Adobe as a sales force contact manager.

I agree, I only use Acrobat Pro 9 anymore and that's because of the Adobe conforming PDF driver and Distiller. I us no Adobe graphics applications any longer and that has been for several years.

Here's the thing: hate on Adobe all you want. But right now they are commanding the lead by a way out in front clear margin. Corel meanwhile is choking on their dust. Most of the major branding work and advertising work for print and motion graphics is being done using Adobe's stuff. The same is absolutely true for corporate branding work. That's pretty much ALL Adobe.

I work full time in the sign industry. And I have to deal with a lot of customer provided artwork. 100% of the major corporate assets is all generated using Adobe software. None of it is done using CorelDRAW. Corel used to hold a very commanding footprint in the sign industry space. They don't any longer. And that's mainly because CorelDRAW is really deficient at importing and outputting Adobe Illustrator generated artwork. For the past 20 years CorelDRAW has been stuck running in a mode of catch-up compared to Adobe Illustrator (among Adobe's other applications). That really didn't mean all that much when most of the sign industry was geared to outputting art through vinyl cutters and routing tables. Vector shapes with a single color could be handled by all kinds of applications. Once the large format printers started getting installed inside sign companies and once sign companies started selling full color LED jumbotron signs capable of showing full motion video and motion graphics the Corel option really started coming up short. And it really came up short big time when a major company built its branding assets using features in Adobe Illustrator that could not be rendered properly within CorelDRAW.

Yeah, it costs money to pay for a Creative Cloud license. But it also costs a lot of time and money to have to re-build client assets made in Adobe software where it can work in a Corel environment. And what does that gain? What does it gain when the leading large format digital printing RIP applications (Onyx, RasterLink Pro, Caldera) are built around Adobe output?

It took over a decade for Corel to incorporate full support for OpenType after Adobe built it into the first Creative Suite version of Illustrator. CorelDRAW introduced Variable Font support years after Illustrator. Will Corel herald the support of OpenType-SVG font support and free-form gradients in CorelDRAW 2021?

Bobby you're dead on! I have no friggin idea what Corel is thinking.  If you're servicing design shops and have a workable volume of business an Adobe CC seat makes sense. If you design art to sell on the internet Adobe is the easy option. With that said if people with CS buy complex art created in later versions of CC their screwed.

Corel only makes sense if you create the file and output it yourself. If you really good you can send to ANY RIP software. I've used Onyx, RasterLink Pro and dozens of others including all the top of the line printing RIPS for press. All from CorelDRAW.

As far as large and grand format Adobe has exactly zero to offer me. I've done 80' banners that hung down the sides of building in Vegas.  I just did a 35' x 10' for a golf club renovation for an architect all out of Photo-PAINT. I've done 125 pieces that were cut out of 1 sheet on a 5' x 10' Zund cutter.  Wraps for buses, trailers, large Sprinters down to Mini Coopers. Adobe offers nothing of value for this work.

In every municipality in my County animated variable data content on signs is illegal,  variable data signs have been so restricted in size they are next to useless. I believe in Kentucky or Tennessee they are illegal in the entire State. I've done maybe 30 of them and the profit margins just plain suck so when they come in I just price myself out of them.

There's plenty of billing but at the end of the day my staff gets paid and I get peanuts. I prefer that my staff and I both make money. Let's face it $85,000 in billing to put $5,000 in my pocket balanced against the time I put in is a do not do project!

In my area South Central PA I know of only 2 design shops that have more than 20 employees. They do zero print and when they needed a sign they gave it to a shop as a mockup, who came to me  and I desiged them to work.

The rest they I know of are extremely poorly managed 1 to 5 person shops. I do no direct business with design shops and my margins went up. So I can believe they'll be dumb enough to fall for a CRM. 

Every shop I know changed how they worked to fit the CRM rather the the developer delivering a CRM that worked as the company works. In 1990 I built a Microsoft Access data base that was later modified with vendor module and Inuse it to this day. It works like I do.

David, Adobe may not have anything to offer to you compared to CorelDRAW. The way it looks to me CorelDRAW is in a struggle to remain relevant. Nearly all the functional advantages Corel has had over Illustrator have disappeared. Corel had graphic design industry niches such as the sign industry mostly to themselves (unless you count sign industry specific design applications such as Flexi, GerberOmega, SignLab, etc as competitors). Adobe has been slowly, steadily chipping away at Corel's foothold at the high end. And then there are "affordable" upstarts now chipping away at the low end.

