--- title: Substance Designer Reviews meta\_title: 'Substance Designer Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta\_description: Filter 56 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Substance Designer works for a business like yours. aggregate\_rating: rating\_value: 4.5 review\_count: 56 scale: '5' date\_modified: '2026-08-07' parent\_category: name: 3D Design url: https://www.g2.com/categories/3d-design --- # Substance Designer Reviews & Product Details Claimed ###### Profile Status This profile is currently managed by Substance Designer but has limited features. Are you part of the Substance Designer team? [Upgrade your plan](https://sell.g2.com) to enhance your branding and engage with visitors to your profile! Substance Designer is a node-based non-destructive application for creating materials. Edit complete texture sets fast with the non-linear workflow and see your changes apply simultaneously to all your outputs. Unleash the power of Substance Designer and focus on what really matters: your art. * * * Seller [Adobe](https://www.g2.com/sellers/adobe) Discussions [Substance Designer Community](https://www.g2.com/products/substance-designer/discuss) Languages Supported English, Chinese (Simplified) Solution Type Best-of-Breed Overview by Vincent GAULT (Tech Artist / Community Manager chez Allegorithmic) Show More ## Value at a Glance Averages based on real user reviews. ### Perceived Cost $$$$$ [ View More Pricing Information ](https://www.g2.com/products/substance-designer/pricing) ## Top-Rated Alternatives [ ![Blender](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Blender") Blender 4.6/5(319) ](https://www.g2.com/products/blender/reviews) [ ![3ds Max Design](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "3ds Max Design") 3ds Max Design 4.3/5(284) ](https://www.g2.com/products/3ds-max-design/reviews) [ ![Maya](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Maya") Maya 4.3/5(267) ](https://www.g2.com/products/maya/reviews) [ View All Alternatives ](https://www.g2.com/products/substance-designer/competitors/alternatives) ## User Insights Average based on 56 real user reviews. Perceived Cost $$$$$ [Log in to unlock pricing and user insights](/login) ![Akshit G.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Akshit G.") AG Akshit G. Associate Motion Artist Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 1/24/2021 "A great product for texturing and painting 3D models," 3.5/5 What do you like best about Substance Designer? it fits in multiple pipelines in in practice, its node based and learning curve was very easy from other software to jumping into it, it is cross platforms ready, once the assets library is designed the materials can be easily be used multiple times and in any platforms without any problems, the plugin saves a lot of time and the free library is very vast, helps a lot Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Substance Designer? for people learning it or for freshers it doesn't provide a free trial, a stripped down version will help a lot Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Substance Designer solving and how is that benefiting you? I use it for designing photoreal materials, once the materials are designed and packaged it can be used multiple times, and even be sold in market, its supported in multiple platforms, the learning curve was very easy, and can be easily be suggested to anyone who are looking for it, the future is procedural materials having high quality assets ready in the collection helps a lot, and in future it will save a lot of time Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Validated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Dalton L.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Dalton L.") DL Dalton L. Unity Développeur Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 1/24/2021 "best software for creating procedural material" 4/5 What do you like best about Substance Designer? Substance Designer is a great software. I am a programmer so I don't normally spend a lot of time on the artistic side of the business. It's something I know how to do but it's just not my strong suit. Nonetheless, I decided to try out Substance Designer. I fell in love with it instantly. Substance Designer makes it incredibly easy and fast to make AAA-quality materials. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Substance Designer? The subscription model it's not easy to justify if you are a casual artist and solo programmer like me. Unity has a license model that only charges royalties if your game/app sells over a certain threshold. A model like that would make it more accessible to casual artists. The learning curve is a bit steep, but it's doable. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering Substance Designer: If you are a casual artist or a programmer this could be a good addition to your workflow. Just be aware of the initial learning curve. If you are just doing some minor quick and dirt prototyping it may not be what you want, but for anything else, I recommend this software. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Substance Designer solving and how is that benefiting you? Create polished and materials that look like AAA ones. You can do some really intricate stuff with this but honestly, it's brilliant even if you need a simple pattern. Also, make it very easy to create tiling patterns. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Validated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Evghenii L.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Evghenii L.") EL Evghenii L. 3D Artist Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 1/21/2021 "I am a Freelance 3d" 5/5 What do you like best about Substance Designer? Intuitive node based experience without limits. My main work in Substance Designer is in creating fabrics that do not exist or not possible to photo is high resolution. It is great that once the fabric is creating, I am able to produce additional variations from it, creating numerous different variants. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Substance Designer? Сomplete inability to export in vector format! I would be great to have a bridge between Substance Designer and Adobe illustrator. It is easier some things to do in illustrator or vise versa. Bridge between them will resolve a lot of problems, it will laso bring to market graphic designers, because they will be able to create vector images in Substance Designer. Right now there is no ability to export anything from Substance Designer in vector formet (eps, ai, svg), this means, that it only can export raster graphics. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering Substance Designer: It is easier to start than you think! