To get the free Starter Edition of DrawPlus, you have to register and open an account with Serif. All in all, it seems that DrawPlus is succeeding at being a top-notch, budget competitor to Illustrator, but at the same time losing sight of the real prize-being a top-notch, niche vector-drawing program. The artistic brushes in DrawPlus Starter Edition are locked, but even with the upgrade to the full DrawPlus X5 I didn’t get the feeling of being a real artist gone digital, like with PD Artist 2 ($79). Just like Illustrator (albeit at 1/6 the price). Plus, nodes are hard to locate and manipulate with the node tool. Take the gradient tool for example: In DrawPlus, changing a radial gradient from the swatch default of grayscale to a color seems impossible without the help of a Google search. But if you are like me and have a long history–but not much love–for using Adobe’s Creative Suite, having Serif copy some of Illustrator’s more frustrating features is, well, even more frustrating. DrawPlus is a lot like the $600 Adobe Illustrator, which is great if you like Illustrator. To access them you have to purchase $99 DrawPlus X5. The artistic brush tools and the photo manipulation tools are locked in DrawPlus Starter Edition.

In DrawPlus Starter Edition many of the best features of the program are locked, but it’ll show you enough to know if you want to pony up the $99 to buy the full DrawPlus X5 version. The Starter Edition of Serif’s DrawPlus is a giant carrot on a stick leading you to purchase DrawPlus X5, a very complete Illustrator-style tool for drawing vector graphics.

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