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   Canva's Affinity Combines Photo, Designer, and Publisher into One Free App

   Adam Engst

   The market for high-end graphic design software just got weirder.

   Several years ago, I wrote '[1]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 [2]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 '[3]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 [4]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[5]privacy preferences in your Canva accountlet 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), Portrait Blur, Portrait Lighting,
   Colorize, Super Resolution, and Select Sampled Depth.

   'Studios' 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 [6]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 can tell, 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.

References

   Visible links
   1. https://tidbits.com/2022/12/05/consider-switching-from-creative-cloud-to-affinity-v2/
   2. https://www.canva.com/
   3. https://tidbits.com/2024/04/01/canva-acquires-the-affinity-suite-of-professional-design-apps/
   4. https://www.affinity.studio/
   5. https://www.canva.com/settings/privacy-preferences
   6. https://talk.tidbits.com/t/the-new-affinity-is-out/32246/12?u=ace

   Hidden links:
   7. https://tidbits.com/uploads/2025/10/Affinity-Generative-Edit-scaled.jpg

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