CorelDraw has been the second runner-up in the design community for over a decade. In the early days of Microsoft Windows, CorelDraw was the only Windows-based vector drawing application on the market. Adobe Illustrator, which is the market leader by far, was still a Mac-based applications in its first incarnations.
CorelDraw has had some bug-ridden incarnations in it's past...particularly version 7.0. We are now on version 11 and those days are fortunately behind. CorelDraw has been criticized for trying to offer too many features in its application. Its vector drawing capacities have never seemed as user friendly as Adobe Illustrator's.
It has always been more advanced in bitmapped capabilities and until recently in vector transparency.
One of it's better features is it's WYSIWIG font selection, where you can see what the font will look like before you apply it. Adobe Illustrator does not have this capability. See graphic below.
Another advanced feature that is worth mentioning is it's 3-D rendering capabilities. This is one area where CorelDraw does excel over Illustrator. The image below shows how a simple square can be turned into a 3-D box on the fly. Illustrator cannot do this.
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Another area where CorelDraw is superior is in bitmapped fills. There are certain times when vector effects just can't do what is need. In this case bitmapped fills are the answer and CorelDraw has superior capabilities in this area. The graphic below shows a screen shot of one of many bitmapped fills available.
