WE COMPARE TONS OF STUFF SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO!
Vector drawing apps
Whether for works of art, accurate diagrams or informative charts, Michael Reed finds that each of these five applications has its strengths.
Roundup
Inkscape 1.2.1 Krita 5.1.1 Ipe 7.2.26 Xfig 3.2.8a LibreOffice Draw 7.3.6
Michael Reed never cuts corners, but he sometimes likes them rounded with a drop shadow.
HOW WE TESTED…
We started by installing all five applications onto the latest OpenSUSE desktop. Given the nature of a drawing workflow, we decided to stick with stable versions of each application. The only application that threw up any problems was Ipe, which wasn’t in the distribution repository for SUSE. In the end, we used an RPM file from the website, but we had to force the installation due to dependency problems. Beyond that, we didn’t encounter any notable problems with obtaining the latest versions of the apps.
By the same token, we didn’t come across any noticeable performance problems when we loaded some quite complicated drawings into each program.
We put the software through its paces by attempting to replicate some of the same procedures in each application. When we got stuck, we hit the documentation, online tutorials and the forums. It’s no good having a killer feature if it’s difficult to use or there is no indication that it exists.