Although not as close of a comparison as my articles on Photoshop vs Canva and Premiere Pro vs Final Cut Pro, there is still a comparison to be had between InDesign and QuarkXPress as page layout programs. Both programs are or were industry standard programs for page layout whether its posters, magazines, leaflets or just about anything requiring page layout, so why not compare them. Its well known in the design industry that InDesign is the modern day way go to. So, in this article I’m going to go through why this is the case and explore whether QuarkXPress has made a comeback since it lost its top spot all those years ago.
Price
Price can always be a defining factor when investing in a new piece of professional software. As with all modern versions of Adobe’s software to gain access to it you must pay for their subscription service, which is either and individual price for each program, which at the time of writing this is £19.97 per month or £51.98 per month for the whole suite which can be seen as quite steep when you’re only just getting into using a program. Whereas QuarkXPress offers customers both an annual subscription fee option for £161 a year as well as an option to buy a perpetual license for £388, which might seem high, but if you compare it to the price of InDesign, it costs less to buy the program indefinitely than owning InDesign for twenty months which puts it more into perspective. Personally, I like the fact Quark give you the choice of buying a license or paying a subscription as it makes the program and company a lot more user friendly, giving us, the consumer, freedom in the way we wish to use the program.
Staying up to date
Going back to the subscription service of Adobe, it means users always have the most up to date version of program released, which can be a blessing and curse. If Adobe releases an update while you’re in middle of a important piece, when you come back to work on it the file could be broken, and at the time of writing this you cant turn this auto updating system off. This gives some room for desire from Adobe with them only offering a subscription service, plus forcing updates upon its users. If you want to use InDesign and can get your hands on an older version of the software like I have, then I would suggest doing that as it can save you the stress of a surprise document breaking update. Quark offer constant updates with their subscription service as well, but unlike Adobe users aren’t forced into updating as soon as a patch is released. Personally, I believe that this would be the preferred way for a company to update their application.
Abilities
For years now InDesign has been the go to page layout software for professionals and for good reasons, it may have had less overall features than QuarkXPress but the quality of features and how well the program ran was far in the favour of Adobe’s InDesign. When it comes to page layout both programs are more than capable for the majority of things and differ from each other in more niche ways. Nowadays, QuarkXPress has some features of its own, for example, its ability to turn page layout into html compatible with Dreamweaver. With things becoming ever more digital a page layout program that is breaking the boundaries it once had of just being a program for the print trade is impressive and very useful for a lot of creators as they’re expanding their skills into online content. InDesign on the other hand has stayed truer to traditional page layout purposes. They have added new features over the years of course but instead of piling them on they have instead refined and optimised the ones already built into the program. For instance, the typography feature on InDesign is far better than Quark’s, Adobe continues to focus on the speed and the refinement of their program.
Conclusion
When it comes to choosing a page layout program it comes down to, whether you need Quark’s added features or not. If you do need the ability to convert work into html, then go for it. But in my opinion, in every other case you should go for InDesign, its faster more refined and is still the market leader. Most importantly if you’re going to be using the program for your career then I’d most definitely choose InDesign as this is most likely what employers will be looking for.
I hope this brief article on the two programs was informative and gave you an idea of what program you’d like to use. If you happen to go with InDesign keep an eye out on In Detail Design for any upcoming InDesign content.
Comments