Wich of these should I buy? As I understand the designer is to design materials? and the painter is to paint directly on 3d models? Painter can produce materials also as I understood.
Since Blender can’t use sbs or sbsar at the moment, maybe it would be best to choose painter?
Esim
Substance designer is more for creating procedural materials. It isn’t as necessary as substance painter. Of course having both at your disposal would be the best, but if I had to pick one, I would go with substance painter.
You really want both. You need designer to create new substances for painter to use. If I had to pick one though, I’d probably go with designer.
Both, their really part of a package… They’re both REALLY good!
I say both,
Substance live!
It’s an awesome deal
and listen to what john says
he’s totally right about that,
Substance designer and painter are like yin and yang
two things that you should use for different reasons
Buy the suite then you get the bump map creator as well and monthly substance drop and substance share access, they also do a nice rent to own option where you can pay monthly but you actually own the licence at the end which is a nice touch and you get access to the share right away I think. I’ve used painter far more than designer especially as you can bake everything in painter now and with smart materials you can actually essentially create new materials but they all good I think and affordable. I need to get into designer more at some point its really cool but I need to put some time aside to learn it.
I think it depends on what you need. If you can get both, definitely get both. I got both but I think I only needed painter, because I’ve barely even touched designer.
I just noticed I got it when I got the suite, seemed to work, didn’t really think about it much more than that 
I would say Live as well. Both are pretty useful. Designer for environment and procedural stuff, you can even make stuff like eyeballs and hair where you can expose variables for color and stuff to easily export new textures when you need them.
Painter for character models or other things where you want to paint directly on your models with the built in tools or materials made in Designer (or Painter for that matter). There are also tons of free materials you can get from Substance Share.
They are very different workflows though so you can try both and see what you like, there are 30 day fully functional trials available on their website.
If you have to pick just one, get Substance Painter. Substance Designer is for designing substances, Substance Painter is for applying them. But really I would recommend to get the Substance Indie Pack when it’s on sale.
I did not know that they had a suite. I will check that
Thanks for all of you that replied. Based on your advices, i will by the Substance live package.
Mind if I ask in this thread?
Is there a free piece of software similar to Substance Painter?
You could try the projection painting in blender. It’s not great though and I would probably do it in a 2d software like Krita instead of it (if I didn’t have Substance Painter).