Here's the thing I find really troubling: Corel has done a terrible job maintaining CorelDRAW over its past couple or so versions. Version 2020 is near the end up its product cycle. In the space of a year CDR 2020 received just one point release update and one hot fix. That's it. Various bugs remain. I've had to keep older versions of CorelDRAW running alongside on both my work desktop and notebook at home to work around the bugs present in CDR 2020. By comparison Illustrator 24 received 3 serious point release updates and more than a dozen smaller bug fix updates. Illustrator 25 has already received a couple minor updates since being introduced in late October (including one update this morning).

The folks running Corel appear to think they're equal in stature to Adobe in the graphics industry. If they really want to be seen in that manner they have to put a lot more development muscle behind CorelDRAW. Right now CorelDRAW is languishing from neglect. Compound that with the new pricing model ($249 per year subscription or $499 full + $149 annually for "upgrade protection"). I think it's a recipe for ruin.

IMHO, CorelDRAW needs to go back to a 2 year product cycle. They're just not delivering the goods on an annual basis, and certainly not for these prices -which they need to re-visit. I think they need to bring back normal perpetual license upgrades. I think they run a high risk of losing customers. Some may go it with Adobe exclusively. Some may look for alternatives to both Corel and Adobe. Many CorelDRAW users are simply staying put with old versions. I may do that if I see my "upgrade protection" price boosted from $99 to $149 when CorelDRAW 2021 is released.

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In regards to LED-based variable message signs, my company does quite well selling them. We do get a decent mark-up on them (there's no way we're selling them at cost). We primarily sell Daktronics displays. They cost a bit more on the front end, but they look better and hold up a lot better. We know how to service the displays, which is extremely important. If a sign company doesn't have anyone on staff who can replace driver boards, controllers, etc they should not try selling that kind of product in the first place.

Many city/town governments have drafted serious restrictions or outright bans on LED variable message signs. They still remain legal in many other places. But the much bigger problem is the growing number of sign codes that put severe restrictions on all kinds of signs. I think it's a civic backlash to the "anything goes" junky attitude so many businesses and sign companies have had with on-premise signs. There's a lot of blatantly unprofessional eye-sore garbage getting erected in too many places. Squeezed and stretched default Arial is all over the place. And then there's a lot of sign structures that are just poorly maintained (missing faces, dead lamps, rusting parts, etc). That adds to blight.

A lot of cities and towns have had it past their eyeballs with that nonsense. Then they look to high income enclaves where signs are hardly visible at all. The only ones you see are tombstone sized monuments covered up with bushes or modest channel letter signs on a building. The town fathers in the places struggling with blight see how nice the high income areas look and want to copy it. The problem is on-premise signs do have a vital, necessary function for local businesses. And if they cannot advertise using that medium it just makes it easier for customers to stay home and order from competitors online.

I agree, I used to have 40 or more users with my architectural clients, now I have zero. Every complaint my clients had went totally unaddressed. The list is long but stability,  font management, customizations causing crashes, no forward movement in Photo-PAINT.  The list goes on for miles.

X8 font management was so awful it was unusable in a networked environment.  CorelDRAW users that worked for them were so bad with customizing their work spaces and corrupting their machines that the IT staff considered Draw no longer viable. I ask for years for an administrative lock, nothing was ever done.

Graphics is very diverse, many types of files can be done with low and no cost applications. That is tough for Adobe and Corel. However it's like Corel isn't even trying.

I read users post the application needs that new wow feature but that's crap.  There is no wow feature. There are a set of needs that make a wow!

State of the art font support that work, web bases work flow that actually works, interfacing with other applications that works. Features that have been tested and work, to start with. Core technology that works is not enough any longer. 

I have to use the noise reduction features of AftetShot Pro, PaintShop Pro and Photo-PAINT in my image editing.  That's not unusual as Photoshop lacks some of these too, however Photo-PAINT just got it's decade old features moved from 8 bit to16 bit while the hobby program had more advanced features,

I'm teetering between thinking that Corel management just does not care and that Corel management just doesn't know! The world is so stupid I leaning toward that Corel just does no know.

In my area they have regulated signs to the point where a $300 sign can require a $500 engineer drawing along with $150 permitting fee!

Some of the regulatory stuff involving signs drives me completely bat-$#!+ crazy at times. It does nothing but waste time and effort to prove to some government bean counter that you know what you are doing in your job. It's really insulting to be blunt about it. I have 40+ years of real art and design experience, a 4 year degree from one of the nation's best art schools and over 25 years of experience doing sign work. I think it's pretty clear I am competent (and actually pretty great) in the work I do. But I have to prove my worth via the red tape again and again.

