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Add to SafariWhen comparing Foundation vs Inkscape, the Slant community recommends Inkscape for most people. In the question“What are the best web design tools?” Inkscape is ranked 7th while Foundation is ranked 11th. The most important reason people chose Inkscape is:
Inkscape is GPL-licensed and maintains public repositories.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Responsive design philosophy
Foundation allows designing for multiple screen sizes simultaneously easily, meaning your content will always fit.
Pro Uses REMs instead of pixels
Foundation uses REMs instead of pixels, meaning you don't have to state an explicit height, width, padding, etc, for every device. Simply put, using REMs means you can just state font-size: 80%; and have the whole component (and its nested elements) shrink by 20%.
This is great for making your site mobile friendly. There is also a Sass function in Zurb that converts pixels to REMs so if you're used to thinking in pixels, you don't have to learn a different system.
Pro No style lock-in
Styles are purposefully undeveloped to encourage differentiation between different sites using Foundation.
Pro Block grid
Foundation has a feature called block grid. Block grid gives designers the power to divide the contents of an unordered list into a grid that is evenly spaced. Furthermore, Foundation also takes care of collapsing columns as well as removing gutters.
Pro Easy customization
Just by looking at the name, Foundation merely provides designers with a foundation of sorts on which they can build their design. It can be customized easily through SASS, a powerful CSS pre-processor or by overriding the default CSS styles.
Pro Easily extensible with a selection of add-ons
There's a variety of front-end templates, icon fonts, responsive table examples, SVG icons and stencils that help you quick-start or easily improve on your site.
Pro Support for off-canvas navigation
Foundation comes with an easy way of creating off-canvas menus.
Pro Uses Interchange to load responsive content
Foundation comes with Interchange, it makes use of media queries to load images responsively and create content that's suited to different browsers and devices.
Pro RTL support
Allows easily changing text direction.
<html class="no-js" lang="ar" dir="rtl">Pro Built-in form validation
Foundation comes with Abide plugin, an HTML5 form validation library.
Pro Good mobile support
Foundation was one of the first frameworks to adopt a mobile-first philosophy. By focusing on mobile design first, Foundation makes designers think on what kind of content is important, relevant and interesting to the users without thinking too much on the space.
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
Files can be exported and saved 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 It can do anything
A very powerful software that can do pretty match anything!
Pro Measurement Tool
This tool is extremely handy and can not be found 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 paths vastly enhancing the application functionality.
Pro Guides, Grids, and Canvas Rotation
Extremely handy features when building complex graphics using Inkscape.
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 The new version 1.1 is looks and feels fantastic
Inskape got UI update: new dockable dialogs.
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
Vector graphics can be created and edited with Inkscape.
Cons
Con Can be hard for beginners to grasp
Since Foundation is built to be customizable, it's default style may not be very appealing for most. While it's true that most production-ready websites shouldn't be using the default style of a css framework (they would all end up looking the same), this is even more true for Foundation.
Con Needs more pre-built components
Example would be a scroll-spy not only for one cell, but cell to cell.
Con Not UMD pattern in core
This problem will bring attention when used with Angular, React and other JS framework. It is important to know that they create app version of this framework.
Con Documentation is a bit better than average
Documentation could be written better and clearer, with many more example than they currently have. Sometimes hard to find solutions for detailed css problems.
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 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.
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 Crashes very often
Inkscape encountered an internal error and will close now - is one of its standard messages.
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 Limited work with ICC CMYK color scheme
Support for ICC color profiles only in SVG files.
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 Uses GTK
It looks an feels like an alien. It also uses now touch-based widgets instead of professional widgets.
Con A toy for facebook-ist enthusiasts, not for professionals
It's a Linux niche mumbo-jumbo, same as GIMP for raster edit .
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 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 Incompatible with previous versions
Sometimes backward compatibility breaks. For example, pre 0.92 SVGs are incompatible with later releases (due different default resolutions).
Con No support for large printing machine system
No support for large printing machine environment, except exporting the resulting artwork to PDF.
Con Under GNU GPL
It is released under GNU GPL which one of the restricted open source license.
