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Comment by Vanderson | Hacker News Reader

I won't be buying any Adobe products any more. From their extremely high prices, to forced subscriptions/cloud only products to their terrible security track record.

Thankfully there are now many cheaper and better alternatives to buy from.

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Whenever people say this I ask about After Effects. I have yet to find a FOSS or cheaper substitute. Many people have suggestions for Premiere Pro replacements, but not After Effects.

Hands down, Blender. See Ian Hubert’s channel[0] for samples of what can be achieved with Blender by a tiny team.

His examples tend to be specific to VFX, but Blender is quite general-purpose as far as motion design goes with an NLE, support for the familiar “expressions” paradigm, and so on.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxD6H3ri8RI

Blender seconded.

I mean, can you code procedural FX with Python in After Effects? You can in Blender. And it's free.

2.90 is shockingly good.

Blender's video tools have been overlooked recently. Video work is limited.

I use Blender and Ian Hubert’s recent work is what got me into it. It’s an excellent tool when it comes to the kind of motion-tracked work he does (and which I hope to get into) but for quickly cutting together motion graphics I have not found it to be as handy.

Blackmagic Design Fusion (now part of Davinci resolve).

For really simple things you can also use Hitfilm Pro

There is also https://natrongithub.github.io/ but I haven't personally tried it

I really like Apple Motion, but that's also a commercial substitute. The $50 once-off price is very good, though

If you want to do 2D motion graphics, there is no real rival for After Effects (AE). A new motion and animation app called Cavalry recently launched but it's far too early to see if it can rival AE. It also uses an online subscription model (https://cavalry.scenegroup.co/).

Have you tried DaVinci Resolve? It's not FOSS, but it is a pro-level After Effects replacement with much more reasonable terms.

DaVinci Resolve feels more like a Nuke clone; it's production film compositing, not the compositing-and-animation mix that After Effects is.

You can do most things AE will do with a combination of Natron and Blender.

You can't replace the huge template and plugin ecosystem of AE. That's what really drives the adoption.

For simple 2d ui animations I use Flow instead of AE + bodymovin. I highly recommend it for simple stuff. https://createwithflow.com/

Very cool. Adobe stock has nearly doubled in the past 12 months and they've been on an upward trajectory for the past 5 years.

Once Adobe realized they're competing with piracy the same way the music industry was, oops, all of a sudden there are profits to be made from simply charging a fair price.

Who woulda thunk it.

Or rather, they are making money by never letting people own the stuff they buy and only renting it out.

They get more money out of us, for a lesser product, that we have even less control of.

$50-ish is a very small monthly price if you're making money using those apps.

I won't be "buying" any of their products anymore either...

I used Adobe products, almost all of them, for over 20 years and I felt so burned by their business model that I don't even want it for free at this point. Also, Fireworks was the best mockup tool they had and instead of improving/evolving it they killed it.

I was a beta tester for Fireworks for one version. It was a pure joy to work with. It was the best web design/interface design software for years.

And yes, another reason I have lost faith in Adobe as a company is them bailing on Fireworks. Maybe because it was a Macromedia product originally. It seems every Macromedia product has been abandoned/neglected by Adobe.

So given the subject at hand where is the cheaper and better alternatives to XD, with the same feature set?

XD is pretty much a flop in the market. Imagine a world where photoshop or Illustrator showed up late and were actually not very successful against competition. It’s a not-bad product, it’s just behind by one or two steps at things like plugins verses Sketch or Figma. Sure Figma isn’t native but it is very performant regardless and the portability of just piping a browser open anywhere is LOVED by clients.

Sketch is sketch. They invented this market and everything is basic a rip on it. Mac only, but that’s generally UX designers anyways.

It is very notable that XD is used by very few major companies. The industry leading firms overwhelmingly use Sketch or Figma or both.

That is very important in development or plugins. There is just so, much, more.

Macs designers are snowflakes on a world where Apple computers accounts for 10% of world market. Designers working on 90% of the rest of the world also need their tools.

Sketch did not invent anything, similar tools were already available on the 90's.

If industry you mean Web designers using Macs around Silicon Valley coffee shops then maybe you're right.

Having freelanced, contracted and worked at graphic design studios, ad agencies, font foundries, charities, finance companies, publishing companies and in government in the UK, I can safely say I've never seen any design departments use Windows as standard. None of these were in Silicon Valley and I've never worked in a coffee shop. This is also coming from someone who was almost religiously anti-Apple for many years.

You can certainly do good design on Windows, but there's no chance 90% of professional UI designers here are using Windows. And for user interface design Sketch is absolutelythe standard these days. I'd love to hear what similar tools were available in the 90s.

Easy, look beyond tier 1 countries like UK and US.

As for the 90's examples, I am a bit far away from my Computer Shopper UK edition to go dig out names.

