CorelDRAW For Mac Alternatives: 8 Best Graphic Design Software For Mac

CorelDRAW is a powerful vector design application that was launched in 1989 but the last version that worked on Mac was CorelDRAW 11 back in 2001.

Corel then re-released CorelDRAW Graphics Suite for Mac again in March 2019 although it’s not cheap at $669 and there are definitely better options available.

The great news though is that there are plenty of excellent equivalents to CorelDRAW on Mac that are not only cheaper, but better in some cases as you’ll see below.

If you’re a professional artist or illustrator, most of them are perfect for using with these drawing tablets for Mac too.

You can also combine them with some of these amazing stock photo resources to create truly stunning, professional illustrations and material.

Here then is our list of alternatives to CorelDRAW on Mac which we think are the best graphic design software for Mac users in order of ranking.

Adobe is easily the biggest competitor to Corel when it comes to graphic design and Adobe Illustrator is way ahead of CorelDRAW nowadays when it comes to graphic design.

If you’re entitled to an educational discount, Adobe Illustrator is an absolute must right now as Adobe are currently offering 60% off the entire Adobe Creative Cloud suite.

That’s not just Illustrator you get – Creative Cloud includes 20 different apps including industry leading tools including Photoshop, Lightroom, Spark, Adobe XD, InDesign, Premiere Pro and Acrobat Pro.

So you’re basically getting 20 Adobe applications for the price of one.

Adobe Illustrator came out of the now discontinued Adobe Freehand program and has evolved into an incredibly powerful design tool that’s now the industry standard for graphic designers.

When it comes to working with vector graphics, Adobe Illustrator’s AI format is so widely used that it’s virtually essential when it comes to sharing and collaborating with other graphic design professionals.

Another big advantage over CorelDRAW is that Illustrator can even import CorelDRAW files – CorelDRAW can’t import Illustrator files though.

When it comes to designing logos, icons, typography and other complex illustrations, Adobe Illustrator produces truly outstanding results.

There’s an unparalleled choice of brushes and filters and layers – far more than you’ll probably ever need in fact – but it’s an example of how powerful and complete Illustrator is. From enormous advertising hoardings to tiny logos, Adobe Illustrator has templates for everything.

Compared to CorelDRAW, Illustrator can be tricky to get used to at first but if you take the time to learn all of the keyboard shortcuts that come with it, you can also significantly speed-up your workflow.

If you already use other Adobe products such as InDesign or Photoshop, then choosing Illustrator really makes sense as the workflow, interface and layout is immediately familiar.

All Adobe Creative Cloud products are integrated with each other making it easy to polish designs and enrich them in other software such as Photoshop or desktop publishing software on Mac like InDesign.

Finally, another big plus for Illustrator compared to CorelDRAW is that it also works on iPad. Although the app doesn’t offer quite as much power as the desktop version, Adobe Illustrator Draw is perfect for doodling and continuing sketches you’ve started on your Mac.

The main disadvantage of Adobe software is the subscription pricing model. However, this shouldn’t hold you back choosing Adobe Illustrator because the reality is, subscription based pricing is the way all software is going nowadays.

Even if Corel were to release CorelDRAW on macOS, the likelihood is that it will eventually move its software to a subscription model too.

There are also advantages to subscription based software such as smoother updates and no big upgrade costs when new versions are released.

On its own, Adobe Illustrator costs $20.99 per month for individuals and there are different deals for businesses.

If you’re a Student or Teacher however, you’re much better off taking advantage of the 60% off Creative Cloud suite offer as you get all 20 Creative Cloud apps included for $19.99.

As you can see below, this is a significant discount on the full price of Creative Cloud which usually costs $52.99 per month.

It’s cheaper if you pay for a full year up front but you can also choose to pay on a month-by-month basis so if you’re not happy, you can just cancel your subscription at any time.

If you’re a professional graphic designer, we strongly recommend adding a subscription to Adobe Stock which is the best stock photo site we’ve ever seen.

Adobe Stock is a huge repository of over 60 million very high-class images, videos, graphics and templates. This is not only time saving but saves hundreds of dollars that would otherwise be spent on licensing or sourcing of images for commercial use.

For a limited time you can get 10 images for free with a free trial of Adobe Stock.

You can download a free trial of Illustrator to see what you think for yourself.

You can also see a quick overview of how Illustrator compares with CorelDRAW below.

Adobe Illustrator CorelDRAW Works on a Mac Works on iPad Industry Standard for Vector Graphics Creative Cloud Integration Export Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) Export Adobe Illustrator (AI) Export Photoshop (PSD) Export PDF Export to CorelDRAW (CDR)

Visit Site

If you want something that can genuinely compare with CorelDRAW on Mac and more, you’ll be amazed at Illustrator can do.

