Software Alternatives & Reviews

PureRef VS Affinity Designer

Compare PureRef VS Affinity Designer and see what are their differences

PureRef logo PureRef

The simple way to view and organize your multiple reference images.

Affinity Designer logo Affinity Designer

Professional creative software, exclusively for Mac.
  • PureRef Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-10-23
  • Affinity Designer Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-21

PureRef videos

The Best Free Tool for Artists - PureRef

More videos:

  • Tutorial - PureRef tutorial: a free, cross-platform virtual board for artists!
  • Review - PureRef Review

Affinity Designer videos

Illustrator vs Affinity Designer - Review and Comparison

More videos:

  • Review - Affinity Designer Review
  • Review - A DESIGNERS Review : Affinity Designer on iPad Pro 2018

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to PureRef and Affinity Designer)
Image Editing
18 18%
82% 82
Graphic Design Software
Digital Drawing And Painting
Document Automation
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using PureRef and Affinity Designer. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare PureRef and Affinity Designer

PureRef Reviews

We have no reviews of PureRef yet.
Be the first one to post

Affinity Designer Reviews

Figma Alternatives: 12 Prototyping and Design Tools in 2024
Affinity Designer has recently released version 2 of the app for professional photo editing, illustrations, and graphic designs. It’s used by millions of designers worldwide for prototyping, mind mapping, and other visual content.
5 Figma Alternatives for UI & UX Designers
And last but not least, the area in which Affinity Designer excels is its licensing system. You only pay for the software once ($60 + a free trial) and can use it on your Windows or macOS devices.
Source: stackdiary.com
10 Best Adobe Illustrator Alternatives
if you are looking for an editing tool that can switch between vector, export, and pixel modes, Affinity Designer is a perfect choice.
The best digital art software for creatives in 2020
Not only that, last year's upgrade (here's our Affinity Designer review) saw Affinity add support for the Apple Pro Display XDR monitor, and tweak the program to run faster than ever on new Macs. While this is a dedicated vector tool, you can switch to a pixel environment if you wish. A new version (Affinity Designer 1.9) is currently in Beta so watch this space for a new...
The best software for digital artists
Affinity Designer has everything you need to create custom designs and illustrations. With Affinity Designer, you have precise control over curves, brush stabilisation options, advanced blend modes, and best of all: one million+ per cent zoom. No, really… it’s true! In fact, this might just be our favourite feature.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Affinity Designer seems to be a lot more popular than PureRef. While we know about 46 links to Affinity Designer, we've tracked only 4 mentions of PureRef. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

PureRef mentions (4)

  • how do u guys organize your visual inspiration/refs digitally?
    I mainly use offline means: organising all my files in a hierarchy of folders and using pureref (which I highly recommend) to make moodboards, and ofc an external hard drive to save backups. The only online means I use is google drive for online backups. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • HELP! So I want to trace this Image(704x702) into a Pixel art (32 x 32 or 40 x 40) but when I resize it, it gets like this (2nd picture) and if I don't, then the pixels are too small, What do i do?
    If you just want the image to be a transparent overlay while you draw 'through the image'(with it being unchanged) you can use something like Pureref(pureref.com) to set the image as always on top + turn opacity down a bit. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Hide user name in menu bar.
    If you can’t get it to work inside of max, I thought of a free easy workaround you could try. I use the software pureref to manage and quickly access reference images. You could just resize an empty pureref window to cover your username. Change the color and opacity to whatever you want, lock the window and switch turn on the transparent to mouse option and you should be good to go! Source: about 2 years ago
  • Hello Reddit! this is my 1st time posting and i'm excited to share some of my sketches with you guys. I like drawing dynamic poses, it's a really fun exercise!. These 4 girls are from reference pics out of Pinterest. Suggestions are welcome :D. Have a great day!
    The high kicking girl on the right is in a PureRef board I keep to practice gesture. Source: over 2 years ago

Affinity Designer mentions (46)

View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing PureRef and Affinity Designer, you can also consider the following products

Kuadro - Kuadro is an image viewer that allows you to open as many windows as you want, lay them out as you...

Sketch - Professional digital design for Mac.

Epic Pen - A windows tool for drawing over your desktop and applications

Inkscape - Inkscape is a free, open source professional vector graphics editor for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

MacinCloud - MacinCloud is a Mac cloud platform that provides on-demand Mac cloud servers, flexible dev workload infrastructure and comprehensive Mac in the Cloud solutions

Adobe Illustrator - Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor.