When it comes to machine embroidery, owning and knowing how to use your embroidery software really expands your creative possibilities. But it can be a little overwhelming sorting through exactly what you need. Some software comes with your embroidery machine, some you can get for free, and some you can buy for thousands of dollars!
To make matters more confusing, not all embroidery software does the same thing! Some software is for organizing your designs, some for editing, and some for creating original embroidery designs (digitizing).
Therefore, if you are going to invest in embroidery software, I encourage you to do your homework. However, the two suites of products that I recommend most often are from S&S Computing and Embrilliance. These programs are inexpensive and fairly user-friendly and take care of the most common tasks you will need in your machine embroidery endeavors.
Embrilliance is a suite of products that run natively on a MAC or a PC. They allow an embroiderer to accomplish a variety of tasks – everything from editing to organizing to creating original designs.
Embrilliance has a proprietary font format – BX – which makes it easy for embroiderers to build names, words and monograms.
There is actually a FREE version of Embrilliance – Express that you can download and use to build letter-based designs with BX fonts. I highly recommend it!
S&S Computing also offers a suite of products for editing, organizing and creating embroidery designs. However, the programs only run natively on a PC. You must have an emulator program for a MAC to run them.
S&S’s flagship program: SewWhat-Pro is a little powerhouse – packed with embroidery editing features at a very small price tag.
You can actually download any of the S&S programs for free and try them for 30 days before you purchase the license. Some of the features during this trial period are a little limited but it will give you a sense for whether you like it and will use it or not.