In just a few years, Affinity Designer has rapidly become one of the best graphic design applications for Mac and won an Apple award for design in 2015. It’s easy to see why too with Adobe quality features and interface touches but without the price tag or learning curve.

Affinity Designer started life as DrawPlus by developers Serif but that’s now a legacy product and Affinity Designer has replaced it. It claims to be the “fastest, smoothest, most precise vector graphic design software available” and it’s hard to argue with that, even in the face of competition from Adobe and Corel.

Affinity Designer is incredibly fast working at an impressive 60fps, well designed, relatively easy to use but packs a serious design punch and offers as much as both Adobe Illustrator and CorelDRAW. Some of the nice touches in Affinity Designer include a 1,000,000 x zoom for precision drawing, support for Photoshop PSD import and export, customized tool palettes and layer support.

The nice thing about Affinity Designer is that the interface doesn’t feel a million miles away from Adobe Illustrator but it’s less intimidating, easier to get to grips with and allows you to do pretty much everything you can do in Illustrator.

For just $50, Affinity Designer is an incredibly professional design software for Mac without the Adobe subscription model. It’s not on the same level as Illustrator but it’s definitely suitable for those that are looking for a desktop app with CorelDRAW style features.

You can read more about it on the Affinity Designer site and see a full list of Affinity Designer features here.

There are two big attractions to Inkscape: it imports CorelDRAW files and it’s free. OK, the import tool isn’t perfect and you’ll have to do a certain amount of manual editing to correct it but try to find another design application out there that can not only import CorelDRAW files but doesn’t cost a cent.

Inkscape is surprisingly powerful for a free graphic design software and uses Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) – an open source XML based format that you can easily import and export into other graphic design programs. Among Inkscape’s many features are object creation, object manipulation, fill and stroke, text support, rendering and more.

Inkscape is regularly maintained by the open source community and is compatible with the latest versions of OS X including Sierra and El Capitan. On the downside, Inkscape is RGB only. You’ll also need to install XQuartz first in order to run Inkscape on Mac and then need to configure XQuartz correctly to ensure that Inkscape runs correctly on Mac.

Of course, Inkscape is nowhere near the same level as Adobe Illustrator but considering it’s completely free to use, Inkscape is a remarkably good alternative to CorelDRAW.

Corel Painter is available on both Mac and PC and while it’s not exactly the same as CorelDRAW, it’s a very good alternative if you want to stick with Corel products.

Corel Painter is closer to Photoshop than CorelDRAW and is aimed at those that want to create stunning digital art. Corel Painter is certainly more complex than CorelDRAW but if you’re a professional designer, the learning curve is no different to Adobe Illustrator.

However, if you’ve used other Corel products, you’ll be up and running considerably quicker than someone coming to Corel products for the first time and there are many Painter tutorial videos to get you started.

The only thing to be aware of with Painter is that it’s probably best when used on tablets with a stylus. You can easily use it on your Mac but to get really creative and create designs naturally, you get the best out of Corel Painter with a Wacom tablet.

Although there’s more in Corel Painter than you’ll probably ever need, you can extend it’s functionality with plugins too.

There’s really too much in Corel Painter to sum up in a few words but it’s about the closest thing Corel currently offer to the original Mac version of CorelDRAW.

Autodesk Graphic is by the creators of the hugely popular AutoCAD software. Autodesk Graphic started life as iDraw on iPad but Autodesk saw its potential after it was released on Mac and bought it to create Autodesk Graphic.

Autodesk Graphic is available for both Mac and iOS and has evolved into a very powerful vector drawing tool for an app that costs just $29.99. In fact in terms of bang for buck, you can’t really get much better than Autodesk Graphic.

Graphic can import and export to PSD, SVG, PDF and EPS files and has a fully featured Bezier Pen tool for creating custom shapes. There are also tons of brushes, layer styles and it’s optimized for OpenGL.

Graphic is similar to Affinity Designer although we prefer Affinity for its Adobe inspired interface and all round general ease of use.

However, for $29, you can’t go too far wrong even if you decide Graphic is not for you, it’s definitely worth trying.

Sketch is another increasingly popular alternative to CorelDRAW that’s very popular with UI designers. In fact Sketch is actually powerful enough to be a wireframe alternative to Visio on Mac.

Sketch is a very accomplished all round graphic design software for Mac that’s used by companies such as Google, Facebook and Apple.

Sketch is designed specifically for Mac so it looks amazing on macOS and produces professional results whether it’s icon design, web design or product design.

It’s definitely more of a design tool than a drawing tool like CorelDRAW but if you’re into UI and wireframe design, it’s unrivaled on Mac.

