Affinity

Affinity has just done something remarkable: it became free. For years it was the great one-time-purchase alternative to Adobe — three professional apps (Photo, Designer and Publisher) you bought once and owned, with no subscription. Then Canva acquired it, unified those three apps into a single all-new Affinity, and made the whole thing free for everyone. Professional-grade photo, vector and layout tools, in one fast app, at no cost, with no restrictions. It is one of the most significant shifts the design-software world has seen, and it upends the calculation for anyone weighing up their options. In this review I look at what the new free Affinity offers, how it compares to Adobe, and who it is for.

The short version: Affinity is our pick for the best free Adobe alternative — and now that it is genuinely free, that recommendation is stronger than ever. It brings professional pixel, vector and layout tools together in a single responsive app, opens Adobe files, and costs nothing. It has a smaller plugin ecosystem than Adobe and a few niche gaps, but for the vast majority of professional and serious-hobbyist design work, it is astonishing value — because there is no cost at all.

Affinity at a glance

The free revolution

Let us start with the news, because it changes everything: Affinity is now free. After Canva acquired Serif, the maker of Affinity, it relaunched the software as a single all-new app available to everyone at no charge, backed by a public pledge to keep it free. Every tool in the pixel, vector and layout studios, all the customisation and export options — everything — is available without payment or restriction. This is not a crippled free tier designed to upsell you; it is the full professional product, given away. Canva funds it the way it funds Canva itself: the core is free, and it charges only for optional extras like its AI tools.

The significance is hard to overstate. Professional creative software has, for years, meant either an expensive Adobe subscription or Affinity’s one-time purchase. Now one of those two options costs nothing at all. For students, freelancers, small businesses and anyone who balked at Adobe’s monthly fees, a genuinely professional design suite is suddenly free to use, forever. It is a rare piece of unambiguously good news for creators, and it reshapes the whole value equation of this category.

One unified app

The other big change is that Affinity is now a single application rather than three. Where you once bought Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher separately, the all-new Affinity brings all three disciplines — raster photo editing, vector design and page layout — into one program, switching between Pixel, Vector and Layout “studios” as your task demands. This is genuinely convenient: you can retouch a photo, draw vector artwork and lay out a multi-page document without leaving the app or exporting between tools. For designers whose work spans these disciplines, having them unified in one fast, coherent environment is arguably a better experience than juggling Adobe’s separate Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.

Professional photo editing

Affinity’s pixel tools are a genuine Photoshop rival. You get professional raster editing with layers, masks, adjustment layers, blend modes, a full retouching toolkit, RAW processing, and support for high-bit-depth and wide-gamut work. Photographers and image editors have the controls they need for serious work — compositing, retouching, colour grading — and the performance is excellent, often noticeably snappier than Adobe on the same hardware. For the great majority of photo-editing tasks, from correcting and enhancing images to complex composites, Affinity’s pixel studio does the job to a professional standard, now at no cost.

Vector design and illustration

The vector studio is Affinity’s answer to Illustrator, and it is a strong one. You get precise pen and curve tools, boolean operations, professional typography, gradients, and the pixel-perfect control that vector work demands, all with the same responsive performance. Illustrators, logo designers and anyone producing scalable artwork have the toolset they need to work professionally. The ability to switch instantly into the pixel studio to add raster effects to a vector design, without exporting to another app, is a genuine workflow advantage that Adobe’s separate-apps model cannot match. For vector work, Affinity is more than capable of professional output.

Layout and publishing

The layout studio takes on InDesign, handling professional multi-page documents — books, magazines, brochures, reports — with master pages, text flow across frames, professional typography and print-ready output including colour management. What makes it special within the unified app is that you can drop into the pixel or vector studios to edit an image or create a graphic without leaving your layout, something that in the Adobe world means round-tripping between InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator. For anyone producing print or multi-page publications, this integrated approach is not just cheaper (free) but genuinely more efficient.

Adobe file compatibility and switching

A practical concern when leaving Adobe is your existing files, and Affinity handles this well. It can open and work with PSD (Photoshop), AI (Illustrator via PDF) and PDF files, so you are not locked out of your back catalogue or unable to collaborate with Adobe users. It is not always a perfect, lossless round-trip — some complex Adobe-specific features may not translate exactly — but for most files the compatibility is good enough to make switching realistic. Combined with the fact that the core skills transfer readily between the two, and abundant tutorials exist, moving from Adobe to the free Affinity is more approachable than you might expect.

Performance

Affinity has always prided itself on speed, and the all-new app continues that. It is engineered to be fast and responsive — smooth zooming and panning even on large, complex files, quick to launch, and light on system resources compared with the sometimes-sluggish Adobe apps. On the same computer, many users find Affinity simply feels quicker. For anyone working on modest hardware, or who is tired of watching progress bars, that responsiveness is a real, everyday quality-of-life benefit, and it means the free tool does not feel like a compromise in use.

Where Affinity still trails Adobe

Affinity is professional-grade, but it is not a total replacement for Adobe in every scenario. Its ecosystem of third-party plugins and integrations is much smaller, so specialist workflows that rely on particular Adobe plugins may not transfer. A handful of niche, high-end features in the Adobe apps do not yet have direct equivalents. There is no direct counterpart to Adobe’s video tools (Premiere, After Effects), so Affinity is a design suite, not an everything suite. And in industries where exchanging native Adobe files with clients and collaborators is unavoidable, Adobe fluency may still be required. These are real considerations — but for a great many users they will never bite, and the price difference (free versus a monthly subscription) is enormous.

