Review by Erich Maria Remarque

One huge issue with Adobe products (which I equate to Adobe shooting themselves in the foot), is their change from perpetual licenses to a subscription-only licensing model. This basically means that you can end up paying thousands of dollars in the long run to Adobe, only to have usage rights to your software suddenly removed when you stop paying the monthly fee.

Thankfully, Corel has not gone that horrible route yet. So if you’re an experienced Adobe Illustrator user, and hate Adobe’s new licensing mode, you might want to consider corel.

Basically you can set some interface elements to match that of Adobe Illustrator. This makes it easy to use when coming from Adobe’s side to Corel. Now even though this might make it easy for people to switch over, it doesn’t mean that it looks EXACTLY like Illustrator. The high level layout looks similar, but the design and certain deeper elements are obviously different. For example, one major issue I have is with the keyboard shortcuts. Illustrator keyboard shortcuts mean other things in CorelDRAW.

In any case, after using the software for a few days I got used to the interface and found it very intuitive to use.

Overall, I think this is a great high end vector graphic software, and an excellent alternative to Illustrator (actually a better one, when you consider the horrible Adobe DRM).