Affinity's Adobe-rivaling creative suite is now free for six months

Adobe vs Affinity:

Is Photoshop better than Photo? Yes, but not by much.

Is Illustrator better than Design? Yes, but not by much.

Is there an annoying learning curve? Yes, but not by much.

I've put the investment into becoming proficient in Affinity and there's no looking back for me. Adobe's pricing, feature roadmap, and general performance are not even close to being worth 10x the price. If Adobe's suite was 2x, I probably wouldn't have switched, but at this point they're just squeezing small creators like myself.

And tbh now that I'm proficient with the Affinity UX, I doubt I'd switch back. It's really good!

And in some ways, Affinity's tools can even be superior (performance, ui smoothness, and even how vector art works). If you're living with a pirated version of CS5 or 6, it's worth coming in from the cold and trying Affinity.

I've been using Affinity's suite exclusively for about 4 years now and I haven't looked back once. Briefly tried Photoshop again for the generative AI stuff and it was slow, unreliable and crashed multiple times.

HIGHLY recommend giving Affinity a shot, I've edited thousands of images with Photo and I can't imagine using anything else now.

This has heightened my concerns, not allayed them. They have said perpetual licenses will always be an option but 1) I don’t trust corporate promises and 2) they could easily just price that out of reach to push people onto a subscription model. A six-month trial is a not a “try us” timeline, it is “make us indispensable” timeline. That’s a big up front loss of revenue for them which I only see them making back if they go for a higher-pressure pricing model.

I loved the Affinity Suite, but it’s such a shame that Linux isn’t supported or that it isn’t provided in a Wine-friendly distributable (a regular installer executable rather than a Windows App Store package).

Does anyone have insight on how this compares these days to Adobe's suite? Seems pretty competitive, but I'm not sure if you're getting 80% of the features for 30% of the cost or 50% of features for 50% of the cost.

Hoping that somebody takes on Sketchup, Autocad etc with a similar approach to licensing. Subscriptions suck for tools you use occasionally.

(Sketchup used to be like that until it was purchased by Tre-something).

Official release: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/press/newsroom/try-affinity...

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40906031)

They did a similar trial during covid which was what got me to try them out. Love their tools, except some of the magic tools aren't available in Designer and require Photo, which can be annoying for people who prefer just one.

Some excellent official tutorials, too:

https://youtu.be/6wfeMGwcF0c

I have been looking for Affinity Photo for a while - but can someone recommend a good alternative to lightroom? Perhaps something that integrate with Affinity reasonable well?

For mac. Plus points for linux support. Even more plus points if it can easily share the library between different devices.

I bought the Affinity suite during 2020 when I was exploring some hobbyist graphic design stuff. I still use it frequently.

I wonder what the goal is for making it free. Now that they're owned by Canva, are they slowly opening the door toward a freemium SaaS business model?

Unrelated but have any of you web software folks tried the latest dreamweaver? I'm old af and I used to love DW in the 90s and actually it's part of why I even know how to code(ish), I used it to teach myself (god bless you kevin lynch)...! anyway, I saw they still update it so I downloaded it just to see what it's like..Seems like they've really developed it well into a front end focused IDE, I can't say if it's good or not, but just from clicking around it felt pretty good... Thought I'd mention it. :)

I'm a little confused about Affinity Photo, the name implies it's supposed to be an equivalent to Lightroom, but the program functions more like Photoshop.

Is there a file browser with tagging, colors, flags, etc.. Or am I expected to manually open every RAW file as I go and use something else to manage them?

I did some test edits to a RAW file, closed it, and now looking at it again the history is blank and it seems to have reverted the changes. It looks like I have to destructively save the changes to the RAW file directly?

Curious.

Likelihood of them fixing bugs that have been outstanding for 6 years during a 6 month trial? Zero.

That's to say that if you try it and don't encounter any of the bugs—great. But if you try it and do encounter the bugs—they're generally unlikely to ever be fixed. In my experience as a user from day one.

Not a heavy graphic design user so would never consider an Adobe subscription, switched to Affinity for its low cost perpetual pricing which has been a great substitute for my needs, though still use Paint .NET for small edits.

Most of the functionality is there but it does a few things differently to Photoshop, fortunately there's a lot of resources in their docs, forums and YouTube videos to learn how it's done in Affinity.

Does Affinity Photo have photo library management support like Lightroom? e.g. pick/reject, tagging, rating etc.

Coming from Adobe Lightroom, I found Affinity Photo to be unusable. But I eventually switched from shooting RAW to shooting JPG, and now I just use files straight out of my Fuji cameras. As a busy parent I can't be bothered to edit anymore. I just shoot and post or shoot and print.

Extremely unfortunate that the article is littered with countless links, but none of them lead to the actual product page. Sure, I can guess what it is or look it up on search, but if you do a marketing stint, surely you'd want to link to the actual thing you're talking about.

Just a week after I paid for the suite! But it's been useful for my (very much non-artist) purposes so far, though like all photo editing software I've ever touched, it has a TON of features and is pretty overwhelming.

This is just for the Photo, Designer, and Publisher apps.

When will some organization agree to support Gimp, Inkscape, and Libreoffice Writer in the same capacity?

I would already prefer the free apps.

> This discount, alongside the six-month free trial, is potentially geared at soothing concerns that Affinity would change its pricing model after being acquired by Canva earlier this year.

This doesn't sooth my concerns. Why should it, when it's literally them switching to a subscription model. Nothing in the article says otherwise. Do we believe they'll build the infrastructure to support a SaaS, then turn it all off after this 6-month trial? It's not just for fun, they're clearly going to make it the primary way of paying for their products.

I bought all the Affinity apps (multiple versions) because I was specifically trying to escape Adobe Creative Cloud. Their software may not be as good as Adobe's, but Affinity's business model provided enough value on its own. I'm making some assumptions here, but come on, we know how this story usually plays out. Unless I'm wrong, I think this is probably a bad idea for users like me.

First time I've realised that affinity is made by the same people who did serif photoplus.

How does affinity compare to lightroom?

Didnt know about this, and I have started to loathe Adobe due to their licensing model. I will check Photo out!

I bought Affinity and have tried to use it but really don’t find it anything like equivalent to the Adobe products unfortunately.

For color correction of photographs, PhotoPea does a much better job than Affinity I feel.

After wasting 15 or 30 minutes trying to get Affinity to work for a photo touchup and color correction, I give up and use PhotoPea.

How is the plugin compatibility? Can I use CS6 or CC plugins in Affinity?

I would buy it just because it’s not Adobe.

Is Affinity draw better than Krita???

That's a clever move, kudos!

I really like Affinity, especially their buy it once pricing model, and I use Affinity Photo for all my photo editing. However, I was very disappointed to learn they were recently acquired by Canva, a company that is blatantly following the VC growth playbook. So I fear that sooner or later Affinity will fall victim to enshittification. It will either become exactly like Adobe is today or it will be sacrificed on the altar of ROI.