You can download a free trial of Sketch to try it for yourself.

If you don’t need something complex and shiny on your Mac and just want a free alternative to CorelDRAW on Mac, then take a look at OpenOffice Draw.

Draw is part of the excellent Office for Mac alternative OpenOffice and is a surprisingly accomplished drawing tool that doesn’t cost a cent.

It doesn’t have the features or polish of most of the other CorelDRAW Mac alternatives featured here but as a drawing tool, it allows you to do much of what you can accomplish in CorelDRAW.

Especially if you just want to draw org charts on Mac or business processes, OpenOffice Draw is ideal although for more advanced design such as dealing with layers and different paint brushes, it’s not really suitable.

However, there are useful tools such as a 3D object manipulator, smart connectors to create professional flowcharts on Mac and you can import images from most major file formats (but not SVG or Photoshop).

For a basic free alternative to CorelDRAW on Mac, OpenOffice is worth looking at although it’s nowhere near as powerful as Corel’s software.

EazyDraw has been around for many years on Mac – since OS X 10.2 Jaguar in fact – and there’s no denying it’s definitely a bit dated nowadays compared to recent competition such as Affinity Designer and Sketch.

However, it’s still a very complete drawing software and definitely a good alternative to CorelDRAW on Mac and one of the few that mow supports the Touch Bar on the latest MacBook Pro.

EazyDraw is more of an all round drawing application that’s suitable for everything from technical drawing to 3D logo design and creating floor plans on Mac.

EazyDraw offers some unusual but interesting purchase options too. You can try EazyDraw for free but it’s limited to 20 objects. However, a better option is to pay $20 for a trial license which allows you to use it with no limits for 9 months.

If you decide it’s the graphic design tool for Mac you’ve been looking for, you can deduct the $20 from the full purchase price of $95. Alternatively, you can even order USB Flash drive for $119.04 with EazyDraw installed that you can plug-in and run anywhere.

How To Install CorelDRAW On A Mac

If only the real thing will do for you, the good news is you can run CorelDRAW on a Mac. Parallels is a virtualization software which allows you to run Windows within macOS.

Nowadays, Parallels is extremely easy to set up and use and is definitely the best way to run Windows on Mac for free.

Although it’s not an optimum solution because it puts a lot of demand on your Mac’s resources, there are many Mac users that still use CorelDRAW on their Mac.

Is Corel Draw Available For Mac?

CorelDraw was discontinued by Corel way back in 2001 but CorelDraw Graphics Suite for Mac 2019 was re-released by Corel on March 12th 2019. However, it costs a whopping $669 so you’re much better off trying one of the alternatives featured here as most of them are considerably cheaper.

Why Did Corel Abandon CorelDRAW On Mac For So Long?

Confusingly, Corel has always offered various other Mac software such as CorelCAD, design app Corel Painter and popular archiving tool WinZip – but not CorelDRAW.

Corel’s CAD program CorelCAD for example is still available for Mac although it hasn’t been developed much and there are much better CAD applications for Mac on the market now anyway.

There are a few reasons why the company decided to ditch CorelDRAW on Mac until 2019.

The main one is because Corel decided that it simply wasn’t profitable enough to cater for the Mac market. The only reason is that Corel Painter still exists for Mac is that Corel originally bought it ready-made from another company and therefore the product was already up and running.

Creating a Mac version of CorelDRAW also means starting from scratch, employing a while new team of designers and engineers and then there’s the additional expense of supporting the app after it’s released to ensure it’s compatible with the latest versions of macOS.

The market of Mac users compared to the market of PC users is simply too small in Corel’s opinion to justify investment in a Mac version. Considering that most designers use a Mac as their design tool of choice, this is a real irony considering that CorelDRAW is one of the leading graphic design applications out there.

The other major reason is technical. CorelDRAW on Windows uses VBA/VSTA scripting which is a technology not even available on Mac with no realistic equivalent. As a result, macros would not work on the Mac version which would remove essential functionality from the Mac version of CorelDRAW.

However, the release of CorelDRAW Graphics Suite For Mac 2019 shows that you can never say never with Corel products.

Conclusion

As we’ve seen, there are plenty of excellent alternatives to CorelDRAW on Mac nowadays.

Adobe Illustrator still remains the best replacement for CorelDRAW on macOS. For students or teachers in particular, it’s really a no-brainer with 60% off all of Adobe’s products.

However, newcomers Affinity Designer and Sketch both provide some serious competition for Adobe both in price and functionality and are both standalone products with no subscription.

If you have any questions, problems or suggestions about the software featured here, let us know in the comments below.

Remember that if you just need to open a CorelDRAW file on Mac without editing it, you can with CDRViewer.