Originally published at: Canva’s Affinity Combines Photo, Designer, and Publisher into One Free App - TidBITS
The market for high-end graphic design software just got weirder.
Several years ago, I wrote “Consider Switching from Creative Cloud to Affinity V2” (5 December 2022) to encourage those who were paying significant monthly fees to Adobe for Creative Cloud to check out a competing trio of apps from a company called Serif. Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher gave Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign a run for their money. They may not have fully matched up to Adobe’s powerhouse apps, but they were close, and the cost was a fraction of Creative Cloud. Pricing has varied a bit between versions and during sales, but a one-time purchase has typically been less than two or three months of the $54-per-month Creative Cloud subscription I was paying for at the time; Creative Cloud is now $69.99 per month.
In 2024, Serif was acquired by Canva, a leading online tool for lightweight design tasks in a collaborative environment. The acquisition seemed to make sense, since Canva’s online tools couldn’t serve professional designers who needed native software capable of precise specifications and long documents. (And, presumably, Serif’s owners felt that selling to Canva was more profitable than staying independent.) The addition of the Affinity tools allowed Canva to keep users within its subscription fold even if they outgrew Canva’s tools (see “Canva Acquires the Affinity Suite of Professional Design Apps,” 1 April 2024). At the time, Canva promised to offer affordably priced perpetual licenses forever, expand and enhance the Affinity products, provide Affinity for free to schools and nonprofits, and listen to and be led by the design community.
Canva has just announced the next big thing for the Affinity apps. The company is replacing Photo, Designer, and Publisher with a single desktop app called Affinity, available for free on macOS (Apple silicon and Intel) and Windows, with iPadOS promised soon. That’s impressive, but nothing in this world is really free. Using the new Affinity app requires a Canva account, which is causing conniptions among a vocal subset of users in the Affinity Discord community who would prefer the promised perpetual license to a free app that requires an online account. You can choose not to share usage data with Affinity, and privacy preferences in your Canva account let you specify which other data-sharing and AI-training options you’re willing to allow. You must be online to download and activate Affinity with your free Canva account, but once activated, the app works offline. Features like help documentation, stock libraries, and Canva AI integrations require an Internet connection.
Unlocking Canva AI tools within the Affinity app requires a Canva premium plan (Pro, Business, Enterprise, or Education). Along with the Canva AI “studio,” a premium plan is required for the Depth Estimation, Colorization, and Super Resolution machine learning models. The Canva AI tools include Object Selection, Generative Expand, Generative Fill, Generative Edit (shown below winterizing a summer photograph), Portrait Blur, Portrait Lighting, Colorize, Super Resolution, and Select Sampled Depth.
“Studios” (the buttons at the top, which the user can choose to hide or display) are essentially toolsets that match the previous Photo (Pixel), Designer (Vector), and Publisher (Layout) apps, plus new sets for Slice, Canva AI, Retouching, Color Grading, Typography, and Compositing. Some users will undoubtedly feel that Affinity is overloaded with features they have no use for, but others will appreciate not having to send data back and forth between the apps. If you only need tools for one discipline, you can work entirely within a single studio (Pixel, Vector, or Layout) and ignore the others. My understanding is that the apps had extensive shared code, so it may have been efficient for the Affinity developers to combine everything into a single tool once there was no business advantage to selling three separate apps. The new app is 3.5 GB on disk, whereas each of the three previous apps was 2.88 GB.
From what I hear, the new Affinity app offers all the same features as V2 of Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher. The new app can open files from previous apps, but its files are not backward-compatible with older apps; those apps remain functional but will no longer receive updates.
