While Adobe is regarded as the "golden" standard for the creative industry, the product does have downsides that are hard to overlook. Among them are end-of-subscription fines (illegal in many European countries), ever-increasing costs, the mandatory subscription model, and privacy concerns.
Over the coming weeks, we will publish a series of posts with mostly European and some FOSS (free and open-source software) alternatives to Adobe products. If they can replace apps like Illustrator and Photoshop depends very much on your workflow and usage of it. I, for one, cancelled my subscription with Adobe and am now making use of the alternatives you'll see posted here in the near future.
Today we're starting with a set of tools by Xara, which have their headquarters in Berlin and a development office in London. Xara offers products as one-time-purchase and a subscription version. This way it leaves the choice of what fits you best with the consumer rather than forcing their choice on you.
Xara's Designer Pro is a great replacement for Adobe Illustrator as well as InDesign. It handles both Vector and Layout like a pro, and is everything you'd expect to see in an application like this.
Xara Photo & Graphic designer is your go-to if you want to replace Adobe Photoshop. It is an advanced image editor which offers non-destructive photo editing, creative effects and bitmap tracing. Also, it has easy image enhancement and a magic erase function, plus of course all the usuals you'd expect from an image editor.