Scribus

RATING:

4.3

(17)

About Scribus

Scribus is an open-source desktop publishing solution that helps businesses create and manage content for publications using a page layout system. It enables professionals to design newsletters, magazines, print advertisements, brochures, calendars and more by editing text, designs and photos. Scribus lets administrators streamline color management operations, automate workflows and view documents in XML format. It allows users to manage content across multiple operating systems such as Linux, Mac OS, Warp 4, eComStation, Windows, OpenIndiana, Solaris, Debian GNU, FreeBSD and Haiku. It is available to users for free and support is extended via phone, email, documentation and other online measures.

Scribus Pricing

Scribus is available to users for free

Free trial: 

Not Available

Free version: 

Available

Scribus manage colors and fills

Scribus Reviews

Overall Rating

4.3

Ratings Breakdown

Secondary Ratings

Ease-of-use

4

Customer Support

4

Value for money

4.5

Functionality

4

Most Helpful Reviews for Scribus

1 - 5 of 17 Reviews

User Profile

Md Fateh Ali

Verified reviewer

Design, 11-50 employees

Used weekly for less than 12 months

Review Source: Capterra
This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered

OVERALL RATING:

5

EASE OF USE

4

VALUE FOR MONEY

5

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

5

FUNCTIONALITY

4

Reviewed June 2022

The best open source alternative of Adobe InDesign

It's a great tool to create books and magazine designs. It allows me to import a large number of pages and work on them easily. As open-source software, it works wonderfully, but if you need advanced and professional work, you consider others. I will recommend others to try it before you buy adobe InDesign or Affinity Publisher. I hope you will love this.

PROS

Scribus is one of the best desktop publishing software in the publishing and print media and it's totally free to everyone. The user interface of this software is pretty cool and very lightweight. It supports multi-cross platforms like windows, Linux, and macOS. So, you can install this software on multiple computers. It has many professional features, such as CYMK support, image packaging, and a wonderful PDF export feature, highly valued by professional printing services.

CONS

One of the big issues of Scribus is its open-source software. So it didn't get updated regularly. In contrast to Adobe InDesign, Scribus lacks advanced features and functionality.

Reason for choosing Scribus

Pricing is the main issue. It works really well for beginner and basic projects.

James

Libraries, 2-10 employees

Used monthly for more than 2 years

Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.

OVERALL RATING:

4

EASE OF USE

3

VALUE FOR MONEY

5

FUNCTIONALITY

4

Reviewed October 2023

Scribus - Great open-source tool for preparing small to medium sized publications.

I actually use Inkscape for graphics layout work for posters and flyers. When the project requires multi page layouts and more complex text handling Scribus has fit our needs well. I spent 12 years as a part-time technology teacher in a small private school. We used scribus each year to design and then publish the school's yearbook, so it can handle quite complex tasks. In my current position I handle most of the graphics design and publishing tasks for our small public library. I work from both home and onsite so the flexible licensing is very important to me. Our budget can't match those of larger libraries so the cost savings of using open-source helps us direct finances to more important needs at the library.

PROS

The open source licensing allows us to use this on each of our staff computers for free, plus it can be installed on laptops or home computers for the staff to use outside of the office. It is powerful and flexible enough to do the simple brochures and booklets that we need here at the library. It also gives me a higher confidence that years down the road the files will still be useable and the software still available. I can't say the same for some older archive files we have that were created in proprietary software that either no longer exists or is prohibitively expensive.

CONS

The features we need are present, but the user interface can still be a little bit rough compared to low to mid-range commercial Desktop Publishing software. Some of the staff are still most comfortable using Microsoft Publisher for their tasks.

Reason for choosing Scribus

For the same reason that we switched from primarily using Microsoft Publisher. Scribus offers an open xml format that should be readable in the long-term future. The open-source licensing cuts down on our technology budget allowing us to allocate the money to more important needs for the library.

Reasons for switching to Scribus

More flexible licensing so we can install on all our computers at no cost. Scribus uses a non-proprietary xml file format so text content can be recovered even if Scribus becomes unavailable or unusable in the future.

