After decades of using Adobe, I’ve finally made the switch away.
If you’re not familiar, Adobe Creative Cloud is without question the industry standard for graphic design software and it’s been a huge part of my work for years. But as great as it is, it’s also pretty expensive. At around £65 per month for a licence, it adds up fast.
I’ve had a sneaky eye on Affinity for a while with some incredible designers I admire like Ian Barnard and James Martin saying how great it is. After doing a bit more research, I discovered that Affinity offers direct alternatives to Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, which are the three tools I use most.
When one of my client contracts ended recently, where they had been covering my Adobe licence, I decided now was time to take the leap. I picked up the full Affinity suite for around £160 as a one-off, lifetime licence. Compared to Adobe’s ongoing fees, that was an absolute bloomin bargain.
Things were going smoothly until about a month ago when Affinity suddenly pulled all their products from sale and closed their store. That caused a fair bit of panic online (and with me!), with people wondering what was going on. A bit of context: Affinity was bought by Canva a couple of years ago, so everyone assumed this meant a switch to a subscription model or worse, that the products were being discontinued.
Then last week, Affinity made a surprise announcement that the new Version 3 would be completely free. That’s right, free.
Now, you might think I’d be frustrated after having just paid for my licence, but honestly, I’m not. The one-off cost was not much less than what I would have paid Adobe for a couple of months and I genuinely believe in what Affinity is doing. I’m happy to support them.
So far, I’ve replaced Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign with Affinity, and I’ve switched to ON1 as my alternative to Lightroom. Like Affinity, ON1 is really affordable, around £60 for a licence and I’m really liking it.
After a few months of working with both tools, I can honestly say I haven’t come across anything I can’t do that I could in Adobe. The only thing missing in Affinity’s previous version (V2) was the AI-powered tools like generative fill and expand, but ON1 already has these features. And Affinity’s new version now includes them for Canva Pro users too anyway.
Yeah, of course I’m cautious about the whole “free” model and what it might mean long term. But overall, I think this is fantastic news for the creative community. It opens the door for new designers and students to access professional-grade tools that were previously out of reach due to cost. I can’t wait to see the amazing work that comes out of this!
For me, I’m all in. Affinity has genuinely impressed me, and I’m not going back to Adobe anytime soon. I’ll probably do a follow up in a year and we can see if I still feel the same…