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Scratch vs Inkscape

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When comparing Scratch vs Inkscape, the Slant community recommends Inkscape for most people. In the question“What are the best vector graphics editors?” Inkscape is ranked 1st while Scratch is ranked 7th. The most important reason people chose Inkscape is:

Inkscape is GPL-licensed and maintains public repositories.

Specs

No specs yet!

Initial Release2003

LicenseGPLv2

PlatformsWindows, Mac, Unix

TechnologyC++

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

Common Questions

What are the best vector graphics editors?

Pros

Pro
Great starting point for kids

Scratch was developed specifically for kids ages 8 and up as an exciting way to introduce them to technology. It's designed to be easy to learn, but still provides good depth in computational thinking.

Pro
Visual

Code is represented as visual building blocks that makes it easy to understand how a program is put together.

Pro
Easy to learn

Scratch is designed to teach computational thinking rather than focus on specific syntax. It was designed specifically to be easy to learn for anyone over the age of 8.

Pro
No need to be able to type

Pro
Can be used to create games

Pro
Highly structured

The language is highly structured. Therefore, it gives you the essentials of how to think like a programmer and teaches you good programming practices from early on, so you could write clean, working and readable code in the future.

Pro
Free and open source

Inkscape is GPL-licensed and maintains public repositories.

Pro
Opens lots of file types

Inkscape supports many common formats for import (including SVG, Photoshop and Illustrator) and its plugin architecture allows more to be added.

Pro
Export to different file types

You can export and save your files for example as a "normal" svg, png, jpg, bmp etc. file.

Pro
Cross-platform

Pre-built binaries are available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Inkscape can be built from source on additional platforms.

Pro
Integrates well into a X11-System

Its uses the X11 icon theme and desktop theme(GTK).

Pro
Dark Theme Support

The new 1.0 beta 2 version finally got support for dark theme which normally is only available for commercial software like Affinity Serif, Adobe Illustrator.

Pro
Measurement Tool

This tool is extremely handy and I was not able to find it in any other vector graphics programs out there.

Pro
Live Path Effects

Extremely powerful menu that offers more than 30 powerful Live Path Effects to apply to your paths vastly enhancing the application functionality.

Pro
It can do anything

A very powerful software that can do pretty match anything!

Pro
Guides, Grids, and Canvas Rotation

Extremely handy features when building complex graphics using Inkscape.

Pro
Interface is available in 29 languages

Basque, British English, Brazilian, Portuguese, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Latvian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Swedish.

Pro
It's really easy and fun

You can edit and create vector graphics with Inkscape.

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Cons

Con
Does not teach you programming

Learning Scratch might help you if you have high difficulty with logical thinking. However, starting with a proper programming language, especially an easy one, will give you the benefits of starting with something like Scratch and everything else.

Con
For kids, so don't even mention it in a job interview: it makes you look like a noob.

Con
Won't get you a job

Scratch is not a language used in the workplace. Instead it teaches computational thinking, helping to create a foundation to aid in learning other languages.

Con
Strange OOP

Scratch has a very strange implementation of OOP that is sprite based, and will become very confusing when you move to other languages.

Con
Very slow startup on some systems

Depending on factors like how many fonts you have installed, Inkscape can take upwards of 30 seconds to launch.

Con
Uses its own SVG-format by default

Inkscape might use SVG as its default format, however this SVG's contains some additional SodiPodi/Inkscape additions that can be troublesome if you want to import the SVG into some other application.

Con
Based on the GTK widget toolkit

Software is based on GTK, so it might not integrate well in non-GTK environments. It also requires many dependencies on those non-GTK desktops. It also adds dependencies to GTK-environments since it is written in C++ which requires the gtkmm wrapper/interface.

Con
Incompatible with previous versions

Sometimes backward compatibility breaks. For example, pre 0.92 SVGs are incompatible with later releases (due different default resolutions).

Con
Crashes very often

Inkscape encountered an internal error and will close now - is one of its standard messages.

Con
Mac version does not look as polished as its versions for Windows/Linux version for the 0.92.x version

It seems that Inkscape 1.0 beta 2 for Mac got some needed attention and it looks a lot better with dark theme support. native DMG installer and they got rid of X11 which is great.

Con
Since 0.91 the gradient editor is gone

It is now only possible to edit a gradient on screen. but you can't set a stop to a specific percentage anymore.

Con
Buggy

Application is often buggy so it happens from time to time that the popup / right-click menu won't close and stays open. It crashes also sometimes randomly. This makes it almost unusable for productive / business use.

Con
Y-axis inverted

0,0 coordinates begin in lower left corner, not upper left corner as SVG standards define in Inkscape 0.92.x.
It seems this is now fixed in the 1.0 beta 2 version of the program.

Con
1.0 is sluggish

Inkscape 1.0 uses GTK 3 which is sluggish and slow for low spec systems( eg. ARM, Celeron, Pentium, Core-i3, Ryzen 3 or Athlon ) compared to previous versions.