When comparing Substance Designer vs Quixel Mixer, the Slant community recommends Quixel Mixer for most people. In the question“What are the best 3D texture painting softwares?” Quixel Mixer is ranked 5th while Substance Designer is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose Quixel Mixer is:
Its freaking free.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
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 Free
Its freaking free.
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 Seems to still be in beta
Many features missing, like layer deletion.
Con Free version is technically non-commercial only
But, uh, "exporting" is as easy as opening up the file locations.