Overview: There are many pros to Affinity Designer from my experience and only a few cons.
Would I recommend it? Yes, if you are using Inkscape often (once per month or more), Designer is definitely worth buying (wait for 50% off sale price).
Disclaimer: Many things I mention are probably possible in Designer and Inkscape. I’m not an expert in either.
Some Observations:
- Affinity Designer has:
- Measurements between objects
- Good tutorials and documentation
- Built in Unsplash search for stock photos
- Artboards
- Organizing things by project rather than having a bunch of different files for each image
- Can have different background colors
- You can align things with respect to another artboard (from one artboard to another)
- Easily adjustable corners on objects
- A way smoother UI, which is functionally nice (e.g., sliders) and makes the experience more fun
- Choose distribution value from slider for objects
- Drawing straight lines in Designer is as easy as shift, drag, click.
- Aligning is better in Inkscape for me
- More annoying anchor point for me in Designer by default. Cannot see a way to change.
- Designer is missing some useful options for aligning.
- In Inkscape, the default is for the stroke width to change as you change the length of a line (e.g., the line gets thicker as it get longer). Designer is not infected with this “feature”. Defaults matter because many people (like me) may not know something else is possible or what to look for.
- Group editing colors and styles seems to work much better in Designer. Was often buggy for me in Inkscape.