This is true for any screenspace rendition of a pantone colour regardless of software. The Swatch libraries are in the ball park on screen colourwise, but it is the name of the spot colour that matters.
You can have a spot colour ‘Pantone 282 C’ which is dark blue. You can colour it bright pink in your artwork and send it to print. Your print will come back dark blue.
Similar to another poster, pretty much every job we print is CMYK. It’s more cost effective. Pantone can go and shite.
A general take on the situation.
… and even a bit more general take on the situation with Adobe, Pantone; their customers service and an apps as a service:
If you are looking for a job with a well-known company or want to work with a well-known company, you are screwed and doomed. If you’re a freelancer or working for a smaller company whose boss is flexible, you’re luckier and can use Affinity.
im interested if an open source alternative could come out of this… Im not sure i fully understand it, but what happens when monitor display technology reaches the color gamuts needed for rec2020, and at that point can a monitor display every color a human can see and then cant we just apply a hex code to each color? at that point as long as the manufacturer has a rec2020 display and the hex code they can exact color match the printed or manufactured output/paint. As long as everyones monitor is calibrated properly.
The problem is that display doesn’t really matter here, it just matters what gets sent to the printer in the end. Pantone uses closely guarded, trade-secret formulas to convert digital color to physical color. Without access to those formulas, or without a different printing standard, the digital color is entirely irrelevant. Currently, you can use Photoshop “without” Pantone and all your digital colors will just be black, but they’ll still print in the correct Pantone colors.
Essentially, industrial printing is like a toaster that will only toast Pantone bread. It’s a deeply stupid system, and I also hope that there’s a better answer soon, but it’s going to take a sea change in the industrial printing industry for that to be possible
And it’ll likely be a slow, painful transition over time, assuming it happens at all. The print industry could try ripping off that band-aid quickly, but they’d have to deal with the consequences over time, meaning that we’ll have weirdly colored magazines and newspapers while they all randomly pick from one of hundreds of alternatives. What was once a convenient process built around a single standard will become a massive clusterscrew, as businesses will have to ask all their various clients to convert their work to use X color grading. And God have mercy on design studios that contract out to various publishers. They’ll have to use 10 different grading schemes just to keep up with all the various standards.
Chances are better than good that most of them will just try to take the gouging just to keep from upsetting their business.
I used to be the king of two color back in the 90s. I haven’t done a spot color job in ages other that for logos. Even then the clients probably used the RGB and CMYK versions. 4 color is amazingly cheap and the majority of communications is probably onscreen at this point. Pantone is probably seeing the handwriting on the wall.
We have one of these at my work:
Yep, we spent almost $2000 to get a physical representation of all of the pantone colors. It’s about way more than just printing.
I work in commercial display fabrication, so we need to make furniture and cabinetry that sometimes needs to match client colors. Sometimes that is mixing paint, sometimes it’s picking the closest laminate chip, or powdercoating color or multilayer wood stain treatment.
Having a physical chip of color to compare to is where the rubber hits the road. When a client specifies PMS 180c, you know exactly what color you need to match. Re-work is expensive, and spending $2000 for a guarantee that the client is going to get the color they expect is worth it.
The subscription model is of course ridiculous, but so is paying $2000 for a few books with colored squares in them, so I guess I’m not that surprised.
This whole thing reminds me of the current Ticketmaster debacle. Everyone saying “just don’t pay for Pantone colors, it’s that easy” is missing the crucial part- no one wants to pay for them, you just don’t have a choice 
if you need them, you need them, and because Pantone has a monopoly, any personal feelings or reservations are entirely moot. I agree, though, (with an earlier poster) that the end of Pantone is coming. I don’t think we’ll see it this decade. Maybe not this century. But eventually, slowly, and agonizingly, things will shift.
It’s a shame the Justice Department isn’t investigating Pantone like they are TicketMaster, but maybe someday. I can dream 