Some of it isn't so difficult, thankfully. I have a number of "section detail" cross section drawings I adjust and re-use for electrical plans. I'm always on the lookout to come up with new ways how to work around the red tape nonsense. But it is a pain when you have to reproduce scale drawings of a building elevation, complete with all kinds of dimensional call-out labels, just in order to get an installation permit. We're talking more than just Photoshopping an image of the sign onto a photo of the building.

One thing I cannot control is the conduct of others doing bad design work in this same industry. Those guys and their cheapskate bosses are going to ruin the whole endeavor for all of us. They're only out to make a fast buck. I'm wanting to maintain a business model for decades and leave something behind for others coming up into our industry. But we won't have any sign industry to speak of if sign designers refuse to understand the civic responsibility they must observe in their work. A great looking, great quality sign can turn into a town landmark. A poorly designed sign is an eye-sore and contributes to blight. Sign designers, sign business owners and the businesses themselves really need to operate from a perspective of: am I being part of the problem or part of the solution? They can add to the commercial landscape in a positive way or crap on it in a negative way.

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I feel like the development team behind CorelDRAW has its hands tied in multiple ways. There's no doubt they've had to endure nonsense coming from down on high via the private equity company bosses who own Corel. First it was Vector Capital and now it is KKR. If I had to guess the development team for CorelDRAW is getting a constant ration of grief and anger from the bosses higher above for how they're supposedly failing. But the CorelDRAW developers are clearly not provided the resources and personnel needed to keep up with or (God forbid) surpass Adobe. It is perfectly clearly the Corel team is suffering given the lack of updates they've been able to provide over the past couple or so years via flawed versions of CorelDRAW. I feel like CDR 2018 was the last reasonably stable version of CorelDRAW. If the CorelDRAW development team was other than beleaguered and disillusioned I would be surprised.

Meanwhile the field of competitors are not sitting on their hands. Adobe clearly considers Illustrator a vital part of its arsenal and is actively working to improve it. The Illustrator beta program is no joke. The Adobe team actually listens to suggestions from beta users. I feel like I can take credit for a couple positive changes that happened in the past year, a couple changes of which removed key advantages CorelDRAW held over Illustrator. Adobe is working in a hotly competitive environment. The vector draw program angle is actually a lesser concern. I think Adobe is operating far more in an damage control angle on the video production end. After Effects is still very much a titan application for motion graphics. But DaVinci Resolve has really been gnawing hard on Adobe's heels and threatening to totally overtake them. DaVinci Resolve doesn't require some $54 per month revolving fee to use. DaVinci Resolve has a free, open source version. And then they have a full tilt deluxe version that costs $300. The graphics departments in our local university and vo-tech lean hard into Adobe. But I've told them they really need to be taking a hard look at DaVinci Resolve. The folks at Blackmagic Design really do know what they're doing. Unlike Corel, I think Adobe is realistic about the challenges it faces and they're trying hard to step up their game. The Premiere Pro NLE app was deficient in a number of areas and Adobe has been trying to fix it. Adobe has been adding new features in response to new video card chip sets, particularly those from AMD. While Adobe might be the "big bad monopoly" their executives seem to be acting as if they know very well they have vulnerabilities.

Joe Christina did a series called (if memory serves) Cutting the Cord Life Without Adobe. He thought well of PaintShop Pro.  He uses DaVinci Resolve and Linus Tech did a review of DaVinci. Both IT tech guys and VLOG people. Linus Tech loved DaVinci but being a larger company than Joe Christina and using dedicated stations for processing his cost analysis still favored Adobe due to performance issues with DaVinci. Joe Christina also found issues with performance but his work load allowed him to plow through. He alluded to some issues still being his Ryzen system.

DaVinci (the bought version) is ok software however for a great deal more money Adobe is not a great deal better. 

I've logged many hours researching hardware and software, clearly the current generation of file creators (I won't call them professional just because someone pays them) clearly has their head up their collective butts. 

Many issues are caused by unintelligent behaviors and poor technical choices, regardless of what software you use. They seem to not understand that time is money.

If you're creating files learn what you're doing,  if you think that from Adobe or Corel you're going to create a 6 spot color job using complex fills and transparencies and it's going to work. GOOD LUCK!  It can be done because both software platforms are capable but it takes a real professional with a comprehensive understanding of output technology. 

If you use a wireless network you better have a very light work load otherwise what the hell are you thinking?

The same for using a laptop but I would add that to be useful in a medium work environment with a laptop you had better spend and I mean SPEND REAL money on that laptop. The instant you have multiple transparencies and complex fills watch out.

Using AMD, all the high end tech people I've watched and emailed with eventually make it work but you had better really be a high end tech person. Time involved to work out the issues ranged from a few weeks to a few months. Then again you might get lucky and get one that works, MAYBE!

