Canva surprised a lot of people by making Adobe alternative Affinity free for all this week, and it quickly caused a stir among artists and designers. While some celebrate the appearance of a new free Photoshop alternative, others are wary and wonder what the catch is.
The new Affinity app combine the main tools and features from the previously separate programs Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher. Those three apps used to cost up to as much as $70 each. The new desktop app combines their pixel, vector and layout tools in one place, and it’s completely free. Has Christmas come early, or is it too good to be true?
The Australian design platform Canva bought Affinity’s developer Serif last year, but it didn’t change anything until this October. The Affinity website stopped sales, leading to a lot of speculation about what was coming.
Now that Canva has relaunched Affinity as a free app, and some are delighted. In the comments on our own Facebook post about the announcement, one person described it as the best news creatives have had for years.
Some can’t believe how much you can do now in free software. “I now use Affinity as a Photoshop, Illustrator, In Design alternative, ComfyUI and Krita for generative AI. Free Davinci Resolve for video, free and open source Darktable as a Lightroom alternative and Blender for 3D. It’s unreal that these design tools are free,” one person writes.
Of course, there’s a difference between Krita and Blender, which are free and open source, and Canva, which belongs to a profit-making company. A natural suspicion of big corporations is causing some to worry about what the new Affinity will become. What’s in it for Canva?
Theories abound. Some think the app will start to show adverts like many free mobile apps do. Others think it will be used to train AI (something Canva denies). Some wonder if Canva’s just doing it to spite Adobe. “Their objective was to undermine Adobe, not provide for paying customers. Revenge instead of progress,” one person thinks.
Others fear Affinity’s tools will be left to stagnate. “If you depend on a software for your design work it needs to be regularly updated and developed. Free software never has that pressure and priority to be kept top notch,” one person writes.
And some still fear that the road towards mandatory subscriptions is marked. “They lock you into their ecosystem with the ‘free’ version, and then some months or a year into the future the enshittification starts and suddenly you will have to pay a subscription if you want to use your projects,” one reader predicts.
There’s inevitably also a lot of debate about AI. The new Affinity app doesn’t have its own generative AI tools, but Canva’s wider programs do. It’s just launched what it’s calling its new Creative Operating System, built on what it says is the world’s first AI model created specifically for design.
Premium Canva subscribers will be able to AI tools like Generative Fill directly in the Affinity app. It seems the company is using Affinity as a loss leader to expand its market share in the hope that at least some of those users will choose to buy a subscription for the AI tools.
For some, the lack of AI means free Affinity alone isn’t an option. “In the professional world, AI features are a necessity. That turns Affinity into subscription. That’s not how you get Adobe customers to switch!” one person thinks.
Some welcome Canva’s approach to AI with Affinity: let those who want it pay for it, while everyone else can use the app for free. But some of those who are most vehemently opposed to AI see a moral hypocrisy in using an app that’s being subsidised by the tech.
“If you have a problem with AI, your entire DCC is funded by users of it,“ one person writes. ”That’s an issue for a lot of people.”
Things have even drifted towards a more philosophical debate about the meaning of the word ‘free’. Is having to sign up to Canva and provide your name and email address a kind of payment in itself?
I have to admit that I was among those looking for the catch, but I’ve been using the new Affinity casually for a day, and my first impression is generally positive. The app works smoothly and I’ve been able to find most of the tools I’d expect, including masks, adjustment layers and retouching tools.
It feels wild being able to edit a PDF document in the same app where I can process raw photos and also create composite images for social thumbnails. Raw editing feels a bit clunky, and I’d miss the efficiency of Lightroom, but for the things I’d use Photoshop for it seems solid.
There are still strong reasons that many Creative Cloud users will stick to Adobe. The Firefly AI tools for a start, and there’s the likelihood of more regular updates – just this week Adobe announced the launch of an AI assistant in Photoshop along with personalised AI image generators for brands and artists.
Many people will need tools that Affinity doesn’t have, like video editing and motion graphics, for which Adobe has Premiere and After Effects, but those who only work with still graphics and don’t want AI may find that Affinity is all they need.
Affinity is available for Windows and Mac from the website. Canva says an iPad version is on the way.
