Amadine is a professional vector illustration app for macOS and iPad, built by Belight Software as a native, subscription-free alternative to Adobe Illustrator. It covers the full creative arc from first bezier curve to final export, without a monthly invoice waiting at the end.
What is Amadine?
Amadine is a dedicated vector graphics editor — not a jack-of-all-trades creative suite, but a focused drawing tool for designers who spend their days pulling paths, nudging anchor points, and shipping logos, icons, packaging artwork, and editorial illustrations. Belight Software, the Mac-native studio behind Swift Publisher, built it exclusively for Apple platforms, and that intentionality shows in every interaction.
The toolset is comprehensive without being cluttered: a precision pen tool, a node editor for sub-pixel corrections, boolean path operations, shape primitives, a text engine with multi-column support, gradient mesh fills, and a non-destructive layer stack. Artboards let you manage multiple output sizes in a single document, and the export pipeline handles SVG, PDF, PNG, TIFF, and EPS without ceremony.
What does Amadine do best?
Amadine's headline strength is its behaviour as a Mac-native citizen. It is compositor-accelerated, respects system color pickers and version history, and loads fast enough that opening it feels instantaneous rather than ceremonial — something I can't say about Illustrator or even Affinity Designer on some mornings. For logo and icon work in particular, that responsiveness compounds over a full day of iteration.
The pen tool deserves its own sentence: bezier handles snap into place with a confidence that took me maybe an afternoon to trust fully, and the smooth/corner node toggle is surfaced so naturally I stopped thinking about it within hours. If your work is primarily mark-making — drawing things rather than arranging things — Amadine will feel unusually fluent.
- Precise bezier pen with clean smooth/corner node switching
- Boolean operations (union, subtract, intersect, exclude) for rapid shape composition
- Gradient mesh for organic, photorealistic shading
- Multi-column text with full typography controls
- Artboards for multi-format delivery in one file
How much does Amadine cost?
Amadine is a one-time purchase on the Mac App Store — no subscription, no annual renewal, no seat-count anxiety. The developer also offers a free trial directly through amadine.com, which gives you real hands-on time with the pen tool before you commit. For anyone still writing a monthly cheque to Adobe, the pricing structure alone is enough to justify a serious look.
Amadine is also available through Setapp, making it effectively free if you already subscribe to that bundle. Check the official site for current tiers, since promotional offers shift.
Who should use Amadine?
Amadine is best matched to freelance illustrators, brand designers, and studio generalists who live in vector work daily but find Illustrator's complexity or cost disproportionate to what they actually need. It is also a natural step-up for Sketch users who have outgrown UI-only wireframing and need genuine illustration capability.
Where Amadine shows its limits is at the production-heavy end of the spectrum: complex master pages, multi-artboard publications with deep stylesheet logic, or heavily scripted export automations. That is Affinity Designer's territory, and Affinity still wins it. But for solo practitioners or small studios doing logo work, icon systems, packaging, and editorial vectors every day, Amadine is more than capable — and meaningfully less friction.
How does Amadine compare to Affinity Designer?
These two fight for exactly the same shelf space: one-time purchase, Apple-friendly, post-Adobe positioning. Affinity Designer has the broader feature set — its pixel persona, advanced publishing pipeline, and typography depth are harder to match. Amadine counters with a leaner interface, a shorter path from install to productive, and an illustration-first focus that feels less compromised by print-production edge cases.
Linearity Curve (formerly Vectornator) is worth a mention as a free third option, though it skews iPad-first and its Mac app still feels like a port. Adobe Illustrator remains the industry benchmark for complex client deliverables, but at a recurring cost that Amadine makes it very easy to decline. My personal default for logo and icon commissions has shifted to Amadine; I still reach for Affinity Designer when the brief involves a multi-page brand guide.
