Which is better? Adobe vs Affinity

And thank you Squarespace for sponsoring this video.

What are the pros and cons of both the Affinity and Adobe creative Suite. They both have established themselves as great tools but which is right for you?

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[lustrafemme]

ive been using affinity since 2020 and a major reason i love it is that i still own it, and i've never lost access to it.
i had to go independent suddenly in late 2020, ending up homeless. long story.
but i already owned affinity photo from when i was financially supported by parents. now in 2022 it's still with me on my new computer. i've maintained access to it even during months where i had to raise money for food.
the one time payment model has your back when you go through anything in life.

[pechblendae]

Adobe user for 20 years.
Switched to Affinity Suite and never ever looked back. I’m happy with Affinity.

[joakimsvensson]

Two years ago I replaced Adobe for Affinity and ended my Adobe subscription to force myself to learn Affinity. I was used to work with Illustrator as my main software, Indesign and Photoshop to some extent. The first month was a slow one, relearning and understanding the software. Affinity’s video tutorials was of great help. After the first month I was proficient enough to get things done at the same speed as before. Now I’m paying for Adobe as well, my clients sometimes demands it. But as a person that is comfortable with both, I always choose Affinity for a project if the choice is presented. I find Affinity to be less bloated with functions and Studio certainly speeds up my workflow. Can’t wait to see what the future holds for the Affinity Suite!

[kodaloid]

There's a few problems with the Adobe rental model. You can't rent for a single month, if you don't require Photoshop access every week of the year, perhaps once and a while, you can't access the tool without signing up for a year rolling contract.

[thatsagoodone]

As mentioned by Brad, Adobe is a "all in one" solution. You can however find amazing programs that IMHO outperform Adobes products or ar on par with them.
For example: Clip Studio Paint is not better than Photoshop. But it is better than PS when it comes to create comics. Because that program is made for that specific purpose.
And it's easier to make something better, when you have a focused goal in mind.
Yes, PS has nice new features but when it comes to actual use, they are often ... not used at all.
It depends on your need.

So the question is: Do you want to make a comic? Are you trying to make logos as vector grafics? Are you retouching fotos?
The more specific you identify your needs, the easier it gets to find really nice alternatives to Adobe.

[StoutPika]

Affinity software does things that you really need and they listen to the community about the problems, Adobe keeps updating and adding features and stuff you may never use just so they can justify their prices and monthly subscription

[silkeschumann]

The subscription model in adobe is the killer aspect. You have to have been on your last leg to understand how devastating a subscription model is. You don't just loose access to the software, you lose access to your own creations. This hand over of control is what I despise wholeheartedly and why I will have to be rich -- really rich before I even consider a subscription model and even then, do I really want to waste all that money for features I hardly use and find alternatives with ease?

[MrLordFireDragon]

It blows my mind you didn't mention ease of use. Some of the most common features people actually want to use (clipping masks, changing text alignment, etc) are mind-blowingly easy in Affinity, but difficult or impossible in Illustrator. Whenever I want to learn something in Affinity I learn it once and it's so intuitive I know it forever (compared to the dozens of times I've had to relearn something in an Adobe product).

To me, I'd much rather support a small team putting out occasional high-quality features rather than a bloated corporation breaking my workflow with mindless additions every year (and it's much cheaper to do so). Affinity Designer is the easy winner for me.

[maciejfyrvellsikorski]

I’m surprised you didn’t touch on consistency at all - yeah, Adobe has a larger „ecosystem”, but you can hardly call it that - it’s more like a bunch of completly different programs rammed into the same package, with almost no uniformity in both interface and file formats. Every new program needs to be learned from the ground up, even when it comes to finding stuff in the interface. This is completally different in Affinity, where if you learn one of the programs, you can easily switch to another and be familiar with it in an instance. And compatible file formats makes it very easy and pleasant to mix and match different types of material work, from raster to vector and vice versa. For me it’s actually the main benefit of Affinity suite, I’m really shocked that it wasn’t acknowledged at all in this vid.

