I think the closest things on the market currently to taking over Serum is VPS Avenger (which is really good BTW), and Phase Plant (which is still a bit young but has tremendous promise).

However a merely OK synth isn't going to kill Serum.

I'm not saying Pigments a bad synth, it's OK, and the price is right at least right now while it's on sale. The only real advantage Pigments seems to have is sample playback and granular synthesis. The modulation and stuff looks better, and easier to work with then Serum but eventually not going to make big enough of a difference. You can even morph wavetables, or import your own. It features a twin audio engine, letting you mix virtual analog and wavetable oscillators to create the perfect starting point for your patch. Having 2 filters is nice, but probably not enough of a consideration because of the engine count. Pigments by Arturia (199) Pigments is an immensely powerful wavetable and virtual analog software synthesizer. Your ability to add noise is really limited too, where in Serum you can load custom noise samples and in Pigments you can't unless you sacrifice an engine to do it. But many patches sound thin because of this design, because you can't layer in base in the same patch like you can in Serum. You only get 2 engines, although to be fair you can have up to 6 analog oscillators. Pigments is different, and for the worse in my opinion. Mix in customer friendly way to buy it through Splice and it's hard to beat. It's sort of stood the test of time and has large amounts of presets and tutorials so it's a great synth to learn for newcomers. Shame the GUI is so tiny though.People are still making lots of music with Serum and will be for a long time. Vember Audio Surge is free-ware now so I grabbed that real quick. Not enough of an update versus the old Massive seemingly like _ffx said. Massive X seems to be getting a lot of negative feedback, well maybe not negative but more like dissapointment. Had a quick google of Phase Plant there, lotta good things said about it, seems like it’s pretty powerful. In the meantime I’m just looking for something to scratch the sound design itch, and something which I can get lots of mileage out of over the course of time and come back to again and again. I could potentially spend a year or two, maybe more, just learning to build in Reaktor without actually creating much or any music, and I dunno if I want to give up that much of my time without much musical output. The learning curve for me for primary and core is very steep, and I’m not still not sure if it’s the right path for me to go down. Was just starting to learn how to build in primary and core, but I’ve decided to put it off for a while till I get my current projects finished so then I can focus solely on learning it without distraction.

Xfer serum vs arturia pigments