Affinity Designer

Affiniity Designer easily and immediately replaced my existing vector graphics program I was using before it (Illustrator). As such there was no major learning curve or wasted time switching over. Further, even though there is no subscription required, the software only continues to improve!

Even though it's not a major change from Illustrator, you do have to get used to a few things that are different. Not a big deal.

The interface is user-friendly, although there is definitely a learning curve coming from other vector design packages. I appreciate that there is a library of built-in shapes. When I'm trying to work through a design, I'd rather not have to draw a call-out or a cog or a heart. It's nice to be able to just pop them in. I also find that the basic text tool is friendlier than other packages.

There are some features that don't work as intended or are missing entirely, when compared against other vector design software. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to auto-trace a raster image, which would be helpful for my use.

I love that this is a one-time purchase software that is really cheap for small studios and freelancers. If you make any amount of money with design, there is no reason why you should not get Affinity Designer.
Blazingly fast, you can scroll, zoom, and create designs super quickly and smoothly.
I love the fact that you can use it for basic "Photoshop"y things as well.

The pathfinding options are clunky.
Lack of useful features like "blend tool", "shape builder tool"
Lack of basic features like a vector-based pattern fill.
Edge artifacts when exporting.

Coming from Illustrator, it's very easy to adapt to, just minor differences in some workflows, but mostly it's intuitive. It can open and edit Illustrator files if they are pdf compatible, even deal with complex things like knockout groups correctly. It's also has some great ideas that I was pleasantly surprised by that made the workflow better and faster. Affinity devs listen to user feedback and regularly update their apps, so any features that it lacks it will probably get soon.

Lack of a good font manager, it just takes the fonts you have installed in your OS. No Google fonts integration or anything like Adobe Fonts, so if you're missing fonts you have to manually find them online and (buy or) download them the old-fashioned way.

Some odd workflow choices, minor things that can slow you down. Like no native way to permanently reset the bounding box of an object after it has been rotated, they have a toggle that works for 1 operation and switches back to the (skewed or rotated) original. The align UI and the order of actions to chose what to align to what is strange and can waste time. Other minor things like that that I ran into, but all in all it works well and gets the job done.

This is a fantastic alternative to Adobe's Illustrator, especially at Affinity's pricepoint. To be fair, we're not a design agency first, we make websites and do marketing primarily. However, when we do want to work with vector graphics, Affinity Designer matches up almost 1:1 with Adobe Illustrator. The real pro is the one-time fee of $50 instead of a full adobe suite subscription. This allows our small team to effectively open, edit, and export vector graphics, without having a several hundred dollars per month bill to foot. For small teams, this is a huge win. I'd imagine some experienced designers will scoff that a few of their old shortcuts don't work, but all in all, the interface and function almost mirrors Adobe's for a fraction of the cost. We also use their photo editing software too, which replaces Photoshop.

Some of the terminology and keyboard shortcuts made the onboarding slightly more difficult for our long-time Adobe Illustrator users, but they've adopted nicely over time. There's always growing pains when you switch tools, but there are many more features that do match up 1:1 that this was a no brainer for our company.