Is Template Creator CK a better choice than...

Personally, I have used artisteer up until 4.0 (template toaster seems to be almost an exact duplicate of artisteer and would appear to be run by several ex-artisteer workers).
I switched over to Template Creator CK and do not regret t in the slightest.
IMO, artisteer is too quirky, and although there are several features which are pretty damned good (like the ability to export the same template for joomla, wordpress, php, html etc), it just doesnt hold up to Template Creator CK.
That being said, there are a few features that I wish Template Creator CK had, but you will find that support here is flawless, and if ced1870 likes an idea you have, it will probably end up in Template Creator CK within a few weeks. Even if he thinks the idea is unnecessary, he will very quickly give you the necessary CSS/code to get what you want.

Just my 2 cents

I agree. I used Artisteer for many sites since just after it was first released, and it worked very well for some things, especially for making templates across many CMSs.

But for Joomla template creation, CK is far superior, more intuitive, more flexible, and just makes more sense. It is platform independent, whereas Artisteer has abandoned the Mac. It implements Bootstrap, which Artisteer doesn't yet. Artisteer does a poor job of keeping up with the latest Joomla versions, perhaps because they are spread too thin across too many CMSs, whereas CK is always up to date. CK doesn't crash (Artisteer does constantly, you just learn to put up with it and save often). And the developer is much more responsive.

And now, since Artisteer decided to make fighting piracy a higher priority than usability for legitimate users, they have made Artisteer virtually unusable.

In every way, for Joomla templating, CK is now the gold standard

thank you for your opinion
just a question, you are talking about multiple CMS, this means that you all are working with other CMS too ?
just because I'm curious
CEd

I also work with WordPress and MediaWiki, but there are good tools for WP, so I am very content to have CK specific to Joomla. I think trying to be all things to all people was one of the downfalls of Artisteer.

can I ask you what you are using on WP ?

Well, I had been using Artisteer, before they decided to stick it to their customers, causing me to let my subscription lapse.

Since then (last summer), I haven't had to do much template work on our WP sites, which tend to be more static than our Joomla sites. But I have played with a number of free online WP theme generators (just google WordPress theme generator and you'll see a bunch of them, there seems to be a lot more options than for Joomla). I haven't settled on one yet, but many seem reasonably useful.

I also hear good things about Template Toaster, but haven't tried it yet. But now that I am so happy with CK for Joomla, I'll probably just use one of the free ones for WP next time I need it.