Inkscape vs VectorStyler
Both are bought outright, both sit in design, and both are bought by people leaving Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Creative Cloud. Here is what actually differs — including what each price does not buy.
The short answer
- Inkscape is free; VectorStyler costs $95.
- VectorStyler has the cleaner licence: buy once, own forever, against free and open source for Inkscape.
Side by side
 InkscapeFreeOpen source |  VectorStyler$95Perpetual | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | SVG-native vector editor with no licence to buy at all | deep vector illustration app, 95 dollars once with upgrades included |
| Price | Free | $95 |
| Licence | Free and open source | Buy once, own forever |
| What you get | No licence to buy, and the source is public. | One payment. Updates included, indefinitely. |
| The catch | The macOS build is a GTK port — menus, shortcuts and dialogs don't behave like a Mac app | One person builds it, so "lifetime" means the app's lifetime rather than yours |
| Macs per licence | not established | 6 |
| Account required | no | no |
| Works offline | yes | yes |
| Apple Silicon | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| On Setapp | No | No |
| Minimum macOS | not established | not established |
| App Store rating | not established | not established |
| Last updated | not established | not established |
| Price checked | 2026-09-22 | 2026-09-22 |
Apple’s public API reports a rating for only a small minority of Mac apps, and returns zero for most of the rest even when the store page plainly shows reviews. A blank here means we could not read a number, never that an app is unrated or disliked.
In their own right
Inkscape
A long-running free vector graphics editor with node editing, live path effects, boolean operations, bitmap tracing and a document model that is plain SVG all the way down.
VectorStyler
A technically dense vector editor that goes after the parts of Illustrator other alternatives skip: non-destructive effects, variable-width strokes, mesh fills and spot colour.