Adobe vs Affinity | The Ultimate Guide

As your Adobe Creative Cloud subscription renewal approaches, the thought of exploring more cost-effective alternatives might be crossing your mind. In this video, we'll compare Adobe Creative Cloud and Affinity, two popular suites that cater to different needs and preferences.

Adobe Creative Cloud, an industry standard for decades, offers a vast range of applications spanning motion graphics, video editing, UI design, and more. On the other hand, Affinity, a newer suite owned by the UK-based company Serif, focuses on photo editing, vector graphics, and publishing.

This comparison will look at Lightroom and Photoshop vs. Affinity Photo, Illustrator vs. Affinity Designer, and InDesign vs. Affinity Publisher. Here's what we'll cover:

00:00 Introduction
00:59 Pricing
02:35 Adobe Photoshop vs. Affinity Photo
03:45 Adobe Lightroom vs. Affinity Photo
04:30 Adobe Illustrator vs. Affinity Designer
06:49 Adobe InDesign vs. Affinity Publisher
09:51 Which should you choose?
11:20 Conclusion

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[zeemon]

Suddenly this video became extremely relevant.

[manamedia]

Great review. We completely switched to Affinity Suite in 2021 and have never looked back. DaVinci Resolve is what we use in place of PP and AE.

[douglasmcarthur]

I bought Affinity because I deeply resent Adobe going to subscription only. I bought the Adobe suite for about £450 back in the 90's when I had a graphic design studio, then shortly after I closed that business my InDesign was somehow blocked because I was 'out of memory'. I had no choice but to go to subscription. So since then I have been paying monthly which over a year is more than I paid for my last full package. I shudder to think how much I have paid since then. I now write and produce books and I understand that Affinity can create layouts for printed books, I am not sure about ebooks. At 74 I am still learning!

[chocolatethunnderzzdahoodbrat]

You forgot to mention that if you’re are a designer looking for mobile capabilities affinity is the best option since it has all the tools as it would on the pc version and Adobe creative cloud is limited to certain features

[inSurfersParadise]

I detest Ransome ware.

Affinity took some getting used but I adjusted my thinking and it allowed me to radically upgrade my workflow and client offer. It is very fast and deals with very large PDFs that are larger than Adobe allows.

The compatibility of the files and consistent user experience in the three programs is excellent.

For my work it is a superior product.

[kevinhouse]

Hey there, nice comparison. My 2 cents as a professional freelance illustrator using mostly Affinity Designer for client work since 2014. Designer is what I use most and it has everything I need to get the job done. There are a few free or inexpensive vector tracers solutions available if I require that for a job once in a while and I don't miss those features that Illustrator has like blending or the ability to work with gradient meshes. In fact Designers ease and ability to work in raster format replaces the need for some of those "missing" Illustrator features most people bring up. The transparency tool is a big plus for my workflow with Designer and the way the layers panel works with nesting and masks is much less clunky than the layer mask workflow I remember from Illustrator (not sure if that has changed). I guess like you say it comes down to what type of work you do and if that pricing structure and working in a cloud is something you are okay with. For me I don't miss anything crucial and the Affinity line not only is up to the challenge, it often exceeds it.

[johnpeterson]

Now that Adobe has asserted what amounts to infinite rights over its users work product I think a lot of us are looking more and more for an effective escape from the Adobe ecosystem. It’s a shame to see this happen but I’m thankful that we now have some excellent alternatives.

[YvonneFrindle]

One area where Affinity Publisher runs rings around InDesign is optical margin alignment. I'm actually a little astounded at just how primitive this feature is in InDesign: first it's buried in an unintuitive location and then it's basically one check box and a numeric setting. And it simply cannot cope with centred text, nor does it allow any custom settings or nuanced adjustments. Publisher, on the other hand, has full-featured control over this aspect of typesetting. You can use the built-in settings of your font, or you can choose to manually adjust some or all of those, for both left and right margins. And it works with centred text as well as left-aligned and justified text. Basically if you care about niceties of typesetting or if you want your headlines and display type to look visually aligned without mucking around with tabs, etc., then Publisher is the way to go. I currently use both apps, since some clients need me to work in InDesign, but when it's entirely up to me, I opt for Publisher, for this and many other reasons.

[mialoron]

I was never a fan of adobe.. so much features which i do not use, it just makes the software slow, clanky and unstable.. Affinity is truly a God send to me.. since i started using Affinity i never looked back..

[NethraSeema]

Please do more tutorial courses frequently for how to use affinity suite more efficiently it will be more helpful

[FlameRat_YehLon]

Affinity also has the benefit of having one single file type for all the softwares, and opening and saving the same file in all 3 softwares are lossless, even though not everything is easily accessible in all software.
And I'd say one downside of Affinity is, it's hard to tell the actual size of a pixel layer, which can cause issue when dealing with binary image (as it can create gradient in what's supposedly black and white only image). Photoshop's smart layer can be opened in a separate window and edited like non smart layer, which is kinda more intuitive when needed. But then also smart layer isn't the most intuitive thing to use in Photoshop. Which is made worse when there are still so many schoolbook that don't talk about the use of smart layers.

[ivan-_-]

Now it’s worth adding the point that Adobe steals your work and appropriates the rights to it without paying attention to the NDA.

[jorgenudvang]

Fed up with Adobe's many games, so changing to Affinity now, but will use DxO CameraRAW for RAW processing. I'm using DaVinci Studio for video work, so well covered on all fronts.

[frangipani-dreams]

As always, lack of competition has given Adobe the ability to charge whatever they want, so the fact Affinity is a fraction of the cost and is clearly pulling customers away, might make them rethink this in time.

[GRFLMDAD]

Cancelled my Adobe subscription yesterday.

[KuttyJoe]

Today was strange. I woke up and as about to get started working and I had an idea. I'd just learned about this new feature in Affinity Designer 2 where you can align/distribute/ and resize objects to the same size about a week ago and it crossed my mind. I thought to myself, Serif makes these features that nobody asked for while not doing the ones that people want. I got started on my work in Illustrator. I never use Affinity Designer although I do have the software for a rare few things. One thing that I do typically is take a handful of objects and do align/distribute on them. Today, I had a ton of them to process in this one document and they also were different sizes. So guess what? On the same day that I wrote off the feature that Serif makes that nobody asked for, I actually needed that feature. I jumped over to AD and gave it a shot and it worked, although I still needed to go back to Illustrator for 1 particular distribution feature that AD wasn't able to do, it still saved me a lot of time.

[jacobcurran]

I hadn't even thought about it till your outro, but affinity really is SO much more stable. I've had many a session working multiple items in both photoshop or illustrator, only to have the application send me to the blue screen of death. Affinity really is quick and clean.

[bornoptimist]

hi, it's more helpful content i felt affinity is more handy as a graphic designer. could you do more content for affinity tools

[MikeAzul]

Completely switched over and i am loving Affinity!

[firewalkerjon]

I have the Adobe Creative Suite but also bought Affinity when Adobe put their prices up (again). The main thing that's prevented me from going full Affinity is that Publisher can't import native InDesign files. It needs the .idml file which is automatically created if I package a document, but not otherwise. As I have work going back several years including Indesign files which haven't got the .idml version, this is a problem, especially as I have often have clients who want an old document updated.