Plans and pricing

The pricing could not be simpler: Affinity is free. You activate the app with a Canva account (free to create) and use it fully at no cost. The only paid element is optional: a paid Canva plan unlocks Canva’s AI tools, such as Generative Fill, inside Affinity for those who want them.

Against Adobe’s ongoing monthly subscription, “free” is an unbeatable proposition for the many people who found Adobe’s pricing hard to justify. The only thing to note is the Canva-account requirement and Canva’s stewardship of the product — but the company has publicly pledged to keep Affinity free, and for now the deal for users is simply outstanding.

Who Affinity is for

Choose Affinity if you want professional-grade photo, vector and layout tools without paying a subscription — which, now that it is free, means almost anyone doing serious design work. It is our pick as the best free Adobe alternative, ideal for freelancers and small businesses watching costs, students learning professional tools, photographers and illustrators, and anyone who resented Adobe’s monthly fees.

Look elsewhere if you need the very deepest professional features, video tools, or unavoidable Adobe file exchange (Adobe Creative Cloud), the easiest template-based everyday design (Canva, which now owns Affinity), or dedicated UI/UX design (Figma). See the full best design tools of 2026 ranking.

Learning Affinity and switching from Adobe

If you are coming from Adobe, the good news is that the core skills transfer. Layers, masks, the pen tool, blend modes, typography controls — the fundamental concepts are the same, so an experienced Photoshop or Illustrator user can become productive in Affinity quickly. There is an adjustment period as you learn where Affinity puts things and how its studios switch, but it is a matter of days, not months, for most people.

Affinity also has abundant learning resources — official tutorials and a large community producing guides and videos — so help is always at hand. Combined with the ability to open your existing Adobe files, this makes the switch far less daunting than it once seemed, and now that Affinity is free, there is no financial risk in simply trying it alongside whatever you use today.

The Canva connection

Affinity is now part of Canva, and that relationship shapes its future. Canva made Affinity free as part of a strategy to serve the whole spectrum of design — from Canva’s effortless template-based creation for everyone, up to Affinity’s professional-grade tools for serious designers. The two are complementary: Canva for quick, easy content; Affinity for precise, professional work.

The one thing to keep in mind is that Affinity’s direction is now Canva’s to set. So far the signals are strongly positive — a free professional app with a public pledge to stay free — and optional paid Canva AI tools inside Affinity are the clear monetisation path, rather than charging for the app itself. For users, the present reality is simply an outstanding free professional design suite.

Performance and system requirements

Affinity’s efficiency extends to its hardware demands: it runs well on modest, mainstream computers, not just high-end workstations. Where the heavier Adobe apps can bog down an older machine, Affinity tends to stay responsive, making professional design accessible to people who do not have a top-tier setup. For students, hobbyists and anyone on a normal laptop, this is a real, practical advantage — professional tools that do not require a professional’s hardware budget, at no software cost either.

Who Affinity is for

Affinity is now the natural choice for an enormous range of people: freelancers and small businesses who need professional design tools without a subscription, students learning industry-standard techniques, photographers and illustrators, and anyone who left — or never joined — Adobe because of its cost. With the price now zero, the barrier to entry has vanished entirely; there is no reason not to at least try it.

It is less suited to those who genuinely need the very deepest Adobe-specific features, a large third-party plugin ecosystem, video tools, or unavoidable native-Adobe file exchange with clients — for them Adobe Creative Cloud remains the standard. But for the great majority of design work — photo editing, vector illustration and page layout — Affinity now offers professional capability for free, which for most people is simply unbeatable.

What the free relaunch means for the industry

Affinity going free is bigger than one product update; it changes the economics of the whole design-software market. A credible, professional-grade alternative to Adobe now costs nothing, which puts real competitive pressure on subscription pricing and hands enormous value to creators — especially students, freelancers and those in regions where Adobe’s fees are prohibitive. For the first time, professional design capability is not gated behind a monthly bill.

For you as a user, the practical takeaway is simple: you can download a full professional design suite today, at no cost and no risk, and see whether it meets your needs. Given that there is nothing to lose, Affinity has become the obvious first stop for anyone who wants serious design tools without a subscription — and a genuine reason for even committed Adobe users to reconsider what they are paying for.

Getting started with Affinity

Getting started could not be easier: create a free Canva account, download the app for Windows or macOS, and you have the complete professional suite ready to use. There is no trial clock, no feature paywall for the core app, and no purchase to weigh — you simply start designing. Import an existing Adobe file to pick up where you left off, or begin fresh, and explore the pixel, vector and layout studios as your work requires.

Because there is no cost and no commitment, the sensible approach for anyone curious is just to try it on a real project and judge for yourself. For most design tasks you will likely find it does everything you need — and for the price of nothing, that makes Affinity one of the easiest software recommendations to make right now.

The verdict

Affinity was always the best value in professional design software. Now that it is free, it may be the best value in software, full stop. The all-new unified app brings professional photo, vector and layout tools into one fast, responsive program, opens Adobe files, and costs nothing at all. Its smaller plugin ecosystem and a few niche gaps mean it does not fully replace Adobe for every high-end professional, and it has no video tools — but for the enormous number of people who need capable, professional design software without a subscription, it is transformative.

If your work absolutely requires Adobe, Creative Cloud remains the standard. But for almost everyone else — and certainly for anyone who ever hesitated over Adobe’s price — the free Affinity is an extraordinary gift, and the one I now recommend to most people who want serious design tools without the serious cost.