"Sketch did not invent anything, similar tools were already available on the 90's."

This is like saying Facebook didn't invent anything because it came after Friendster.

Indeed, and after Hi5.

Affinity Designer is cross-platform (Mac and Windows) and is cheaper than Adobe (and not based on an online subscription) but it's not focused wholly on UI design. It doesn't match XD feature-by-feature but it can be used for UI app design. It has no prototyping features and is unlikely to have such a feature in the future.

It does have features like symbols that are essential for any UI design app (a symbol is a visual component that can be repeated throughout a design; editing one instance updates all instances).

However, the Affinity Designer audience skews more towards illustration and my impression is it isn't used as much for UI design even though it has very capable tools to accomplish this. This means fewer tutorials and a small community using it solely for UI design.

Here's an example tutorial on creating a mobile app UI using Affinity Design that shows what can be done in the app:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgaRAkohwMU

Workarounds then. One can also use PowerPoint based design then.

I wouldn't say Affinity Designer is a workaround and it's far more capable and powerful (and less painful to use) than PowerPoint for UI design.

But...you can use PowerPoint or Keynote for creating simple clickable prototypes that can be very effective. For example: https://keynotopia.com/

What feature XD give you that not available on Sketch and Figma?

Adobe Fonts integration is useful for marketing pages. In Figma you only get Google fonts, but that's what everybody is using with site builders, Canva etc.

What's also nice is that you can create color themes in their Color/Kuler web app and then have those themes available to pick from within XD, or that you can open and work on images and scenes in Photoshop or Dimension (their V-Ray based 3D app which is cool for Hero scenes).

Best use both, Figma is better for web apps (XD doesn't even have inset shadows for forms), and XD is a bit better for landing and marketing pages, especially if you use their other tools.

Hi, Dylan (Figma CEO) here. You can use local fonts in Figma via a local daemon helper, our native app or by adding the font to a shared library on our Org Plan. (Assuming you have an appropriate license for the font.)

We're also hopeful browsers will expose an API for accessing a list of local fonts / font metrics with the user's permission. (It's a fingerprinting issue to expose this info without the user opting in which is why browsers haven't built something like this in past.) This is gaining traction on the Chrome team, which is really exciting! https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=535764...

https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/360039956894-Use-Lo...

https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/articles/360039956774-Manage...

Hey, thanks for replying. I'm aware of local fonts, but you first have to get them onto your system, which is additional friction. With CC I can just browse their catalog and enable or disable what I want.

Have you thought about integrations with popular (among typographers) services like Fontstand, or smaller ones like Fontown? This could be a gamer changer. I really want Figma to become a real alternative to Adobe, not only for UI stuff!

Adobe Fonts is near the top reason I currently am pushing people I work closely with away from Adobe.

Adobe's font control is simply dystopian. Many hours wasted debugging why a font was having issues _only_ in Adobe products, but not in other software (like Word).

Windows support as starter.

Figma supports Windows

As bloated electron app? No thanks.

Did you know Adobe Creative Cloud also an electron app? Not to mention dozen of other adobe system service will be installed whether you like it or not

We are talking about XD here.

That extra gift adobe give you when you install XD

Did you know that Visual Studio Code itself is a “bloated Electron app”?

I found Figma quite well-engineered, though I’ve only used it in its website incarnation.

Yes I know, and that is why I only use it on the projects I am obliged to, due to tooling requirements.

Same with me and Figma. I was sent Sketch files and I wanted to use them. Myself I prefer paper (or something basic like the Concepts app on iPad) when sketching UIs.

I think Figma and Sketch are often classed as competitors, and I know many prefer one of those.

I'm unsure how pricing compares.

Sketch is not multi-platform, so no real alternative.

Figma doesn't support the design capabilities for native app design, so no real alternative.

Where is then the alternative?

I have no idea what your priorities are, so it's hard to guess. XD doesn't support Linux either. Apparently https://icons8.com/lunacy runs on Windows and can import and export to Sketch.

Figma of course runs in a browser so works fine on all, and there is a Mobile UI toolkit for it: https://www.figma.com/templates/mobile-ui-kit/

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/04/sketch-figma-adobe-...

https://www.codeinwp.com/blog/figma-vs-sketch-vs-adobe-xd/

But maybe what you need is... Adobe XD? I personally quite like it.

Exactly, so this assertion that alternatives do exist doesn't make sense.

Alternatives do exist, just not for you specifically, perhaps.

So lets not generalize it works for everyone.

InVision? https://www.invisionapp.com/

Axure RP? https://www.axure.com/

Nice that it provides a list of how cheap they are and cover design for native applications on Windows.

I'm pretty much completely invested in the Adobe ecosystem. I don't find it expensive at all for how much I get out of it, but if there's a better option than Illustrator/Photoshop/InDesign I'd love to hear about it.

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