The all-new Affinity is available today for Mac and Windows, with iPad coming soon.
Source: Canva
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All the v2 versions are on iPad, have been since v1. Feature parity with the desktop versions too, interfaces are of course a little different. I have full confidence the current v3 will soon be on iPad too. Utill then, v2 versions are plenty powerful.
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Their business approach is somehow like Obsidian, in which without pay I can enjoy full features including sync. By increasing the number of users, more users will need some paid services like the built-in sync and publishing.
And I like Affinity CEO is still here (he was on another video showcasing v3), not fully replaced by Canva.
The opposite approach is Bending Spoon: laying off almost all previous staff and CEO, cropping free versions and pushing up prices. I only hear the ongoing news of development on Evernote, among many apps they have bought.
Although no one knows what will happen next, Affinity has its potential now especially when Adobe is getting more greedy. At least indie artists, illustrators, zine publishers, some freelancers and small companies will head towards Affinity instead of Adobe: Adobe’s price is too high and TOS is too harsh (e.g. cancellation fee).
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When I posted about trolling my desktop for AI, I didn’t mean that as snarky as it probably read. Every advertising billboard you see is trolling for customers.
My remaining doubts about Canva come from the way they cut off users for the month of October. My choice would have been to say creative freedom comes on the 30th and on top of that, Affinity V2 is free, too.
That would have created hype and a rush to grab Affinity V2 lest the 30th bring bad news.
In the meantime, there’s a vast unaddressed market a dedicated marketeer could really leverage.
I speak of homeopathic remedies for stress-onset incontinence. There’s a whole C-suite full of execs at Adobe in need of relief now that Affinity is free. There’s no cure for what ails them, of course, so homeopathy is firmly indicated.
Because therapy that cures nothing has got to be great for maladies with no cure!
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Going back to basics, pay once apparently wasn’t sustainable in the long run. So… all things must change?
That was my understanding, though I never actually tested only installing Publisher. But I think my point stands - there was one app that did all three things. Maybe it had some different install requirements, and it definitely had some different license requirements. But the “Persona” selection in “Affinity” is a direct descendant of the one in Publisher.
Meanwhile… I’m off to use my new app that is both free and I also helpd pay for (most of the development of it). You’re welcome, newcomers.
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You choose to believe whatever you want, of course. My experience of corporate takeover never ended well for any product I liked and used (ZBrush, Substance Painter, Autodesk Fusion (T-splines add-on) hell, even Photomator and Pixelmator so far), and they sure as heck weren’t thinking about your best interests when making it “free”, but rather to yank a few adobe users and try to disrupt their dominance.
I wouldn’t mind to be proven wrong, time will tell. Short of using open source alternatives something like this is bound to eventually happen to any decent proprietary software.
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We can choose what to believe, but, for example, none of the “never ended well” apps you mentioned are ones I have ever heard of, so my experience is completely outside of yours. In other words, neither of us know the full story of what has happened.
Now… I have heard of Photomator and Pixelmator, but your assertion that it “hasn’t ended well… so far” is part of the problem I’m calling out here. Nothing has changed yet. And here we are saying bad things have happened. They haven’t. Some people just expect them to happen.
We should, I believe, stick to “that sucked” and steer clear of “this will suck” when we don’t actually know what will happen.
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I am not convinced this shares the usual risks of “free” software. After all - Adobe rose to its current prominence by offering a free Adobe Reader. Indeed Adobe still offers that.
Adobe realized early on that to become a de facto standard, there had to be a universal free way for anyone to read pdf documents. The built an empire charging money for Adobe Acrobat Pro and other advanced offerings - but there was always a free Adobe Reader in order to share documents with the world.
It seems to me Affinity is now doing the same thing - hoping .afphoto, .afdesign, and .afpub similarly take hold as a universal format to share. In order to do so the basic Affinity app must be free.
At the same time, Affinity realizes that there is likely to be a major market of users willing to pay for AI features to make the creative process quicker/easier/faster/better. So they are betting that making non-AI Affinity free will create income by converting customers to paid AI users.
If this plan works it could be a win-win for everybody except Adobe. If it prompts Adobe to rethink their pricing/marketing strategy that could be a terrific example of the free market in action.
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There was a time when pretty much everyone in the professional graphics industry paid many $hundreds for one or more Adobe products. Many companies in that space were paying many $thousands because they had several people who needed to use them.
