Here’s the Deal

Substance Designer vs Substance Painter

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When comparing Substance Designer vs Substance Painter, the Slant community recommends Substance Painter for most people. In the question“What are the best 3D texture painting softwares?” Substance Painter is ranked 2nd while Substance Designer is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose Substance Painter is:

Since Substance Painter allows users to paint in full 3D, it can be used not only to paint full textures, but can also paint masks which can then be used in other tools (like Substance Designer) for material filter generators (like the ones used to make edge wear and dirt)

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Common Questions

What are the best 3D texture painting softwares?

What are the best programs to create procedural textures?

What are the best 3D texturing tools for game development?

Substance Designer

Substance Painter

Pros

Pro
Native integration with many game engines

It has the ability to export sbsar files, these can be put into most game engines allowing in engine tweaking of procedural content.

Pro
Ability to create custom substance files

Substance designer allows users to create custom substance files, it offers a lot of power with a mix of workflow of working with procedural textures and bitmaps.

Pro
Allows you to paint in full 3D

Pro
Painting and procedural editing of textures

Cons

Con
Expensive

The pricing starts at $20 for the indie license and $100 for the pro license.

Con
Not good for painting textures

Substance designer is not very powerful when it comes to painting textures, while there are 2D painting tools, they are not very good.

Con
Expensive and impossible to run without an expensive graphics card

The free trial is the only thing free. You'll have to pay a lot of money for the full version, and even if you do get it, you will have to pay for an expensive graphics card to use it, which means a lot more money flying out of your wallet and/or bank account.