For a long time, the Affinity suite of creative apps was my go-to recommendation for people looking to quit Adobe. For a price almost as low as a single monthly payment for Adobe Creative Cloud, you could buy a license for Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo, or Affinity Publisher, and the app was yours forever. While not as established as Illustrator, Photoshop, or InDesign, the Affinity apps felt much more at home on Mac and tended to get better with time rather than worse.
Unfortunately, Affinity developer Serif was acquired by Canva back in 2024, and in 2025, they released the new web based “Affinity by Canva” editor, replacing all of their standalone products with a single “free” one. Free with quotation marks because of the many features locked behind a paid subscription, and you can count on the list of features locked behind the paywall to grow with time.
I paid Affinity an extremely reasonable 80 dollars for the upgrade to the V2 Universal License back in 2024, and I hope I’ll be able to keep using Affinity Designer for many years to come. RIP to the best Illustrator alternative out there.
