Pages vs In Design

If you parked a Volkswagen Beetle next to a Mercedes, would that answer your question? All of the releases of Pages to date, including the current 8.1 version, have been intended by Apple as consumer word processing applications with limited Desktop Publishing (DTP) features. This is not to say that it has been used for professional work, where MS Word, or Scrivener, or better suited tools should have been used. You wouldn't have to read too much of Apple's Pages marketing content in contrast to Adobe InDesign to understand the product capabilities and target users.

Some have retreated back to MS Word, and others have realized that the control over fonts, text, color model, and content simply cannot compete with InDesign, or the new non-subscription, Affinity Publisher ($49.99) in the Mac App Store. Both of the latter can product professional (PDF/A, PDF/X) standards PDF documents and neither Pages, nor Apple's PDF framework can do that. A big factor when choosing a commercial printer.

The free nature of Pages has its allure, but you need to be honest with yourself about your end goal, and the tools that you choose to get there. InDesign has a lengthy learning curve, and there is that issue about the subscription model. I own all of the Mac-based Affinity products which are designed to interoperate together, without a subscription model, or exorbitant entry cost. Affinity has labored for years to produce Affinity Publisher, and without a dime of compensation from the vendor, I can say that it can go up against InDesign and Quark for capability. There is a free trial from Affinity's website. It is not however, a word processing application, but rather, pure DTP in nature.