CorelDraw is great, but for years they were also subscription-only. In the last six months or so they finally started offering a single-price license again--at a prohibitive level.
I bought the previous single-price version years ago, and it's so stale that I prefer to use Inkscape, despite the more limited feature set, and I've been using the Affinity suite as a more professional replacement.
Now it looks like they let you buy it again, but at $550, I'm still giving them the finger. Their upgrade price used to be ~$200; I would pay that once ever 3-4 years or so, and consider that a reasonable expense to get a good product and have it available when I did need it. But for $550, I'd need to be planning on keeping it for something like a decade to get a similar value--and it's too much to justify buying at my limited usage level.
All of these subscription services should get over themselves and allow you to rent them for occasional usage for a reasonable amount of money. If I could give them $20 for intermittent (time-limited? operation-limited?) use, with no "auto-renewal", I might do that every time I actually needed the product.
But no, they need to be greedy and demand that you pay for a year of usage in advance (or by using deceptive practices like Adobe above).
I've used Paint Shop Pro, and I really don't like it. I can use Corel PhotoPaint and Affinity Photo, and they're fine, but PSP makes me crazy when I try to use it. I'd almost rather use Gimp.
Fair enough. I've never paid full price for any Corel product. They're frequently on Humble Bundle where you get a bunch of them on the order of like $30 total. It looks like right now there's even a sale going on: https://www.humblebundle.com/software/corel-productivity-cre...
My CorelDraw license is for 2020, so not super up to date, but I've generally liked it. I've not tried the Essentials package.
I'm stuck with CorelDraw X8 which dates to 2016. If they were selling a buy-it-once license in 2020, I wasn't aware of it. I swear they had switched to subscription-only by then? But maybe it happened that year and I missed the last opportunity to buy a permanent license.
Last time I looked at Essentials, it looked to me like they had hamstrung it too much. I don't remember the specific restrictions they put on it, but I didn't want what they were selling. Might be worth another look with the Humble Bundle though.
I bought the previous single-price version years ago, and it's so stale that I prefer to use Inkscape, despite the more limited feature set, and I've been using the Affinity suite as a more professional replacement.
Now it looks like they let you buy it again, but at $550, I'm still giving them the finger. Their upgrade price used to be ~$200; I would pay that once ever 3-4 years or so, and consider that a reasonable expense to get a good product and have it available when I did need it. But for $550, I'd need to be planning on keeping it for something like a decade to get a similar value--and it's too much to justify buying at my limited usage level.
All of these subscription services should get over themselves and allow you to rent them for occasional usage for a reasonable amount of money. If I could give them $20 for intermittent (time-limited? operation-limited?) use, with no "auto-renewal", I might do that every time I actually needed the product.
But no, they need to be greedy and demand that you pay for a year of usage in advance (or by using deceptive practices like Adobe above).
I've used Paint Shop Pro, and I really don't like it. I can use Corel PhotoPaint and Affinity Photo, and they're fine, but PSP makes me crazy when I try to use it. I'd almost rather use Gimp.