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Substance Designer solving and how is that benefiting you? I am creating fabric textures in substance designer, when there is no ability to make a photo of it. Usually client has only low resolution of it, that I am not able to use a bump/displacement map. Before the appearance of Substance Designer I was forced to use Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator to create custom fabrics, but it was a big problem to make variations of it, because of lack in instruments and work with instances. Or I was using Zbrush to sculpt the alpha and then was using it as a main texture, right now I can "draw" generate that in Substance Designer that saves me a lot of time. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Validated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Verified User in Computer Games](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User in Computer Games") UC Verified User in Computer Games Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 1/18/2021 "Substance Designer Review" 5/5 What do you like best about Substance Designer? The procedural, node based work flow is extremely powerful once you get your head around it. There's a wealth of content and teaching resources to help with that. The flexible workflow means it's extremely easy to adjust textures you've made, IE, number of bricks in a wall, number of stones in a gravel texture.. Overall it's just the most powerful tool for the job when it comes to creating tiling textures. The workflow between Designer and Painter is also nice, where you can use your procedural materials easily in Painter. Creating variables also allows you to easily adjust parameters that you expose. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Substance Designer? The learning curve can be quite steep for people who are new to node based work flows. However, as mentioned, there is a wealth of teaching resources and the Substance Designer community is huge, and always open to answering questions. Sometimes it can be difficult to find the node you need. You know what you need to do, but the node may have a name that is difficult to find. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Substance Designer solving and how is that benefiting you? Complex materials that would take a long time to sculpt by hand can be created in a fraction of the time. Things such as tiling brick walls, gravel materials.. etc. All this while being able to easily go back and adjust the textures super easily. This iterative work flow means it's very easy to react to feedback in the professional environment. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Ryota S.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Ryota S.") RS Ryota S. Animator Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 1/17/2021 "Amazing material editor for VFX and games" 5/5 What do you like best about Substance Designer? The ease of use and the quality of the end result. I can literally paint right on the screen like painting a clay model. I especially love how I can quickly paint normal map and height map details. It means I don't need to bother with actually sculpting it in Blender and baking it out. It saved me so much time when creating models for my client. I also love smart materials that let me reuse the texture I made for other things. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Substance Designer? I hope that it will be able to natively support Blend file so that I can get started right away from Blender instead of spending time prepping it. I mainly use Blender, so it would be important for me to be able to jump right into texture design in SP to speed up my work flow. Although I only had chance to use it because my client let me use it, I had great time learning and making use of it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Substance Designer solving and how is that benefiting you? It's the total package for material and texturing. It's so easy to paint and edit inside SP, and it's also easy to package up the working file to export the end result to Blender. It's modular nature lets me edit the texture however I see fit without having to repeat the same steps over and over again. It's helping me a lot with hard surface objects as well as organic objects. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Validated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Sergij D.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Sergij D.") SD Sergij D. Freelance Character Artist Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 1/16/2021 "a wonderful and intuitive program that helped significantly optimize the project." 4.5/5 What do you like best about Substance Designer? in the projects I liked to use the nod system easily and clearly . The intuitiveness of the whole system is for me . . It is easy to integrate the program into various projects, with the ability to train teams in a short time with minimal resources as there is a large base of initial material and an excellent system of assistance documents . . this is the best program for creating tiles and different environments that I have ever seen and it really reduced the time to create assets for our projects . . It was easy to edit customers and art directors . Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Substance Designer? I like everything in the right direction , in which you are moving except for the design and visual content of the program , which is cumbersome and takes up a lot of screen space , I do not like the time it takes to run and the ability to optimize the catalog of textures and presets . Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering Substance Designer: increase the quality of the material base, a better and more optimized window, with work in multi-screen mode Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Substance Designer solving and how is that benefiting you? as I said above . this is the best program for creating tiles and different environments that I have ever seen and it really reduced the time to create assets for our projects . It was easy to edit customers and art directors . the base of materials perfectly helps with acceleration of performance of the set tasks and a possibility of their adjustment Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Validated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Volodymyr H.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Volodymyr H.") VH Volodymyr H. 3D Modeler Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) 1/25/2021 "Great tool that helps safe time" 5/5 What do you like best about Substance Designer? I love precision in texturing workflow that gives me that software, thus it helps me to improve time efficiency in my production line. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Substance Designer? Sometime it feels very laggy and overloads my computer a bit, but it's more about how I construct my node setup. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering Substance Designer: Never stop lerning Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Substance Designer solving and how is that benefiting you? Designer helps me to unify and optimizy process of making textures and combine diferent materials all tofether when I have to create model with 1 material. Most models that I create are dedicated for mobile platforms so count of materials is lemited. Using sbubstance designer helps me to speed up process of combining textures to 1 material. