Adobe Illustrator Review 2025: The Gold Standard of Vector Design

The Creative Industry in 2025: More Options, Harder Choices

The vector design market looks nothing like it did five years ago. Figma ate UI/UX design. Canva convinced half the world they do not need a designer at all. Affinity Designer proved you can get 85% of Illustrator's power for a one-time seventy dollar payment. And browser-based tools like Linearity Curve keep lowering the floor for beginners.

So why does Adobe Illustrator, a piece of software that first shipped on floppy disks in 1987, still command the loyalty of professional designers worldwide? Why does it still sit on every serious agency's machines?

I spent four weeks putting the 2025 version (v29) through real client work: a startup brand identity, an icon set for a mobile app, packaging art for a consumer product, editorial illustrations for a magazine, and technical diagrams for documentation. I tested on Mac, Windows, iPad, and the new web beta. The answer, in my experience, is that Illustrator earns its place not through any single feature but through the accumulated depth of thirty-eight years of professional refinement that no competitor has fully matched. But whether that depth is worth the subscription price depends entirely on what kind of creator you are.

For Illustrators and Editorial Artists

If you draw for a living -- editorial work, book covers, character design, poster art -- Illustrator gives you tools nobody else offers. The Pen tool is still the best path-editing instrument ever built. Yes, it takes weeks to learn. Yes, the Curvature tool provides a gentler alternative. But once you have muscle memory for the Pen tool, nothing else feels as precise.

The gradient mesh capability is where Illustrator really separates from the pack. You can apply a grid of color-control points to any object and create photorealistic shading that is technically still vector art -- infinitely scalable, resolution-independent. The results can be stunning, the kind of hyperrealistic vector illustration that makes people ask if it is a photograph. Affinity Designer has nothing equivalent. Figma does not even try. Freeform gradients offer a simpler version of the same idea for softer effects, backgrounds, and abstract pieces.

The 2025 Firefly AI integration is worth discussing honestly. Text to Vector Graphic lets you type a description -- "minimalist line drawing of a mountain landscape" or "geometric fox logo in art deco style" -- and get editable vector paths back. Not raster. Not a flat image. Actual anchor points you can push around. In my testing, about 60% of the results were usable starting points. The other 40% needed so much rework you might as well start from scratch. Generative Recolor is better -- describe a color mood and it recolors your entire illustration. Great for exploring variations during brand work.

Neither feature replaces skilled illustration. But they speed up the messy early phase of any project where you are just throwing ideas at the wall. And the fact that outputs are native vectors, not flat images pasted onto a canvas, makes them actually useful in a production workflow.

For Brand Designers and Identity Work

Brand identity is probably Illustrator's strongest use case in 2025, and it is the area where alternatives fall shortest.

A logo needs to work at every size. Favicon to billboard. Business card to vehicle wrap. That means vector, period. And not just any vector tool -- you need one with typography that actually handles the details. Illustrator's type engine is still the only one in its class. Full OpenType feature access including stylistic alternates, swashes, ligatures, and contextual alternates, all through a visual interface. Variable font support with smooth sliders for weight, width, and custom axes. Type on a path with fine-grained spacing controls. The Touch Type tool for adjusting individual characters in a logotype. No competing vector tool matches this depth.

Multi-artboard support is another big deal for brand work. I can put the primary logo, secondary mark, favicon, social media profiles, business card, letterhead, and brand guidelines all in a single .ai file, each on its own artboard at the right dimensions. Up to 1,000 artboards per document. Try doing that in Figma or Affinity without the experience feeling cramped.

And then there is print production. CMYK color management, Pantone spot colors, overprint preview, bleed and trim marks, PDF/X export. If your brand work touches physical media -- and most serious brand work does -- you need these features. Figma does not have them. Canva does not have them. Affinity Designer has some of them but not the full depth.

For Hobbyists and Casual Creators

Here is where I will be blunt. If you are making social media graphics, simple logos for a side project, or learning vector basics, Illustrator is overkill. The learning curve alone will eat weeks of your time for capabilities you may never use.

Affinity Designer at $70 one-time covers 80-90% of what Illustrator does, runs faster on complex files, and has a unique hybrid vector-raster mode that is genuinely useful. Its Pen tool is good. Its shape tools are good. It exports cleanly. For someone who does not need gradient mesh, advanced typography, or print production tools, it is the smarter buy.

Canva is the right choice if you just need something that looks decent in fifteen minutes.

And Inkscape -- free, open-source -- is perfectly fine for learning vector concepts and creating simple to moderate artwork. The interface is dated, performance is sluggish on complex files, and professional features are thin. But zero dollars is zero dollars, and for a student or hobbyist exploring whether they like vector design, it does the job.

