Xara Designer Pro X vs Adobe Photoshop: Which is a better fit?

Soma: Hey, my name is Soma. I'm a self-employed graphic designer and print specialist using Xara Designer for 20 years, and I'm giving a five-star rating to that. I have tried many other applications like QuarkXPress in the early 2000s and Adobe, Photoshop, Illustrator and these sort of things, Corel, for example. But I found Xara Designer is the most straightforward and most simply to use software at all. I have chosen Xara because it's a vector graphic software that has many, many features, and it's not just one specific area, what it works for. For example, Pantone coloring, vector graphic design, website design, print production. It's not so difficult because I was using it as an individual person before just for hobby, and when I started my company, I just started using it like every day before, so it was absolutely easy. I was proficient at the software when I started to use it in my company, when I immigrated it. If I was start a company again, I would consider Xara Designer Pro because it's really, really straightforward. The user interface is extremely simple. It's definitely not crowded. Very easy to catch up with all the features of the software, so you can find everything at the first glance on the screen. The design handles of the objects are really, really, really simple, so you don't need to look for anything. You get used to it in a few minutes just to start to use it.

Onome D.: My name is Onome. I am an artist and facilitator and a solopreneur, and I would give Adobe Photoshop a four. Prior to Adobe Photoshop, I was using this web-based graphic design tool. I think it was called GIMP. So it's pretty old school, not user-friendly at all. So as soon as I had the opportunity to start using Adobe Photoshop, I jumped right into it. I chose Adobe Photoshop because it was the most straightforward, comprehensive graphic design program that I knew about at the time that really did everything that I needed it to do and so much more. It was actually a very overwhelming software. I only needed maybe 10% of the capacity of what it could do, but that 10% was everything I needed that I couldn't find in other... I'll find a little bit here in this one program, a little bit this other. Adobe Photoshop was the one software I found that had all the different capacities and make collages and build posters and flyers, like those kinds of things. So I will say that Adobe Photoshop has a very simple learning curve as far as figuring out the basics relatively quickly, how to put an image together and manipulate the colors and the texture. But it has this steep learning curve when it comes to really diving into building a polished visual presence. So that was where I would encounter more frustration. But when it came to being able to jump right in and get immediate projects done fairly quickly, that was where my experience with Adobe Photoshop really shined. So the biggest advice I would give for somebody looking to bring Adobe Photoshop into your business is ask yourself how frequently and consistently do you need access to dependable comprehensive graphic design. Because if you use graphic design every day or multiple times a week, then it may be worth it for you to go with Adobe Photoshop in its current incarnation as a subscription model. Back when I used Adobe Photoshop, it was freestanding software, and I wasn't using it consistently and frequently enough for me to justify signing up for a subscription model. But if you're someone who you have an inspired idea 3 in the morning, you want to be able to access Adobe Photoshop to implement it right then and there, and you know that that will come up for you often, or if you have team members who want to continually and consistently tweak their designs, then it'd be worth it for you to get the subscription.