Vector Design Apps
Designer-facing vector tools for UI, illustration, and brand work.
The designer-side of the pipeline that feeds your UI Components, Icons, and OG Images. For canvas drawing in your app, see Whiteboards.
UI design (the Figma replacement question)
- ★ Penpot — the only fully open-source (MPL-2.0) UI design tool with parity to Figma in 2026: components, variants, auto-layout, prototyping, dev mode, design tokens (W3C-spec, native). Self-host or use the free hosted tier. The default for "we want off Figma."
- ★ Figma (free tier) — closed source but the industry standard; free tier covers 3 files / unlimited drafts / unlimited viewers. Dev Mode is free for inspectors. Honest pick: still where most teams are.
- Sketch — macOS-only, paid; legacy choice that lost ground to Figma. No free tier worth speaking of.
- Lunacy (Icons8) — free Sketch-compatible UI editor for Win/macOS/Linux; closed source with a generous free tier.
Illustration / general vector
- ★ Inkscape — full-blown illustration tool. SVG-native, GPL, mature; the OSS Illustrator. Slower than commercial peers but feature-complete.
- Boxy SVG — fast, focused SVG editor; web + macOS app; freemium. Excellent for editing icons / hand-tuning paths.
- Vectornator / Linearity Curve — free macOS / iPad illustration app; closed source.
- SVG-Edit — browser-based SVG editor; OSS, basic but works.
- Method Draw — fork of SVG-Edit, friendlier UI.
Next-generation / emerging
- Graphite (beta) — Rust-based open-source procedural / non-destructive vector + raster editor. Genuinely promising; not yet ready for production work but worth tracking. MIT/Apache-2.0.
- Affinity Designer 2 — closed source, paid (now Canva-owned). The "I don't want a subscription" Adobe alternative; one-time purchase.
- Pixelmator Pro — macOS-only; closed source; raster-leaning but with vector tools.
Pick this if…
- You want fully OSS, Figma-like: Penpot.
- The team is already on Figma and you can't move: Figma free tier.
- Detailed illustration / SVG work: Inkscape.
- Quick SVG edits in a browser: Boxy SVG.
- You're tracking the future: Graphite.
- One-time purchase, no subscription: Affinity Designer 2.