Today, the art of designing and drawing has moved online right from magazines and print advertisements to digital graphics and comics. To increase the speed and efficiency of this online art best drawing software was created.
Most of these drawing tools work much like graphic design software, allowing you to build vector illustrations, alter typography, manipulate images, and create digital art. Plus, many tools also work with your stylus so that you make the right strokes on laptops and iPads.
So, to make your decision a bit easier I have ranked and reviewed the best drawing tools based on ease of use, export quality, file formats, integrations, pricing, drawing features, capabilities, and more.
So let’s get started.
What Is The Best Drawing Software?
1. Adobe PhotoShop
Adobe Photoshop is the undisputed industry standard if you are looking for creating graphics and images. It’s most suitable for activities like animation, graphic design, digital painting, and photo editing.
As a part of Adobe Creative Cloud, it offers a powerful set of features to help you design 3D artwork, photographs, complex illustrations, mobile apps, and more.
Additionally, It’s also capable of painting reproduction and provides video editing tools, among others. In a nutshell, you can bring any idea to life with Adobe Photoshop. Finally, Some of its key features include the image warp feature, object selection tools, lens blur, and more.
Key Features of Adobe Photoshop
- Pulled String Mode – This particular feature helps you easily change the direction of painting in mid-stroke.
- Modern Presets – The tool offers intuitive presets like shapes, styles, layers, swatches, patterns, and new gradients.
- Adobe Sensei – It’s an in-built AI tool that helps you make precise and fast selections by drawing simple shapes around the relevant object.
- Enhanced Transform Warp – You get more options to divide your image or add control points with a customizable grid based on your needs.
Pros of Adobe Photoshop
- Offers an educational discount.
- Provides a 7-day free trial.
- It comes with specific three-stroke smoothing features.
- Adobe Photoshop provides integrations with numerous third-party applications like Skype, Twitter, and Facebook.
- It offers a curvature paint tool and can create 3D images.
- You can combine images to create animation, new scenes, and stamp-sized passport photographs using it.
- As a part of Adobe Creative Cloud, it’s one of the most popular tools for both Microsoft and Apple macOS.
Pricing Plans
Adobe Photoshop offers two pricing plans along with a photography plan.
- ‘Single app’ Plan – $20.99 per month
- ‘Creative cloud all apps’ Plan – $52.99 per month
- photography plan – $119.88 per year, paid annually.
2. CorelDRAW
CorelDRAW is a graphic design and drawing software widely used for both professional and personal purposes. Moreover, its vector-based designing USP can be used for designing brochures, cards, and logos. Corel has an ensemble of products that makes it highly relevant and functional in the various respective domains.
Additionally, it provides platform-specific versions to ensure the software can leverage the full potential of the hardware. Finally, these also offer a ton of customization features for efficient graphic design with Corel products.
Key Features of CorelDRAW
- LiveSketch Tool – This tool enables you to instantly use a pen-enabled device to give digital shape to your ideas.
- Extraordinary Precision – Provides you the facility to create highly detailed technical documentation with exact specifications.
- PowerTrace – You can create vector images directly from vector sources and save precious time with this AI-assisted feature.
Pros of CorelDRAW
- It offers a 15-day free trial period with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
- Adjustment of the design space is highly customizable and easy.
- CorelDRAW lets you perform efficient font filtering.
- The tool always provides immaculate color consistency, no matter which format you use to export your drawing poser. This helps brochures and logos stand out.
- It has prominent interactive sliders and an excellent Gaussian blur feature.
Pricing Plans
CorelDRAW comes with two pricing plans. The first is for the full version and costs $669. It also has an enterprise plan that comes at $198 annually.
3. Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator is an editing and vector drawing software used by millions of brand managers, billboard advertisers, book illustrators, video game makers, web designers, and creative artists.
Plus, It’s capable of producing designs with pixel-perfect accuracy. Additionally, graphic designers and professional artists can easily create stunning designs through easily accessible presets and templates.