The Shape Builder and Pathfinder Workflow

I want to spend a moment on Shape Builder because it is one of those features that does not sound exciting until you use it daily. You draw overlapping shapes -- circles, rectangles, whatever -- then drag across them to combine, subtract, or divide regions. It is the fastest way to construct logos, icons, and decorative elements from simple geometry.

During my icon design project, Shape Builder was the tool I reached for most. Building a complex pictogram from circles and lines in seconds, with the precision that only mathematical paths can give you. The Pathfinder panel adds ten boolean operations on top of that for when you need more control. Live Paint fills regions defined by overlapping paths without requiring you to close shapes first, which is a godsend for illustration work.

Every competing tool has some version of boolean operations. But none match the speed and reliability of Illustrator's implementation. It is one of those things where years of engineering refinement show up as seconds saved, hundreds of times a day.

Image Trace: Bridging Hand-Drawn and Digital

If your workflow involves scanning hand-drawn sketches and converting them to clean vectors, Illustrator's Image Trace is the best in the business. Multiple presets for different source types -- high fidelity photo, sketched art, line art, silhouettes -- each with adjustable thresholds. I scanned hand-drawn illustrations and got clean, editable paths with minimal cleanup needed.

The high fidelity photo mode produces amazing results, though the files get huge because of the thousands of paths generated. For practical use, the sketched art and line art presets are the workhorses. No competitor matches this quality.

The Color and Gradient System

Illustrator's color tools go deeper than what you find in most vector editors. Beyond the standard color picker, you get the Color Guide panel, which generates harmonious color palettes based on color theory rules -- complementary, analogous, triadic, compound, and more. Pick a base color and the panel shows you coordinated options. For brand work, where color relationships need to be intentional and defensible to clients, this is a genuine time saver.

The Recolor Artwork feature deserves special attention. Select any complex illustration and Recolor lets you remap every color in the piece, either manually or using color group rules. I used this during a packaging project where the client wanted to see the same design in five different seasonal colorways. Instead of manually recoloring hundreds of individual objects, I could remap the entire palette in seconds and export each variation. With the Firefly-powered generative recolor option, you can even describe a mood -- "warm autumn tones" or "ocean and sand" -- and get results that are usable starting points. This single feature can save hours on projects that require color exploration.

The iPad Story

Illustrator on iPad is real Illustrator. The Pen tool is there. Bezier editing works. You get layers, artboards, type tools, and cloud syncing with the desktop version. For sketching on the go or working with an Apple Pencil on detailed illustration work, it is genuinely useful.

But. It still lacks full feature parity with the desktop. Some effects are missing. Complex documents can feel sluggish. The interface, while adapted for touch, sometimes feels cramped for precision work. It is a strong complement to the desktop app, not a replacement. Not yet.

Performance and File Management

Illustrator has gotten faster on modern hardware, particularly on Apple Silicon Macs where the native ARM build makes a noticeable difference. Opening files, applying live effects, and running complex operations like pattern expansion all feel snappier than they did even two years ago. GPU acceleration for canvas rendering means zooming and panning through dense illustrations stays smooth in most cases.

That said, Illustrator still struggles with documents that push beyond a certain complexity threshold. Files with thousands of gradient mesh points, heavy use of live effects like Gaussian blur and drop shadows, or documents with hundreds of embedded raster images can slow the application to a crawl. Saving large files takes noticeably longer than it should. And the autosave feature, while welcome, can cause brief freezes on complex documents. For artists who build dense, layered illustrations, the workflow tip is to use layers judiciously, flatten effects when you are done editing them, and break large projects across multiple artboards rather than cramming everything into a single canvas.

Pricing: The Subscription Elephant in the Room

Illustrator is subscription-only. No perpetual license. This is the single most divisive aspect of the product and has been for years.

The single app plan runs $22.99/month. Over three years that is $827 -- enough to buy Affinity Designer three times over at $70 each. If you are a working professional whose income depends on Illustrator, $23/month is a rounding error in your business expenses. You also get Adobe Fonts (a massive type library), 100GB cloud storage, and Firefly AI credits included.

The All Apps Creative Cloud bundle at $59.99/month ($720/year) is better value if you also use Photoshop, InDesign, or Premiere. Students get the full bundle at $19.99/month for the first year, which is genuinely excellent. There is a 7-day free trial.

But the vendor lock-in is real. Your .ai files are only fully editable in Illustrator. Cancel your subscription and you lose access to your working files in their native format. You can export to SVG, PDF, or EPS before canceling, but the native editing capability disappears when the payments stop. This frustrates a lot of people. Reasonably so.

Affinity Designer at $70 one-time with no ongoing costs is the obvious alternative for anyone uncomfortable with that arrangement. The Business/Teams tier at $37.99/user/month is steep. Enterprise pricing is custom.

What It Gets Right, What It Gets Wrong

The Verdict