Debbie

Marketing and Advertising, 1 employee

Used weekly for less than 6 months

Review Source
This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered

OVERALL RATING:

1

EASE OF USE

3

VALUE FOR MONEY

1

FUNCTIONALITY

1

Reviewed February 2024

Too many bugs. Unusable.

This product used to be decent. Now it's unusable and I paid for this. Terrible.

PROS

None. I used to use Scribus, now it's unusable with text flow bugs.

CONS

Type won't flow properly in a text frame. Words are separated with no logic or properly placed hyphen when a sentence comes to the end of a text frame. I've spent way too much time researching and trying to "fix" this. The work around is to force a return where you want the sentence to break. It's basically unusable. This is NOT the free trial, I have paid for this. I'm finding other people are having this issue. I have since read that it won't work on a Mac M1. That information should have been listed prior to me paying for this. I'll have to go back to paying $$$$ for InDesign. At least I know that'll work!

Jeremy

Professional Training & Coaching, 1 employee

Used monthly for more than 2 years

Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.

OVERALL RATING:

4

EASE OF USE

3

FUNCTIONALITY

4

Reviewed October 2022

Great Tool for Open-Source Design

PROS

Scribus allows me to select and convert colors in bulk, which saves a ton of time in my workflow. It is moderately easy to use, and I have found myself using this program to make other quick changes to content as well.

CONS

This software has crashed on me a few times, and I have experienced other glitches as well. These issues are not frequent, but I have experienced them occasionally.

Nick

Publishing, 1 employee

Used weekly for more than 2 years

Review Source
This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered

OVERALL RATING:

5

EASE OF USE

4

VALUE FOR MONEY

5

FUNCTIONALITY

5

Reviewed October 2023

Have been happy using the 1.5 branch for years

Scribus, and especially using the Python API, is enabling me to create publishing-quality puzzle images and puzzle books (though I still have some work to do on that) very efficiently and consistently.There are definitely hurdles to overcome using the API, but in the end it is that API that is enabling me to scale my puzzle creation business in a way that would not be viable using any interactive desktop publishing GUI simply because of the time it takes doing stuff with mouse clicks and manual fiddling.

PROS

Currently using Scribus 1.5.8 (in Ubuntu), it supports everything I need to create high quality Begriddled puzzle books, as PDFs suitable for KDP and Ingramspark, etc, and publishing quality PNG and JPEG puzzle images (that include text) that can be included as-is in magazines,etc, or used on products.Although currently 1.5 is considered the development branch, and 1.4 the stable one, the reality is that 1.5 is better than 1.4, is very stable, and suitable for production use (as I have been using it) for years.More recently I have started to use the python API to create documents (including books) programmatically rather than do it manually via the Scribus GUI. Although I found this not so easy at first, once I found decent 1.5 documentation (I use impagina.org/scribus-scripter-api) and got up to speed with it, it opened up a whole new dimension of automation possibilities. It is not perfect, but scripting in Python 3, I have so far always been able to work around limitations.

CONS

The Python API is not well documented and there are not many good script examples. Most examples you can find are outdated and simply don't work now because they use Python 2 instead of 3, or were created for Scribus 1.4.Some things that are straightforward in the GUI require some trickery to automate. Eg I found rotating an object around its centre, easy to do in the GUI, quite a challenge. But having got that working with the help of ChatGPT to develop an algorithm to do it using only the features provided by the API, I won't have to write that function again.Some issues have to be worked around. The only way I found to make some changes "stick" and be properly visible in the GUI was to save and re-open the document. This is straightforward in the API, but it took me some time to discover this worked as a workaround.But the good thing is that once you've solved an issue and incorporated that in your scripting, you can re-use that without having to solve the problem again.Another example was wanting individual pages in a document to have different dimensions. It's an unusual thing to want to do, but it was useful for me to be able to generate differently sized images for a puzzle and its solution. You can do it in the GUI. The way I found to do it programmatically was to create a new document with the new size, and import that back in to the main document. It works well, but you shouldn't have to work around limitations in this way.