2D Graphic Design Software

Adobe Illustrator can be a little difficult for beginners, and some advanced tools have a steep learning curve. It can also use a lot of system resources when working with large and complex files. Another limitation is that it is not ideal for creating realistic photo-based mockups, so I often need to use Adobe Photoshop for more advanced and realistic mockup designs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Adobe Illustrator helps me create professional logos, vector graphics, and brand identities with precision and flexibility. It allows me to create scalable designs that maintain high quality at any size, which is essential for branding, printing, packaging, and marketing materials. This saves me time and helps me deliver clean, professional, and high-quality designs to my clients. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

While Lucid is great for creating and collaborating on process maps, managing large volumes of content across multiple teams can require additional governance and oversight. Without clear ownership and standards, it's easy for documentation to become duplicated or outdated over time. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Lucid is helping solve the challenge of capturing, maintaining, and improving business processes in a collaborative way. It reduces confusion, improves transparency, and ensures everyone is working from a single source of truth by providing a centralized platform for process mapping, stakeholder review, and approval workflows. For me, this means better alignment across teams, faster process updates, and stronger governance over business processes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Large boards can become harder to navigate as the number of diagrams, annotations, and connected elements grows, and performance can occasionally feel less responsive when working with dense canvases. I would also like more flexible options for organizing related boards into a clear hierarchy, along with broader access to advanced capabilities without requiring a plan upgrade. These improvements would make it easier to maintain technical documentation as projects expand. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Miro helps address the challenge of communicating system behavior and service dependencies through scattered notes or disconnected diagrams. For order and payment workflows, I can map the API gateway, checkout service, inventory and pricing dependencies, payment gateway, and downstream event handling in one visual reference. I can also document the critical checkout sequence and observability considerations alongside the architecture, making it easier to discuss failure points, idempotency, and service interactions during technical reviews. This creates a more consistent reference for architecture discussions and helps keep implementation details and system-level decisions aligned. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Not really a major issue, but there isn’t an option to have the canvas "pop out" into a separate window. You’re confined to working within the program. I’d really like a feature like that, since I usually use my tablet as the painting area while keeping the rest of the interface on my main screen. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's solving the issue of not being able to paint traditionally due to either lack of physical materials, accessibility, etc. It provides a good medium to paint, while providing the convenience of simulating realistic traditional painting. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recraft excels at vector generation, brand consistency, and text rendering, but its operational instability, credit model, and support infrastructure create genuine professional risk. If you rely on it for deadline-driven client work, it’s wise to keep backup tools on hand and document any service failures as they occur. The platform’s technical capabilities are impressive when everything is functioning properly, yet the gap between benchmark performance and day-to-day reliability still feels significant. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recraft’s brand consistency and multilingual capabilities directly support how I position myself as a culturally fluent content creator. Being able to produce polished, consistent visuals quickly helps me prototype podcast concepts, pitch subscription channel ideas, and maintain academic-level visual standards without hiring a designer. That keeps my bootstrapped ventures lean while still looking established. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The only dislike I have about Procreate is the fact that if I delete the app and reinstall it all my work will be gone forever. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Procreate has given me an elaborate, easy to use digital sketchbook. It feels like a trustworthy, highly functional app that I can rely on, and one I’ve stayed loyal to. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Nothing major. Early on, there were some limitations with schema filtering and support for larger tables, but the team has been super responsive and shipped fixes quickly. One thing still on our wishlist is better versioning support, though the current setup already works well for most of our needs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It helps us quickly generate and share clear ER diagrams with the team, which is especially useful during onboarding and planning changes. Before ChartDB, we’d waste time explaining schemas manually or digging through SQL. Now we just share a link to the diagram, way faster and easier for everyone to understand what’s going on. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

File compatibility can sometimes require a few extra adjustments when enhancing projects with clients or collaborators who use Adobe software. I would like clearer guidance on export settings and color management. Sometimes the exported file doesn't perfectly match what I see in the application in terms of colors and quality. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Affinity Designer lets me handle vector, raster, and layout design tasks efficiently in one app, maintaining smooth workflows without subscription fees. It offers professional tools and runs smoothly on average laptops, making it cost-effective and reliable for complex designs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Well, I think the fluency in some aspects of using the tools could be improved a little, but I understand, since it's a tool that they are iterating, it will improve over time. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

SVGator makes animation easy for me without having to rely on other professionals or tools, saving me time by not needing many tutorials. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The tool offers many options, so first time users may spend a few minutes finding the right settings. Though the tutorials and live chat make that ramp up quick. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Maptive addresses the problem of turning raw location data into actionable visual maps quickly.

It simplifies territory management, sales tracking, and service area visualization for my businesses. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Honestly, there’s very little I dislike. As with most creative software, there can be a bit of a learning curve when you’re first exploring all the features, but the newer updates and the improved interface have made everything feel much smoother and easier to navigate overall. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

SketchWow solves the challenge of creating engaging, professional-looking visuals quickly, without requiring advanced graphic design skills or expensive software. It lets me produce presentations, diagrams, charts, and other visual content much faster, which saves me time and helps my work look more polished and professional overall. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

File Sharing Friction: While CorelDRAW can import and export .ai and .eps files, complex gradients, proprietary effects, and text formatting often break or shift during the conversion.

