It is used for both artistic and technical illustrations such as cartoons, clip art, logos, typography, diagrams, and flowcharts.

[5] Inkscape can render primitive vector shapes (e.g. rectangles, ellipses, polygons, arcs, spirals, stars and 3D boxes) and text.

[8][9] Four former Sodipodi developers (Ted Gould, Bryce Harrington, Nathan Hurst, and MenTaLguY) led the fork, citing differences over project objectives, openness to third-party contributions, and technical disagreements.

Tools allow manipulating primitive vector shapes: simple ones like rectangles, ellipses, and arcs, and more complex ones like 3D boxes with adjustable perspectives, stars, polygons, and spirals.

Rendering feature that can create objects like barcodes, calendars, grids, gears, and roulette curves (using the spirograph tool).

Other tools allow creating Bézier curves, freehand drawing of lines (pencil), or calligraphic (brush-like) strokes which support a graphics tablet.

[16] Inkscape can write and edit text with tools available for changing font, spacing, kerning, rotation, flowing along the path or into a shape.

[17] Inkscape supports image tracing, the process of extracting vector graphics from raster sources.

Different transformations can be applied to them, such as: size, position, rotation, blur, opacity, color, and symmetry.

Every object in the drawing can be subjected to arbitrary affine transformations: moving, rotating, scaling, skewing, and a configurable matrix.

Transformations can snap to angles, grids, guidelines and nodes of other objects, or be aligned in specified direction, spaced equally, scattered at random.

[25][26] Inkscape can also be installed via FreeBSD ports and pkgsrc, the latter being native to NetBSD, but well-supported on most POSIX platforms, including GNU/Linux, Illumos, and macOS.

GTK is a free and open-source cross-platform software widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs).

However, it did praise the ability to add custom filters and extensions, the Inkscape community's passion for creating and sharing them, and the precise path and placement tools.

The review concluded that whilst Inkscape "boasts outstanding features and a passionate user base for a free program ... it's not suitable for busy professionals.

It lauded the wide range of editing tools and support for many file formats, but noted that the application's processing can be slow.

It considered Inkscape to be a good free alternative to proprietary graphics editors such as Adobe Illustrator.