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Bradley H.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Bradley H.") BH Bradley H. Environment Artist Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) 1/18/2021 "Substance Designer Review" 4.5/5 What do you like best about Substance Designer? Substance has helped me improve the quality of work and the speed of which it is produced. The workflow is very non-destructive, which is great for working in a large team of artists. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Substance Designer? Substance designer can be a quite intimidating for beginner learners who haven’t used node-based graphs. Luckily, algorithmic has a great selection of free tutorials and guides which can be found online for free. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering Substance Designer: Worth the purchase, used both professionally and on personal projects. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Substance Designer solving and how is that benefiting you? Substance designer is very flexible and has endless possibility’s when building a library of materials that keeps both consistency in PBR values and quality of work. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Cesar M.](/assets/transparent-ad5be28fbcd25b7b08d2cebe1d957125437fb5407d75ee717965ad22c8808791.gif "Cesar M.") CM Cesar M. Environment Texture Artist Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) 1/18/2021 "Anything is possible!" 4.5/5 What do you like best about Substance Designer? Having this procedural nodes workflow with Substance Designer has become a game changer in my texturing pipeline. You really can do whatever it's what you need to do. Everything it's endless inside Substance Designer. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Substance Designer? Might get a little time to understand the node workflow but once you get it, you can literally do whatever you want. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Substance Designer solving and how is that benefiting you? Creating seamless textures with certain art driven look it's why selected Substance Designer as our first software to tackle this tasks. The benefits are that we can export .sbar files and polish or edit them directly on Substance Painter or in Maya. That's a game changer. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Validated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ![Verified User in Computer Games](/assets/icons/anonymous-avatar-purple-4ae1032bdb50ee5682003170c8184aee790d25958bd397abbd384ba52c596a7b.svg "Verified User in Computer Games") UC Verified User in Computer Games Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) 1/18/2021 "Intuitive and very powerful tool to create procedural content" 5/5 What do you like best about Substance Designer? Very simple and intuitive tool, easy to use and very flexible. Process is very fast and great preview PBR viewport Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What do you dislike about Substance Designer? Adding nodes is sometimes a bit confusing since you can't always see the nodes in the browser but only in the quick menu, would be nice to have a simpler way to quickly add nodes (similar to the visualt scripting features of Unreal Engine 4) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Recommendations to others considering Substance Designer: Have a look at the doc pages as soon as you're not sure how to use a feature https://docs.substance3d.com/sddoc/substance-designer-102400008.html Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. What problems is Substance Designer solving and how is that benefiting you? Create SDF (Signed Distance Field) textures out of manually baked textures from Phtoshop Review collected by and hosted on G2.com. Show More Current UserValidated ReviewerIncentivizedSource: G2 invite ## Questions about Substance Designer? Ask real users or explore answers from the community Get practical answers, real workflows, and honest pros and cons from the G2 community or share your insights. [ Ask about Substance Designer ](https://www.g2.com/products/substance-designer/discussions/new) GU Guest User What is Substance Designer used for? 0 Upvotes 0 [ Join the conversation ](https://www.g2.com/discussions/substance-designer-what-is-substance-designer-used-for) [ View all Discussions ](https://www.g2.com/products/substance-designer/discuss) ##### Pricing Pricing details for this product isn’t currently available. Visit the vendor’s website to learn more. [ View More Pricing Information ](https://www.g2.com/products/substance-designer/pricing) Substance Designer Comparisons ![Product Avatar Image](https://images.g2crowd.com/uploads/product/image/small_square/small_square_6112c138e20f80a02a073469ac6e865c/blender.gif "Product Avatar Image") Blender 4.6/5(319) [ Compare Now ](https://www.g2.com/compare/blender-vs-substance-designer) ![Product Avatar Image](https://images.g2crowd.com/uploads/product/image/small_square/small_square_a5f997e9293e492840a3e9596a8c566b/keyshot.png "Product Avatar Image") KeyShot 4.5/5(182) [ Compare Now ](https://www.g2.com/compare/keyshot-vs-substance-designer) ![Product Avatar Image](https://images.g2crowd.com/uploads/product/image/small_square/small_square_4c780658e809bc5049c36f652e511ea4/cinema-4d.jpg "Product Avatar Image") Cinema 4D 4.6/5(137) [ Compare Now ](https://www.g2.com/compare/cinema-4d-vs-substance-designer) ##### ##### Substance Designer Features Design Brush Variety Effects Move Render Views Store & Manage Pipeline Controls Template library [ View More Features ](https://www.g2.com/products/substance-designer/features) ##### Categories on G2 [3D Modeling](https://www.g2.com/categories/3d-modeling)[3D Rendering](https://www.g2.com/categories/3d-rendering) ##### Explore More [What is the best encryption software for securing sensitive files without degrading user workflow speed?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-the-best-encryption-software-for-securing-sensitive-files-without-degrading-user-workflow-speed)[What's the best CPQ software with custom pricing features](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-s-the-best-cpq-software-with-custom-pricing-features)[Top tools for optimizing cloud spend](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-are-the-top-tools-for-optimizing-cloud-spend) [Best compensation planning software for growing companies](https://www.g2.com/discussions/best-compensation-planning-software-for-growing-companies)[Which aviation compliance monitoring platforms deliver user-friendly interfaces despite complex safety management features?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/which-aviation-compliance-monitoring-platforms-deliver-user-friendly-interfaces-despite-complex-safety-management-features)[Pros and Cons Details](https://www.g2.com/products/substance-designer/reviews?qs=pros-and-cons) [Show MoreShow Less](javascript:void(0);)