Is there a free version of Illustrator?

Not from Adobe. There is a seven-day trial, and then Illustrator is US$22.99 a month on the annual plan, US$34.99 if you want to cancel any month, or US$69.99 inside the full Creative Cloud bundle.

But the honest answer to the question changed in late 2025, and it did not come from Adobe. Affinity became a single application covering vector, pixel and layout work, and free for individuals. Not a limited tier. The professional app.

That is the most consequential thing to happen in this category in years, and most published round-ups still quote Affinity’s old one-off price.

Illustrator alternatives compared

Cheapest paid tier and what the free tier really allows, checked against each vendor’s own page on 6 September 2026.

What you lose, honestly

Nobody switching should be surprised later, so here is the real list.

The .ai file itself. No other application opens a native Illustrator file with full fidelity. What does move is PDF and SVG. If you save your Illustrator files as PDF-compatible, most tools here will open them with paths and text intact. Effects, appearance stacks and some type features will not survive.

The rest of the suite. Dynamic linking into After Effects and InDesign has no equivalent. If a job passes through three Adobe apps, leaving one of them costs more time than the subscription saves.

Client and printer expectations. Some print shops still ask for .ai. Most accept PDF/X, which every tool here exports. Ask before you assume either way.

Plugins and scripts. If your workflow depends on a specific Illustrator plugin, check for an equivalent first. This is the single most common reason a switch gets reversed.

Think in file formats, not features

The most useful habit when leaving any Adobe app is to stop thinking about which tool owns your work and start thinking about which format does.

SVG is a W3C open standard. It is text, it is versionable in git, every browser renders it, and every tool on this page reads and writes it. Inkscape and Boxy SVG use it as their native document, which means there is nothing to convert and nothing to lose.

PDF plays the same role for print. If your masters are SVG for screen and PDF/X for print, the application you use becomes a preference rather than a dependency. That is worth more than any feature comparison.

Which one for which job

General illustration and branding. Affinity. It is free, professional, and covers the whole job in one document.

Icons, UI assets and anything for the web. Inkscape or Boxy SVG, because the file you save is the file the browser renders.

Signage, apparel, engraving and cutting machines. CorelDRAW. This is its territory and the tool support around it is not matched elsewhere.

Drawing on an iPad. Linearity Curve, or Affinity on iPad if you want the same document on the desktop afterwards.

How we test and price these tools

Every price here was read from the vendor’s own pricing page in a browser on 6 September 2026, not copied from another round-up. That is how we caught that Affinity is now free, which most published lists have not updated.

For creative software we always state whether a licence is a subscription or a one-time purchase, and what a perpetual licence stops receiving. We compare the total over three years rather than the monthly figure, because that is the horizon on which owning beats renting.

File compatibility is tested rather than assumed: we check what actually survives a PDF or SVG round trip, since that is what decides whether a switch is realistic. No vendor pays for a place on this list.