Xeon can be useful but again you better be a real tech person and SPEND REAL money. I'll add that my architectural clients are moving away from them, as i9 performance on 3D renderings are more cost effective. 

CorelDRAW for those of us who create and output our files and happen to have a version previous to 2019 and also have 2020 installed can create and output state of the art files. With that said life with CorelDRAW is a great deal better with real power. Desktops, Intel i7 or higher, 32 GB of RAM, true NVidia graphics cards with 6GB of RAM and a quality SSD.

Now if Corel can get their corporate heads out of their butts.

Let's examine the relationship in terms of file compatibility between Adobe and CoreDRAW since my first  experiences with version 3 to now.  It has always been very spotty,  somewhere in the X cycles it got a tiny bit better.

In general NO REAL DIFFERENCE now, then there ever was. So no real new issues over the last 25 years or more. 

Why the compatibility problem? Any monkey that's worth their salt and has used both Adobe and CorelDRAW together knows that Adobe and Corel approach complex fills and transparency differently.

So there WILL NEVER be 100% cross application compatibility and there never has been.  Then again no real change in the last 25 years.

Advantages/disadvantages?

I have nearly zero experiance with non postscript output so I'll not speak to that.

I have output to nearly every high end RIP system currently in use and dozens that are no longer in production.

In general zero difference between the output of the applications. 

There are some subtle differences mostly with layered transparency, in my experience Adobe produces more surprises that fail to show up in the RIP proof preview but do show up on plate then CorelDRAW does. I suspect it's because the Adobe process has transparency created in 3 applications being processed in the PDF stream where CorelDRAW transparency 99.9999% of the time is proceeded only via Draw.

This is a problem for proofing systems the do not use ROOM technology.

I have output to many print and print/cut RIPS for roll fed and flat bed devices including those with white and metallic capabilities.  DO NOT CONFUSE these RIPS with the high end print RIPS mentioned above. THEY ARE NOT OF THE SAME QUALITY.

Many of these RIPS (99%) are based on licensed lower end Global Graphics or Watach software. Many are still postscript 2 or 3 devices very few are true PDF RIPS.

Again in general zero differences between the output.

Again subtle differences, I've seen more surprises on the media than what showed up in the RIP preview with Adobe products then with CorelDRAW I again suspect for the same reason.

My vendors using proprietary CAD interfaces no longer want anything but PDF output. I've done cut acrylic signage with 5 levels so it must work. If you know how to make the files.

So what's the big deal with 2020? Why now is there such a problem?

The release of 2019 with all the recoding was a significant step backwards in many areas due to coding errors and developer arrogance. 

Now with plenty of experiance with the application, I see the release of 2020 as barely a 5% attempt at simply repairing the damage done in 2019. Another example of Corel arrogance. 

Like it or not if YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING, create complex work, output your work, have 2018 and 2020 installed in US dollars CorelDRAW is still a viable cost effective choice.

The situation is pretty simple. If someone is generating all of his artwork from scratch he can use whatever graphics applications he prefers. But if that person has to incorporate artwork provided by others into the final product it's important for those client assets to be reproduced accurately. Sign companies have to deal with that issue all the time. It's one thing if the artwork is a funky JPEG from a local mom and pop business. It's another thing if the artwork is branding assets from a major company for a big sign project.

Most corporate branding work is generated using Adobe's software. While Illustrator and CorelDRAW have many features in common there are dozens of features and effects where the two applications do not overlap at all. Third party plug-ins (such as Astute Graphics' big suite of plug-ins for Illustrator) can further complicate the situation. I have many years of experience moving logos and other assets between the two applications, so I'm pretty aware of which things translate perfectly and the other things that break. Unfortunately most of the people doing corporate branding work don't care to consider those issues. They just assume everyone who will handle their branding assets uses Adobe software. It's not a big deal if their assets don't contain elaborate fills and effects. But they routinely save AI and EPS files in the latest CC version rather than in an older "legacy" format that other applications can import (with varying levels of success).

Over the past few version releases CorelDRAW has become better at importing Illustrator-generated art files. The additional features Corel added to gradient fills (including varying levels of transparency) were one factor that improved import accuracy. For example, the YMCA is one client whose branding assets I can now reproduce accurately within CorelDRAW. When they first rolled out that branding scheme back in the late 2000's I had to use Adobe Illustrator exclusively to reproduce the collection of full color logos due to how the gradient fills were built.

Technical issues of importing artwork aside, my bigger concern is the future outlook for CorelDRAW. If they don't get a handle on bugs and get real about some existential issues they'll be a historical footnote a few years from now just like Macromedia or other defunct software companies.