[Frozen_Death_Knight]

The way I see it, Affinity is a really good piece of software that has gotten significantly better since I bought Photo back in 2017. I barely used it much back then as a 10 year Photoshop veteran at the time, but as they kept fixing stuff I have come to appreciate more and more the freedom that the Affinity Suite provides. While I do think Photoshop does a lot of things right and has more polish because of decades of development, one thing I have noticed since switching is that I see more and more cracks in its armour to the point that I really don't want to go back to using it anymore. There are a lot of very nice quality of life changes I use in Affinity as a painter that I just can't live without. With more fixes being done to problem areas in each version I am positive that Serif are going to have them fixed eventually.

In future versions I hope they address problems like these for painting:
- Improve colour picking. Add a mouse icon while holding down alt and add all the Colour Picker Tool settings to all the other colour pickers like for the Brush Tool (want to alt colour pick with Selected Layer like you can in Photoshop).
- Improve brush management. Add folders, add an R click menu for the brush tools, etc.
- Creating Embedded Documents, aka Affinity Smart Objects, by R clicking layers and converting them in the Layers panel.
- Fix bugs for some tools and add more shortcut key commands for each of them to improve workflow.
- Perspective tools.
- Perspective transformations. More specifically for the Move Tool. Designer especially needs perspective transformations for vector art.
- Add anti-aliasing options for the Move Tool for better support of pixel art transformations.
- Fix boolean bugs.
- Raster-to-vector conversion.
- Add more vector tools. Designer still needs a blob brush, an eraser brush, and a shape builder tool just to name a few.
- Pure vector brushes and patterns.
- More ways to save, import, and export UI settings, tool settings, etc.
- Option to move cache data storage from the C drive to other drives (really big problem if your main drive doesn't have a ton of space).
- Better integration between all three Affinity programs. Sharing of settings, brushes, assets, etc. would make working between each program a lot simpler.

So, is Affinity better than Adobe? I would say yes if you are raster painter. It may not have every bell and whistle of Adobe Photoshop, but I think its strengths are starting to outweigh its shortcomings, and you can clearly see with some of the features Adobe took inspiration from Affinity and vice versa that Affinity tends to do them a lot better (i.e. branched history states for Photoshop, which is just embarrassingly implemented when compared to how Affinity did it).

If you are a vector artist I would say that Adobe still reigns supreme, although I absolutely hate working in Illustrator. Designer is honestly a joy to work with, but it lacks a ton of features that make it near impossible to do certain vector art. When Designer does get a new tool like the Contour Tool, I usually prefer the Affinity implementation over the Adobe one (Pen Tool and Node Tool are great to work with as well). Plus, you can use Inkscape when things can't be done in Designer, so you don't have to rely on Illustrator most of the time if you copy+paste between Inkscape and Designer.

Not to mention that the Affinity programs are overall faster than Adobe in many categories. 32-bit painting is much better supported in Affinity, which to me is a big plus since I recently bought a G9 Odyssey with HDR capabilities. It's really solid.

Also, as the review said, Adobe fills a different need than Affinity does. If you need to run a multi-media empire, Adobe is pretty much unmatched. Even I have to use Adobe because they bought Substance Painter and Designer some years back. Though, I am very much looking forward to seeing Affinity tackle 3D painting, since they teased it coming to Photo two years ago. The future is looking bright. :)

[youshimimi]

As for the updates, I can't speak for Affinity, but I've worked with Adobe for many years now and they don't deserve any praise in this department.
Back when you had to pay for each new release, every single new version came with a bunch of new or completely reworked features. Now? You get one or two new surface level features a year, if you're lucky. Just look a Illustrator's updates over the last couple of years. Nothing of consequence has been improved. Yes, they added a niche feature like slightly improved 3D, but general workflow is dormant ever since we got the subscription model. And it's not because it's perfect, far from it.
Same with PS, a better selection would never count as a year's worth of updates back in the day. They are getting more money than ever and doing absolutely nothing with it. They know they don't have to sell you a new version with great updates - you will pay for their dormant apps just because you have to.