Collaborative Bottlenecks: If you are collaborating with agencies, external marketing teams, or clients who expect native Illustrator files, the back-and-forth conversion process can quickly become a headache. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The Scale Problem: Eliminating Math and Resizing Headaches

The Problem: Many standard vector illustration tools have a hard limit on canvas size. If you need to design something massive—like a large billboard, storefront signage, or architectural-scale graphics—you are forced to work in a 1:10 scale or do complex math to ensure your ratios remain correct when sent to production. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It feels a bit limited once work gets bigger. For small diagrams it’s perfect, but for larger planning or brainstorming sessions, the canvas feels restrictive.

It’s more of a diagram tool than a full collaboration space. When discussions go beyond flows into planning, tracking, or workshops, we had to use other tools.

Template options are also fewer compared to some other platforms, so sometimes we had to build layouts from scratch.

Basically great for simple visuals, but not ideal for large cross-team collaboration. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It helps turn discussions into visuals quickly. When we talk about processes or system flows, people often understand differently. Drawing it out in Whimsical clears things up fast.

I use it during planning talks to map steps and decisions. It helps the team see the full picture instead of just hearing it.

It’s also helpful for sharing knowledge. A diagram is easier for someone new to understand than reading long notes.

So the main benefit is clarity and saving time on explanations. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

As a free user, you cannot really modify the templates. Without a pro account, you cannot really do anything. The price. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I use Snappa to easily create images and collages. It simplifies making posts and ads for companies with its existing templates. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What could be improved is, like, the different brush sizes and, like, the usability, you know, because, like, I have to select from the brush sizes, and, like, that could have been more intuitive. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I use Sketchbook because it integrates well with my tablet and mobile devices, allowing for more creativity compared to other software. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Personally, I would say sometimes it was a bit hard to select and navigate b/w the shapes you need. I would say it would be made better if this side bar for the shapes could be made a bit smaller so it will be easier to select all the items needed. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I would say the biggest problem that really is trying to solve is that it is providing a tool that is online and helping people make amazing flowcharts and diagrams which can really help out when you are trying to explain something and diagrams are the best way to do them. Personally, I made some flowcharts for my presentation and they looked really nice and I was able to explain much better. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's honestly hard to find any negative points because it delivers exactly what it promises. If I had to suggest an improvement, I would love to see more advanced automation capabilities in the future, such as webhooks or an open API. Being able to connect and export designs directly to other tools in our tech stack would streamline our processes even further. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Plasfy eliminates the classic bottleneck in day-to-day graphic design production. It allows us to maintain agility in our marketing campaigns and standardize visual content creation without sacrificing professional quality. By centralizing our design workflow in such a fast, cloud-based platform, we save hours every week and improve visual consistency across all our projects and web deployments. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Flowmapp is missing some functionality that would benefit our team, but customer service has been very receptive to our feature requests. The team is invested in continuous improvement, so any bugs are likely to be resolved in short order. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Flowmapp helps to facilitate the handoff from website scoping and planning to high-fidelity design and component-based development. It improves our team and client communication, consolidates our tech stack, and allows our team to work in a more agile way. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Adobe Capture struggles with inconsistent vector quality when capturing complex, textured client artwork. For instance, busy patterned packaging often yields jagged shapes requiring manual cleanup from our designers. There is also no straightforward way to batch-process multiple reference photos. With no dedicated IT, this extra editing eats into our schedule when we are rushing to finalize brand asset deliverables for tight client deadlines. Poor vector output forces our designers to manually retouch shapes pulled from intricate client packaging samples. On a recent brand kit project, hours were spent smoothing distorted edges, eating into time reserved for other deliverables. Lacking batch import, we have to process reference images one-by-one. With no internal IT support, this overhead creates pressure when we race to hit strict client creative hand-off deadlines. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Adobe Capture eliminates tedious manual recreation of brand elements, saving our designers hours by converting real-world references into vector assets. With seamless Creative Cloud sync, both in-house and freelance artists access shared assets easily, keeping us aligned and on schedule without an IT team. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The main downside is the cost structure when working in teams. The licensing per user can add up quickly, especially when you need multiple collaborators accessing shared libraries and projects.

Additionally, the storage limits for shared workspaces can feel restrictive over time, particularly when managing multiple brand systems and large design files. It’s manageable, but something to consider as your team and project volume grow. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sketch helps us solve the problem of inconsistency when building brand systems. Instead of creating isolated design pieces, we can structure everything into components and shared libraries, which ensures that typography, colors, and visual elements stay aligned across all assets.

It also reduces rework significantly. When something changes in the system, we can update it once and see it reflected everywhere, which saves time and keeps projects organized.

Overall, it allows us to move from designing individual pieces to building scalable visual systems, making our work more efficient, consistent, and easier to manage as projects grow. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.