GIMP vs Painter

Likelihood to Recommend

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

Founder

HatwareApparel & Fashion, 1-10 employees

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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

Senior UX/ UI Architect

Self EmployedArts & Crafts, 1-10 employees

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Pros

GIMP has a very intuitive interface so now as a user you can always layer all the images or make a different image from scratch.
One thing that I really like about GIMP is that it has a relatively smaller learning curve which can agitate many things that we don’t want so it’s better to keep this topic on the side for a while.
This product has so many large tools at the disposal stage which are used for manipulating different types of images and simultaneously exporting any type of unnecessary stuff.

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Christer Geberg

Sr. Manager, Industry Marketing

PerficientInformation Technology & Services, 1001-5000 employees

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Watercolor Compatible
Multiple variety of Brushes and shapes
Captured Dab Library

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Verified User

C-Level Executive in Engineering

Computer Networking Company, 5001-10,000 employees

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Cons

The UI could be revamped to reflect more modern UI trends (for example, material design look)
The Export menu could be made more intuitive and allow to easily choose file extension, quality etc.
Would be great if GIMP natively supported digital negative files (RAW)

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Verified User

Employee in Information Technology

Transportation/Trucking/Railroad Company, 51-200 employees

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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

Senior UX/ UI Architect

Self EmployedArts & Crafts, 1-10 employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

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Free/Freemium Version

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Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Entry-level set up fee?

No

Starting Price

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General

Free Trial

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Free/Freemium Version

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Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Entry-level set up fee?

No

Starting Price

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Usability

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

Architetto

Libero professionistaArchitecture & Planning, 1-10 employees

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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

Senior UX/ UI Architect

Self EmployedArts & Crafts, 1-10 employees

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Support Rating

GIMP 9.2

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

Founder & Co-Owner

Randy Sanchez Sauce CoFood & Beverages, 1-10 employees

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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

Senior UX/ UI Architect

Self EmployedArts & Crafts, 1-10 employees

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Alternatives Considered

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

Key Player

Home InsteadIndividual & Family Services, 501-1000 employees

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Corel Painter has support to multiple OS and across all the devices. Coloring and multi layer imaging works very well. The new enhanced brush settings and the redesigned brush libraries.

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Verified User

C-Level Executive in Engineering

Computer Networking Company, 5001-10,000 employees

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