[elenacserrano]

To be honest, my biggest issue here is that Adobe does not want to make packs focused on certain areas of expertise. I don't want to spend 63 euros / month for all the programs when I only use Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and inDesign. Sure I could do the switch to Affinity, but unfortunately all my clients work in full Adobe environments. It feels stupid to pay so much for things that I use once every few months. They should at least offer packs of 2 or 3 programs, instead of having to get them separatedly. I once asked them if they were ever planning on doing this, but it was totally not in their plans.

[jcclcreations]

Good video. I have moved away from EVERYTHING Adobe. The BS of renting software has to stop. For fonts I get them from Font Bundles, for video editing I've moved to Davinci Resolve since it's actually stable. Photo and designer I now use Affinity. I use Procreate on the iPad for painting my 3D models I make in Blender if I don't use Blender for everything. The basic resolve is more than enough for almost anyone unless you're doing high production movies. Best part, for everything I use it's basically 1 month of Adobe sub. That's just silly.

[Raylightsen]

Is always morally correct to pirate adobe products.

[TheHappyWhisk]

For me, it's all Affinity. Been using them for years and LOVE their stuff. One payment. Done and dusted. Yes, please.

[rocketsteps]

Great video. I migrated from Adobe to Clip Studio and Affinity 2 years ago and haven't looked back. Purely based on the subscription model and not wanting to pass that cost onto clients.

[bendesignsmedia]

Great video Brad, just a couple notes: 
1. Affinity Designer was released before Affinity Photo, not a big deal but interesting that Affinity went after Illustrator users before photoshop.
2. I think the ecosystem can go either way. Sure Adobe has more apps, but Affinity's apps work WAY better together. StudioLink is life changing and Adobe could have built something like that a decade ago but just chose not to. Most people don't come close to using all the apps they get with their creative cloud subscription anyway, so just buying the apps you need is more useful in many ways.
3. You didn't really talk about industry compatibility which is the main complaint I get about Affinity on my channel. Affinity is fantastic for solo creators, but it gets really difficult when working with others in the industry because Adobe is so dominant.

4. I think iPad apps could be its own a category, and that is Affinity absolutely creams Adobe since Adobe just doesn't care about iPad users

[RodrigoDAgostino]

Affinity all the way! I switched 4 years ago and I’ve never looked back. And this is coming from a graphic/web designer.

PS: Adobe Xd is nothing but a joke. An extremely buggy sad joke. Don’t even bother giving it a try when there’s things like Figma out there.

[SteveRB]

“… keep in mind that Adobe software is just as expensive as it was before they switched over to that [subscription] model…"
That's probably true for many but when Adobe switched to their subscription (i.e. hostageware) model, my annual cost for Adobe products that I used up through CS6 went up close to 350% since I mostly needed Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, and Dreamweaver and I didn't need every annual update iteration. On top of that, when the subscription ends, their software no longer works. (I do have a number of software subscriptions but they provide more value to me and not continuing a subscription just means I no longer get updates — the software works as long as the macOS version I use supports it.) 

When I had to finally drop the CS6 applications due to a macOS upgrade I switched over to Affinity’s suite and have been very happy with it since. Outside of Dreamweaver, there is very little that Adobe has produced that I can’t find quality alternatives for — this, of course, varies according to one's software needs. (I did try the Dreamweaver subscription 2019/2020 version, but while it has some improvements over CS6, it seemed to take a few steps backward and was rather clunky so I went back to Dreamweaver CS5.5 on Windows at work.)

The only real problem I've seen in going from Adobe to Affinity is some file compatibility issues with workflows that rely heavily on Adobe.

[GeorgeSpacesOut]

Who else is here after learning about Adobe's updated TOS?

On another note: I'm an astrophotographer and my understanding is that Affinity Photo has tools to edit astro images. That alone would've sold me on Affinity.