In fact, it provides over 80 million in-built images, videos, graphics, and templates to make graphic design and online drawing easier.
Key Features of Adobe Illustrator
- CSS Extractor Tool – Use this feature to give shape to dynamic and highly customized websites.
- Extensive font styles – You can choose from over 16,000 different fonts to create the perfect drawing.
- Shape-builder Freeform Mode – You can create highly customized shapes and sizes of any drawing and take inspiration from other images.
Pros of Adobe Illustrator
- The tool offers 24*7 customer support in multiple languages.
- It offers a free trial period for the product.
- You can also perform “Perspective Drawing Enhancements.”
- Adobe Illustrator Draw has an iPhone app with loads of editing tools.
- You can create custom designs, dynamic symbols, matte paintings, and pixel-perfect designs.
- It comes with excellent vector graphics functionality and an SVG export option.
Pricing Plans
For individuals, Illustrator costs $20.99 per month for annual plans. There are separate plans for schools & universities, businesses, and students & teachers where it’s available as part of the creative cloud.
So now let’s cover the basics.
What Is Drawing Software?
Drawing software is a computer program that can help you view and create art on a computer. Paint is probably the first drawing software that most of us got acquainted with. These tools can either be highly advanced or simple.
However, there are far more excellent tools in the market now. Most of them are highly customizable, keeping in mind the variety and scope of the uses. Therefore, Drawing software helps to materialize your ideas digitally with the help of the mouse, keyboard, and screen. The added advantage is that these tools let you draw, delete, and redraw at the click of a button.
Some excellent examples of such tools are QCAD and AutoCAD, both widely used for electrical engineering designs, mechanical, civil, and other industries. Apart from students and engineers, these tools find extensive use by professionals in the domains of fine arts and creativity, T-shirt designing, tattoo artistry, and more.
What Should You Look For In Drawing Software?
You can use drawing programs in both a personal and a professional setup. Naturally, the required features in each case will differ. However, some features are central to any drawing software:
1. Multi-Platform Compatibility
A tool that is compatible with tablets, smartphones, laptops, and PC fosters real-time collaboration and improves accessibility for businesses. That’s why it’s important to choose a drawing tool that offers multi-platform compatibility.
2. Third-party Integrations
You should easily be able to export and import to and from applications like PowerPoint and Word. Therefore, extensive third-party integration is an essential feature of drawing tools.
3. Color Consistency
Color consistency can vary on the digital platform, just like on canvas or paper. You might notice a change between the brightness levels across formats like EPS, PDF, and JPEG. Here, CorelDRAW is an excellent example to keep color consistency.
4. Holistic Toolsets
The basic drawing software has features like lines & shapes, paintbrushes, erasers, markers, painters, a drawing area, and more. Moreover, good drawing software should ideally have a wide range of colors in the palette. Additionally, you should be able to create animations and 3D effects.
5. Property Computation
The most important functionality in the industry is that the drawing tool should emulate real-world conditions correctly by performing accurate calculations. Such accuracy is especially helpful in the healthcare and engineering industries, among others.
6. Pattern Recognition
Make sure your software offers you to recreate your art. Plus, the ability to record all of your strokes and allied processes to repeat them in new drawings software will use.
Some tools now even offer sophisticated OCR programs that detect your paper drawings and convert them into digital art to edit in the software.
Best Drawing Software – Final Summary
This wraps up my list of the best drawing platforms you can use for your business this year. I will keep updating the list with other good drawing tools available on the market.
Ultimately, we all have different budgets and software requirements. So it’s safe to say that your choice of drawing software will vary compared to others.
If you are tight on budget you can go with an option like MyPaint or Adobe Express. If you want a well-rounded tool that allows graphic designs and animations, Adobe Photoshop is a great option.
Make sure to carefully evaluate your budget, requirements, and goals before making your final decision.
Which drawing software do you use? Let me know your feedback in the comments below.
More from Smashitbuck: Do refer to my other articles on learning management platforms, youtube shorts, and AI writing tools to read this year.
