Affinity Just One-Upped Adobe So Hard
Today, Affinity announced a new version of their popular art suite—which includes pixel and vector image editing and desktop publishing tools comparable to Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign—and they made a huge splash by revealing that the new version is free (with an optional Canva Pro subscription that enables generative AI features).
I’ve seen an awful lot of internet rage about this announcement today, and frankly, the reaction confounds me. (Yes, I see the AI thing. We’ll get to that.)
Some background:
- Affinity has long been known as one of the few remaining tech companies who sell their software for a one-time purchase that grants a perpetual license, which stands in stark contrast to Adobe’s mandatory Creative Cloud subscription. This has long been a much-beloved selling point.
- Affinity was acquired by Canva in early 2024. At that time, Canva made four pledges to the Affinity community: that perpetual licenses would always be offered and pricing would always be fair and affordable; that Affinity “is here to stay” and would accelerate the rollout of new features; that Affinity would be made available at no charge to non-profits and schools; and that Affinity’s future would be guided by community feedback.
Most of the FUD I’ve seen so far centers around the idea that this is the first step of Canva enshittifying Affinity. That seems to be manifesting itself in two broad arguments:
- It’s free for now… but for how long, and what happens if/when Canva decides to start turning the screws on their “free” customers?
- Canva’s generative AI is now a part of Affinity, and that’s made a bunch of folks very, very angry.
Okay, I hear you on both counts, but let’s take a breath and, like, actually game this out a bit?
It’s free… for now
Affinity offers alternatives to Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, and as of this announcement, those now come completely free of charge. By comparison, licensing those three apps from Adobe requires a $60/person/month Creative Cloud subscription which must be kept up in perpetuity.
Even if (or when) Affinity starts pulling things back behind the paywall—say, a year or two from now—there is a long way between today’s “free” and Adobe’s $60/person/month, within which Affinity will still be a vastly better deal than Creative Cloud.
(Note: If your alternatives are open-source software like Krita, Inkscape, and Scribus, and those actually serve your needs, then by all means, live your truth; I’m not gonna stop you. But for all that those tools are great, they’re still not up to par for my needs as an editor and designer for a publishing company, and that means I’m looking at this from the perspective of someone who’s still trapped in the Adobe monopoly.)
I realize that after a decade of relentless enshittification we’ve all learned to be suspicious of “free”. We say if you’re not paying, you’re the product; we assume they’re secretly (or openly) harvesting all our data to sell to advertisers and/or to train AI models; we expect the designed dependency and platform lock-in to hit fast and hard.
So yeah, I’m sure some kind of catch is coming. I’m just not convinced it’s worth pre-emptively burning Affinity to the ground, nor am I convinced it’s likely to be anything Adobe hasn’t already been abusing us with for years.
(Note that that doesn’t justify or excuse any future abuse by Affinity—abuse is always bad!—but it does mean Adobe’s going to have to work damn hard to tip the value proposition back in their favor, and in the meantime, we professional creatives benefit from the competition.)
It has AI, which we hate
Look, I’m not gonna defend generative AI here; it’s built on stolen art, it’s an environmental disaster, it’s decimating the labor force, it’s accelerating fascism, and it’s driving people to psychosis and suicide. Period.
But I will note that if you don’t want AI in the new Affinity, it turns out you can simply not pay for it, and then it will not be there! All the generative AI features are locked behind a paid Canva Pro subscription, and AI features are currently the entire value proposition for opening your wallet. This is manifestly not a case of “ramming AI down our throats”.
And you know what? That’s honestly way better than I expected from a company with Canva’s reputation.
Would it be better if generative AI didn’t exist at all? Sure! But sadly, we don’t currently live in that magical world of unicorns, fairies, and healthy shared morals and ethics. For the reality we actually inhabit, what we’ve gotten here is pretty damn impressive when you consider how else this might’ve gone: Affinity—which, again, is owned by Canva—is, miraculously, AI-free by default.
You know what’s not AI-free, no matter how you slice it? Adobe Creative Cloud.
The single-app design is a technical coup
Prior to today’s announcement, Affinity V2 was three separate apps:
- Affinity Photo (sub for Photoshop)
- Affinity Designer (sub for Illustrator)
- Affinity Publisher (sub for InDesign)
Today’s new Affinity is a single app that integrates all three experiences into one seamless workflow. There’s no transferring your file between apps, no waiting for another app to launch, no files getting locked because they’re open in the other app; you can just do all the things. 🤯
I’ve spent most of the day testing out a bunch of my typical Adobe workflows in Affinity, and it’s honestly impressive how natural this integration is. Adobe’s tools immediately feel quaint by comparison. It won’t get adopted by the rest of the industry overnight, but I think this marks a major sea change in creative design UX.
Conclusion
I’ll stress again here that I’m not defending generative AI in any way.
But I do feel like a bunch of folks saw the letters “AI” in the announcement today and immediately threw the baby out with the bathwater in their haste to be conspicuously angry on the internet, and I think that’s a shame, because Affinity’s just shipped an extremely exciting product which deserves recognition on its own merits.
And all the hand-wringing over it being free—about “what’s the catch?”—is, well, fine so far as it goes, but it seems awfully premature to me. I’m just saying we might all feel a little better if we could inhabit the good thing we have today, and put off raging about an imagined future until that future actually arrives.
Anyway, we’ll see if my first impressions hold over the coming weeks, but I’m really optimistic that my Adobe shackles have finally been broken.