If you already use Blender and want Inkscape-like functionality, grease pencil has gotten REALLY impressive! Worth checking out! But let's talk about materials real quick:
I personally got burned when I dropped hard-earned cash on Substance and they sold out from under us.
It might not be 1:1 for the most powerful features found in Alegorithmic's traitorware, but the PBR Painter add-on has been AWESOME for painting materials in Blender.
There are some other add-ons for materials and advanced effects too.
(For designing, I'm glad fo see Material Maker mentioned! It's impressive and legit! I hope that project goes far!)
I honestly think a majority of that stuff is totally doable in Blender right now, add-ons just make it easier and/or a bit more efficient, and these devs are worth supporting.
Armorpaint looked pretty cool, but is it still being developed? Seems like it's been awfully quiet, which is a shame because it seemed very promising!
It's sad because Substance was the ONE time I relented and said "Hey, maybe this commercial software will be really worth it." Fool me once.
Blender is just the most amazing peace of software I know and I actually enjoy using it. Unless I try to do retopology again. Screw that all the way to hell!
Also I want to mention Graphite.rs for graphic design. It aims for vector/raster image with procedural customization capability and in early development. Last I checked they don't do much outreach and having feedback helps too.
I have never had any reason to use any of Adobe's stuff other than acrobat.
Having used 2 competitors extensively at work, Bluebeam and PDF X-Change (and the free version of 1 of those, PDF X-Change, at home), it's not even close.
Acrobat is so much worse, and they came up with the format.
It means because of a orange guy and his tariffs the whole market is down. So we have to compare it with whole market. If it has fallen more than half of stocks, then we can say it just adobe's fault and not just market's fault.
To get this idea we take the average of stocks which S&P500 which shows the average stock price for 500 biggest companies.
Figma is a vector drawing app that was originally for UX design (an Adobe XD competitor), but they just added a bunch of graphic design tools that compete with Adobe Illustrator.
Canva does a lot of raster and vector image editing that originally targeted people that were not design pros, but they’ve been adding a lot of features that allow people to make some professional quality stuff stuff with ease.
All in all, both companies are growing into the spaces Adobe dominated. If you were a UX designer who needed to occasionally use Illustrator for a more detailed illustration, maybe you no longer need that Adobe CS license.
Idk, i work at a print shop and half of my work day is spent fixing dog shit files people send me from Canva. It's the scourge of pretty much every printer out there.
I worked in print before Canva. They were going to send you shit files with or without that tool. Most tried to send word docs or power points so Canva is probably a step up.
How long before Adobe buys them... they did it macromedia and all their other competitors. Anti-trust laws, if they were working, would have shut down Abobe decades ago.
They tried to buy Figma, but getting past the regulators was too hard. It was clearly a play to monopolize UX design just like the did with graphic design.
What does Blender have that overlaps with an Adobe product
I ditched premiere for the Video editor in Bender, and you can use Blender in a lot of ways just like After Effects, if you really know it, then its a lot more powerful than AE.