That cash cow stopped being so productive when printed newspapers, magazines, printed brochures etc. began to diminish as they were partly replaced by the web. Like many things web, it was done much cheaper with a lot of design being passed to freelancers and semi-pro folks who had no choice but to work for cheap. Those people could not afford to buy Adobe software, partly because they had no idea how much they’d make from it. They hung on to old versions of Adobe software for years and patched the holes with other software
That’s where Creative Cloud and subscriptions came in. Initially, you could get the Adobe software you needed for a low initial (even monthly) outlay, with much less risk. If the gig didn’t work out, you’d only paid a smallish sub. It won back a huge part of the now very different industry and protected Adobe’s revenue stream.
Adobe has been jacking up the prices ever since, making it very unattractive to subscribe for less than a year and having very strict terms (e.g. f you want to stop during the sub, you need to pay them a high proportion of the remaining period to buy yourself out)
Affinity offers a genuinely pro set of tools to do any graphic design and it’s available for free, forever. If they can win over education (who like free) a lot of freelancers and new designers will stick with it forever.
It will be interesting to see if this bold move pays off and especially what response Adobe makes. It’s the disruption that Silicon Valley often talks about, but what emerges is hard to predict.
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Just for the sake of historical accuracy, there was actually a time that Reader was not free.
OK good point.
That actually makes the comparison to Affinity even more applicable. Why did Adobe decide to release a free version of Reader? Because it was essential to promoting PDF as a universal standard.
How would adoption of PDF have been different if PDF readers remained paid software?
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Canva itself is very widely used in eduction, not the least because the pro version is free to K-12 teachers, institutions, and students.. Ditto non-profits.
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Agreed
I believe we are about to see some stunning competition/disruption between Affinity and Adobe. Get out the popcorn and enjoy free enterprise at work.
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I just signed up and also was able to sign up for free as an educator with Canva. Thank you for the good information. Much appreciated!
It depends on what you want the software to do.
Affinity Photo is more like Photoshop with its Camera Raw module than it is like Lightroom. Both have a module for basic RAW processing and another for layers-based pixel editing.
Like Photoshop, Affinity doesn’t have any catalogue management tools. I make extensive use of Lightroom’s catalogue tools, but I know plenty of people who don’t.
Lightroom (or the Camera Raw module embedded in Photoshop) has—for the moment at least—more powerful masking and distraction removal tools, including a generative fill option, than the free version of Affinity.
Ditto Photoshop. If you want to use tools like AI object selection, background removal, generative fill, generative expand, portrait blur, etc., you will need to pay $120 per year for them. (I gather than they aren’t as good as the Lightroom / Photoshop tools, though I assume they will improve.)
I’ve been grandfathered into Adobe’s $120 per year Lightroom + Photoshop bundle, and have absolutely no intention of jumping over to Affinity for photo processing. If I needed vector or layout tools, however, I’d certainly give Affinity a shot before I paid for Adobe Illustrator or InDesign.
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It will be really interesting to see what happens in the enterprise space. I wonder if it will sort out in a manner similar to the Microsoft Office / Google Workspace divide.
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I was using that plan for 10 (?) years, but as it came up for renewal this May, they had doubled the price. That’s when I moved fully to Affinity Photo for photo processing too. It is a full replacement for my compositing needs. A bit frustrating when some operations are done in other ways, but a small threshold to cross when you know your Photoshop.
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I cancelled my long-time Adobe subscription this week. Before I did I was offered a variety of discount plans including continuing my current plan at 50% off for 1 year if I stay.
I wonder if that is a recent change in Adobe policy or if that has been around long-term.
Well, I cancelled my Adobe subscription last week, too. Adobe wanted me to provide them with updated documents proving that I am still eligible for their charity discount (I still am, but the URL they sent me to was not working). Given the recent price increases, even the discounted Adobe products are quite expensive, so I decided just to cancel the subscription and not to bother dealing with Adobe customer support.
I am seriously considering moving my photography stuff to F(L)OSS. DigiKam and RawTherapee look promising, and yesterday I discovered Open Source Photography, an awesome blog with a lot of room for thought.
I bought Affinity’s apps a few years ago, but I did not use them much (because of Adobe), which may change now. I am hoping that FOSS will become more and more powerful and that commercial alternatives like Canva and hopefully Apple’s Pixelmator/Photomator will experience a bright future, too. I am not sure about how this will work out, but the Adobe way or the highway does not work for me any longer.
So, to have options is nice.
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My worst fears were unfounded, except for one. I feel orphaned without Affinity’s user forum.
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