What users are saying about

Painter vs CorelDRAW Graphics Suite

Painter
5 Ratings
CorelDRAW Graphics Suite
Top Rated
29 Ratings

Painter

5 Ratings
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Score 5.6 out of 100

Based on 5 reviews and ratings

CorelDRAW Graphics Suite

Top Rated
29 Ratings
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Score 8.8 out of 100

Based on 29 reviews and ratings

Likelihood to Recommend

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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CorelDRAW Graphics Suite

CorelDRAW is very well suited for customizing cross plots and diagrams from external software, and integrating them with multiple other sources, such as pictures, in order to distill the main concepts and summarize ideas for scientific papers. It also works great for digitizing figures from old papers and adapting them to the context of your work.

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Pablo Lacerda Silva | TrustRadius Reviewer
Pablo Lacerda Silva
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Pros

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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CorelDRAW Graphics Suite

  • Ease of use is a major factor in our choice for the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite. With intuitive interface terminologies, users are able to jump right into the applications with ease and confidence.
  • The ability to customize the Suite to fit your particular needs is a major strength of the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite. CorelDRAW customization abilities are endless and can turn the default Graphics Suite into a fully customized powerhouse application catered to a designer's specific wants and needs.

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Richard Reilly - Fluid | TrustRadius Reviewer
Richard Reilly - Fluid
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Cons

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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CorelDRAW Graphics Suite

  • Some of the font files have spacing issues, for example, Monotype Corsiva is set a little to the right when choosing a centered text
  • We can't save a version of the CorelDRAW file as a jpeg.
  • The auto vertical text centering options don't always transfer well or show if saved as a pdf, so we hand-center text vertically.

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Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Verified User
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Usability

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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CorelDRAW Graphics Suite

CorelDRAW Graphics Suite 8.0
Based on 1 answer
Just like any design program or suite, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who doesn't do graphic design professionally. If you're not adept at learning a program or experience, it isn't a program you can just pick up and start using easily. Outside of the learning curve, it's a nice program with a decent user interface.

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Mandy Cramer | TrustRadius Reviewer
Mandy Cramer
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Support Rating

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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CorelDRAW Graphics Suite

CorelDRAW Graphics Suite 8.4
Based on 11 answers
It's not easy to get people. The tutorials don't really "tell you" exactly how to do stuff. You have to depend on Youtube and even then, it's not the best. Corel really needs to put out really good quick tutorials on how to do "key" special effects, like how to remove a background QUICK, Art Conversions, Best Practices, etc.

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Jen Lyles | TrustRadius Reviewer
Jen Lyles
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Alternatives Considered

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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CorelDRAW Graphics Suite

Corel is as good as Adobe Illustrator but cheaper. It is easier to use than Inkscape, however, Inkscape is free. I chose Corel because I learned it 10+ years ago and transitions were easy enough, affordable enough that I didn't have to relearn or break the bank to continue with Corel.

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Logan Baker | TrustRadius Reviewer
Logan Baker
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Return on Investment

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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CorelDRAW Graphics Suite

  • Ease of use reflects on less time to train new users, a positive impact in investment and productivity.
  • The practicality to make new designs results in less time needed to do them, again a positive impact.
  • The integration with other graphic programs could be better if needed to finish a rendering using the design made in Corel Draw it's needed to export in formats that don't carry all information and the process is not that simple.

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Stéfano Bellote | TrustRadius Reviewer
Stéfano Bellote
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Pricing Details

Painter

General

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

CorelDRAW Graphics Suite

General

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

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