibility and Platforms
Another big differentiator is device and platform support:
Affinity Designer is available for macOS, Windows, and iPadOS. This makes it an excellent cross-platform solution if you like to work on both desktop and iPad. Your work is fully compatible between devices and you can easily integrate it into your existing workflows with other apps. Note that there is no iPhone version.
Procreate is exclusively designed for Apple‘s iPadOS and iOS mobile platforms. There are no desktop versions available for Mac or Windows. While this means you can only use it on iPad and iPhone, it also allows Procreate to fully optimize the app for the unique multi-touch capabilities and Apple Pencil support offered by these devices.
If you prefer working on an iPad with an Apple Pencil and want the most streamlined mobile drawing experience, Procreate is hard to beat. But for flexibility across desktop and mobile platforms, Affinity Designer has the advantage.
3. Tools and Features
Let‘s take a closer look at the tools and features offered by each app.
Affinity Designer‘s core strength is in its wide assortment of vector tools for illustration and design:
- Pen, pencil, and brush tools for drawing precise vector paths
- Intuitive node editing for refining curves and shapes
- Boolean operations like unite, subtract, intersect, and divide for combining vector shapes
- Affinity‘s unique "Personas" workspaces for vector, pixel, and export
- Artboards and slices for UI design
- Grids, guides and alignment options
- Text and typography tools
- Gradients, shadows, and lighting effects
- Symbols and constraints for reusable elements in designs
- 1,000,000% zoom for working with intricate details
- Support for Photoshop PSD, AI, PDF, SVG, and EPS file formats
As mentioned, Affinity Designer does offer pixel-based painting tools as well in its Pixel Persona. But compared to Procreate, they are much more basic and not the main focus of the app.
Procreate has an extensive collection of tools for digital painting and illustration:
- Over 200 highly customizable paintbrushes with unique textures, shapes, and dynamics
- Dual-texture brushes for advanced paint blending techniques
- Huge library of downloadable brushes created by the Procreate community
- Smudge tool for blending colors and textures naturally
- Powerful layer system with masks, adjustments, grouping, and layer effects
- Drawing assist features like QuickShape, perspective guides, symmetry, and isometric mode
- 3D model painting and posing
- Gradient map and color harmony for cohesive color palettes
- Full typography features with fonts, styling, kerning, and leading
- In-app camera for taking reference photos and face-painting
- Support for importing and exporting PSD files
While you can do some vector work by importing vector files, Procreate itself does not include any vector drawing tools. Its focus is entirely on raster graphics and natural media painting.
4. Color, Performance, and Workflow
A few other technical differences to note:
Color management – Affinity Designer supports the RGB color space used for screens as well as CMYK for professional printing. It offers live preview of color space conversions and PANTONE color swatches. Procreate supports RGB color only, as it is designed for creating digital illustrations that will largely be displayed on screens.
Performance – Both apps are well-optimized and can handle large, complex files. However, the vector graphics in Affinity Designer are typically more lightweight and scalable compared to the pixel-heavy raster artwork in Procreate. For best performance in Procreate, you‘ll need one of the newer, more powerful iPads.
Workflow – Affinity Designer offers a non-destructive workflow. You can infinitely edit and rearrange elements in your designs without permanently altering them. Procreate is a bit more like working with physical media, where your pixels are directly edited with each stroke (although you can undo). For digital painting, this offers a familiar, hands-on experience, but for graphic design, the non-destructive vector workflow is typically preferred.
5. Ease of Use
When it comes to ease of learning and use, Procreate has a bit of an edge over Affinity Designer.
While Affinity Designer‘s interface is very well-designed considering how many professional tools it packs in, it still presents a learning curve if you‘re new to vector software. Some of the unique features like Personas and constraints can take some time to wrap your head around.
Procreate keeps things simpler with a clean, minimal interface that puts the focus on your canvas. If you have any experience with digital painting, you‘ll feel right at home with the natural painting tools and layer system. The gesture-based controls are also easy to learn for controlling your canvas and brushes.
This isn‘t to say Affinity Designer is difficult to use – just that it may take more time to master all of its features compared to the purposefully streamlined toolset of Procreate. Affinity offers excellent tutorials and learning resources to help you get up to speed.
6. Pricing
Finally, let‘s look at pricing and value:
Affinity Designer is sold as a one-time purchase, with separate desktop and iPad versions:
- Desktop version (Mac/Windows): $60.99
- iPad version: $21.99
Procreate is available as a one-time purchase on the App Store:
- iPad version: $14.99
- Procreate Pocket (iPhone): $5.99
Both Affinity Designer and Procreate are excellent values for the features they offer. The one-time licensing is also very welcome compared to subscriptions.
If you‘re just interested in the iPad experience, Procreate is slightly less expensive. But when you consider that the desktop Affinity Designer is a full-featured professional tool rivaling Adobe Illustrator ($239/year subscription), it is a bargain.
Procreate also offers a bit more flexibility in that a single purchase allows you to install it on all your supported iPads and iPhones. With Affinity Designer, you‘ll need to buy both the desktop and iPad versions separately if you want to use them together.
The Bottom Line
At the end of the day, both Affinity Designer and Procreate are best-in-class tools that are extremely capable for their respective uses. The "right" choice ultimately comes down to your specific needs and preferences as a digital artist or designer.
Affinity Designer is the clear winner if you need a professional, cross-platform vector illustration and graphic design app. Its desktop-class tools make it unbeatable for branding, illustration, web graphics, UI/UX design, and print media. The iPad version and affordable price also make it one of the most accessible options for professional vector work.
Procreate is the champion when it comes to mobile digital painting and illustration, especially if you work primarily on an iPad and want the best possible drawing and painting experience. Its focus on natural media, expert brush design, and intuitive multitouch gestures simply make it a joy to use for creating finished artworks. You won‘t find a better app for digital painting on iPad.
Of course, many digital artists use both vector and raster tools in their work and may switch between them frequently. In that case, there‘s no reason you couldn‘t use both Affinity Designer and Procreate together! Their reasonable one-time pricing means you can invest in both to cover all your needs for illustration, painting, and design.
Hopefully this comparison has helped clarify the key differences between Affinity Designer and Procreate. Evaluate your own creative requirements, workflow, and budget to determine which app – or both – will give you the tools you need to do your best work and develop your digital art skills. No matter which one you choose, you‘ll be equipped with some of the most cutting-edge and capable creative software available today.