What’s the Difference between Illustrator and Photoshop? Apr 1, 2021, 11:23 am EDT | 4 min read In the world of digital design, two names stand above the rest: Photoshop and Illustrator. These two Adobe applications are extremely popular, but what’s the difference between them? Why would you use one over the other? For the non-Adode fans out there, this also applies to GIMP (an open-source alternative to Photoshop) and Inkscape (an open-source alternative to Illustrator). Keep that in mind when we’re talking about these applications. It’s All About Raster vs. Vector Photoshop and Illustrator have some things in common, but there’s one major difference that requires them to be separate products. Photoshop is a “raster-based” editing application, while Illustrator uses “vectors.”