What users are saying about

GIMP vs Painter

GIMP
40 Ratings
Painter
7 Ratings

GIMP

40 Ratings
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Score 7.9 out of 100

Based on 40 reviews and ratings

Painter

7 Ratings
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Score 6 out of 100

Based on 7 reviews and ratings

Likelihood to Recommend

GIMP

GIMP is great for anyone ranging from personal use to a small business. But, if you are a large business and have a sufficient budget, I would recommend you to opt for an expensive paid software like Photoshop, that would provide not only great features but also public recognition.Its great for beginners wanting to start editing photos, there is a small learning curve that could be gotten used to in no time.

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Musab Nismy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Musab Nismy
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Painter

Corel Painter does have a lot of great brushes, and they do emulate real art supplies very well. Especially the thick paint is well done.But unfortunately there are so many functional and UX bugs that overall it is just horrible to work with. When contacting customer support about it, they really seem clueless about the seriousness of the situation, and clueless about what proper UX is in general. They have tried to make it work a bit like Photoshop, which is a good move but then some things are absolutely not intuitive at all and they are definitely missing the mark horribly with so many issues. I would highly recommend using Photoshop instead, though you'll have to download them separately; it also offers a lot of great brushes nowadays and works much much smoother without all those aggravating bugs of Painter. The price of Corel Painter is just not at all worth all these horrible bugs.

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Iris Shields | TrustRadius Reviewer
Iris Shields
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Pros

GIMP

  • Customizable interface.
  • Powerful tools for image editing.
  • It is a light and multiplatform software.
  • It can work with many editable formats.

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Paola Santino | TrustRadius Reviewer
Paola Santino
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Painter

  • Emulate real art material like paints, drawing materials, etc.
  • Has a lot of different brushes and other art materials
  • It has a set up that can initially test your system to analyze and enhance performance

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Iris Shields | TrustRadius Reviewer
Iris Shields
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Cons

GIMP

  • It would be nice to have the keyboard shortcuts match Photoshop as that is what designers are used to. The transition from Photoshop to GIMP would be a lot easier.
  • When saving images for the web, it would be nice to have a side-by-side view of the full pixel image and the image you're trying to save showing what it will look like as you lessen the resolution.

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Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
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Painter

  • Way too many functional bugs, makes it hard to work with
  • Bad UX and usability, too much unintuitive behavior, makes it particularly hard to work with
  • Overall looks and behaves as if it was coded in the '90s, it really needs a complete UX overhaul
  • Did I mention the many bugs yet? Yeah? I'll mention it again because it's bad

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Iris Shields | TrustRadius Reviewer
Iris Shields
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Usability

GIMP

GIMP 10.0
Based on 1 answer
I interface GIMP with other software--I need to. I generally use the major calculation, CAD, word processing, and photo editing programs. In my office, my use of this software is not limited to computer-aided design. However, I am sure that if I needed this software for other purposes, it would have no interface problems.

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Stiavetti Daniele | TrustRadius Reviewer
Stiavetti Daniele
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Painter

Painter 1.0
Based on 1 answer
If it wasn't quite clear yet, I'll state it again: the usability of Corel Painter is, simply put, horrid. And I am not talking about rendering, lagging, etc., it is not even all that bad there. I am talking about the weird issues like being unable to move a brush into a custom brush palette when you work on a second screen, like being unable to move the software onto the second screen in the first place unless you separate all the palettes and the windows (and if nobody tells you upfront there is no way of knowing because the manual doesn't state this at all), and then having to drag all your separate windows and palettes over one by one every time your computer wakes up again, and they won't really want to move to the other screen but only through a tiny corner of your screen, and the fact that you have to scroll through lists and lists of fonts but can't search and when you apply this font, add another piece of text the font jumps back to the default font of all the text already applied even when you haven't selected any of the text. Just to name a very small few.

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Iris Shields | TrustRadius Reviewer
Iris Shields
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Support Rating

GIMP

GIMP 8.1
Based on 7 answers
We have never needed to use the support functions for GIMP. Any queries we have or had about whether GIMP could complete a task we have used Google and YouTube. There is a wealth of information, guides, and forums dedicated to GIMP and how to perform certain tasks with the application.

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Adam Jackson FGCLP MAHRI | TrustRadius Reviewer
Adam Jackson FGCLP MAHRI
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Painter

Painter 3.0
Based on 1 answer
It was really hard to get them to understand what I was having problems with. It was hard to get the message through that Painter has an unacceptable amount of functional and UX bugs. When I finally talked to someone who was easier to communicate with, he was very stoic about the situation, like they didn't really care about the awful amount of bugs.

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Iris Shields | TrustRadius Reviewer
Iris Shields
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Alternatives Considered

GIMP

I looked at getting Adobe Illustrator before finding GIMP. The cost was prohibitive to me, as I was looking for something that would allow me to work on the images I had at a low cost. I could not justify buying Adobe Illustrator for the small amount of use I would get out of it. GIMP is the perfect solution, allowing me to do what I need with no cost for the software.

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Jonathan Thommarson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Jonathan Thommarson
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Painter

Like I already mentioned Photoshop is so much more pleasant to work with. Though out of the box Photoshop definitely has a lot fewer brushes; you can definitely download bushes often for free, or otherwise a small fee (you have to pay to add more brushes with Painter as well). Painter has so many horrible bugs, functional as well as usability bugs, it's just very, very sloppy definitely compared to Photoshop which is virtually bug-free nowadays. All due respect to programmers, I have been a coder myself, but it is obvious that Painter is built by coders and coders alone, it is obvious there have not been many designers (UX or otherwise) involved in the development of Painter.I got Painter on a discount (luckily or I would have been really ticked off) and I wanted to try it out. I would NEVER pay $500 for it now I know it is riddled with bugs.

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Iris Shields | TrustRadius Reviewer
Iris Shields
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Return on Investment

GIMP

  • GIMP has allowed me to present clients with high-quality and creative logos that meet every requirement.
  • GIMP has allowed me to maintain brand consistency across a large variety of projects.

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Zach Lung | TrustRadius Reviewer
Zach Lung
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Painter

  • Waste of money
  • Waste of time trying to work around all the bugs
  • Waste of time trying to talk to customer service

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Iris Shields | TrustRadius Reviewer
Iris Shields
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Pricing Details

GIMP

General

Free Trial
—
Free/Freemium Version
—
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—
Entry-level set up fee?
No

Painter

General

Free Trial
—
Free/Freemium Version
—
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
—
Entry-level set up fee?
No

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