📡 Fewer Tabs, Fewer Regrets: Testing Recraft
What happened when we used Recraft for illustration, vectorisation and visual consistency in one place.
TL;DR
We tested Recraft to see if one tool could really handle image generation, editing and vector design in a single workspace. It mostly does.
Onboarding is effortless. You sign up and you are creating within seconds.
All in one workflow. Generate, resize, erase, expand, all on the same canvas.
Vectorization is fast and clean. Sketches turn into usable vectors almost instantly.
It learns your style. Brand colors, textures and tone are picked up with surprising accuracy.
Especially useful for small teams. It speeds things up and keeps things consistent, even if complex 3D and advanced text handling still need work.
Why we tested it
The folks at Recraft reached out and asked if we’d like to test their tool and share an honest review. As creatives who already work with more AI tools than we care to admit, we thought it was a good opportunity — even if our first reaction was a very familiar “okay, but do we really need another AI image generator?”
Still, the promise was tempting: one space to generate, vectorize, edit and design without juggling half a dozen apps. So we did what we always do. We dropped Recraft straight into our actual Orbit workflow and treated it like a real case study, not a polished demo. Read on to see where we landed. From sign up to first visuals.
There’s also a broader context here that goes beyond any single tool. Marta from our Orbit team works at an advertising agency, and from what she sees daily, adapting to AI isn’t optional anymore. In an already tough market, agencies need to learn how to work smarter, not louder. This isn’t a radical shift — many teams already rely on tools like Freepik or Envato as standard parts of their production workflows. AI tools are simply the next layer, and learning how to use them thoughtfully is becoming less of an experiment and more of a baseline.
First minutes inside
Onboarding is refreshingly quiet. No loud pop ups. No forced tour. You land, sign up and you are in. There is a tutorial if you want it, but the interface explains itself well enough to just start poking around.
That matters. A lot.
The value shows up almost immediately. You type an idea, hit create and get a clean, coherent image back. Background removal, proportion tweaks, layout expansion all happen directly on the canvas. No exporting. No side quests.
Putting it to work
We started small on purpose.
A quick Halloween flyer.
A flat vector dinosaur working from home.
A minimalist ramen logo.
The results came fast and, more importantly, they stayed visually consistent. Switching between flat, textured and more photo realistic looks did not turn into the usual mess of resizing, re exporting and fixing artifacts. Everything stayed in one place. Edit, erase, recolor, expand. It felt collaborative in a strange way. Less like giving commands to a machine, more like shaping something together, a bit like working with that one teammate who just gets it and doesn’t ask you to “circle back” every five minutes.
From notebook to vector
Next stop was vectorization. We uploaded one of our Orbit sketchbook doodles and watched it turn into a clean, scalable vector in seconds.
Normally this means soo many things… scanning, tracing, fixing lines, opening Illustrator, closing Illustrator, reopening Illustrator. Here it just worked.
What surprised us is that it doesn’t stop at simple doodles. Recraft can handle more complex images too and gives you control over the result, you can adjust the level of detail and even reduce or refine the number of colours, depending on what you need. Exhibit A: this very cool dinosaur we made.
It is not perfect, but it is fast enough to turn half ideas into something usable. For small teams juggling multiple projects, that speed alone is a real advantage.
Teaching it our taste
We also tested the custom style feature. We uploaded a handful of Orbit visuals with muted colors, layered textures and clean compositions, and asked it to learn from them.
The results were not identical to our work, but they were recognizably ours. Same mood. Same restraint. Same visual direction. Close enough to be genuinely useful.
Mockups and small surprises
Next up were mockups and posters. The mockup builder is great for quick visualizations. Not print ready, but more than enough to communicate direction in early concept phases.
Poster mode made it easy to test compositions and type layouts without committing too early. A small but very welcome detail: you can duplicate a canvas, switch styles and compare variations side by side without losing your flow.
What stood out
As a small team, we noticed how quickly we could move. No jumping between tools. No hunting for files. No broken flow.
Recraft keeps everything in one place and that changes how ideas develop. The interface feels considered. The outputs feel coherent. The learning curve stays low.
That said, it is important to be clear about what it is not. Recraft is not built for deep 3D rendering or complex multi layer photo manipulation. It is a brand asset machine, not a high end illustration studio.
Text handling is still limited and some outputs need polishing before they are client ready. But it made us rethink how tools can support creativity instead of replacing it.
What’s next and what we’re curious about
Recraft is not trying to be better than every tool you already use. It is trying to keep work moving, keep ideas together and remove the small frictions that quietly eat your time.
For us, that already made it worth exploring.
The free version is enough to test and understand the workflow. If you want more control, the Pro plan starts at $12 per month and unlocks private projects, commercial usage rights, 4K upscaling and access to external models like Nano Banana, GPT 4o, and Flux. That extra flexibility makes a noticeable difference when you want consistent results across a project.
Now we are curious about your take.
What worked for you?
What didn’t?
And which tools are still earning their place in your workflow?
This post was created in collaboration with Recraft. Partnerships like this help The Orbit stay independent and allow us to keep most of our work free. All opinions are our own.
Great review of the all-in-one workflow! The vectorization speed you describe is really impressive—going from sketchto clean vector without the usual Illustrator dance is a gamechanger. I've been testing similar tools for product visualization, and the style learning feature caught my eye cause most generators still struggle with brand consistency across multiple assets. The limitation on 3D work makes sense tho, since realtime rendering still needs way more compute than most web-based tools can handle.