Why does Illustrator's Image Trace produce so many anchor points?

Image Trace's classical edge-detection over-traces soft anti-aliased edges in AI-generated art. Vectify's AI model recognizes shape intent and produces minimal anchor counts.

Do I need Illustrator after vectorizing with Vectify?

No. Vectify exports clean SVG, EPS, and DXF directly. You can also recolor and edit paths inside the built-in browser editor without Illustrator.

Vectify vs Adobe Illustrator Image Trace

Adobe Illustrator's Image Trace is included in every Creative Cloud subscription, so it's the default choice for many designers. But Image Trace was designed in the era of hand-drawn and scanned art. On modern AI-generated logos with anti-aliased edges and complex gradients, it often produces messy paths with hundreds of unnecessary anchor points. Vectify's AI tracing was built specifically for this kind of input.

Anchor-point efficiency: Image Trace tends to over-detect edges in soft AI-generated artwork, producing jagged paths that take extensive manual cleanup. Vectify's AI model identifies the underlying shape intent and produces minimal-but-faithful Bezier curves, which scale cleanly to billboard size.
Color fidelity: Image Trace uses a fixed color quantization step that often merges similar colors or splits a single brand color into multiple paths. Vectify preserves color regions with higher fidelity, which matters for brand colors, gradients, and metallic effects.
Workflow: Image Trace requires Illustrator (a $22.99/month subscription) plus the time to learn the tool and clean up traces manually. Vectify runs in any browser, takes seconds, and exports SVG, EPS, and DXF in one click.
Illustrator Image Trace: requires Creative Cloud subscription, manual trace cleanup
Vectify: browser-based, instant, includes built-in editor
When to choose Illustrator Image Trace: If you already pay for Creative Cloud and your input is high-contrast hand-drawn art, Image Trace can produce solid results — especially when you're comfortable manually adjusting threshold, paths, and anchor count.
When to choose Vectify: If your input is an AI-generated PNG and you need a clean print-ready vector quickly without buying Illustrator or learning trace presets, Vectify is the faster, cheaper choice.