Affinity Photo vs. Pexels

For single-person teams or very small teams, I think Affinity Photo is great as it has a one-off cost and no ongoing subscriptions. If people are familiar with the Adobe products it might take a period of adjusting to Affinity Photo. It might also be overkill for some people's needs. But it does offer everything and room to grow. So weighing up what you need to do with photos and seeing if it fits is important.

Incentivized

1. Small businesses with small or non-existent budgets still need assets to create content 2. Individual content makers or freelancers who need stock assets 3. Corporate eLearning wants to modernize and replace all old-fashioned, outdated, brightly lit studio photos with more realistic and relevant imagery that will resonate with modern audiences and learners.

Incentivized

• Almost all of Adobe Photoshop's features for a fraction of the cost. It was an easy decision for our organization.
• The interface and most of the features are an almost mirror image of Photoshop. Flat fees instead of high yearly fees are much more desirable for our small team.
• They have a great support forum for the little one-offs that aren't quite like the Photoshop app, or don't have the same exact name as Photoshop. The forum really helps when this happens. The YouTube support from the company and other users has been very helpful as well.
• I use Sketch as my primary vector design tool. Affinity allows me to take a .ai, .eps, or other proprietary format and convert it to .svg for use/manipulation with Sketch and back. I can't say enough for this feature. It has helped me stay less pigeon-holed into Adobe products, which have lacked innovation for a long time in my opinion.

Incentivized

• High-resolution images – Pexels is full of images that are high enough in resolution to look beautiful on their own, but also high quality enough to be combined with other images without distracting pixelization
• Stock videos – other free stock sites are often limited to just images, but Pexels has a wide range of videos available as well, which we use to plus up decks
• Good search functions – while not as robust as some paid sites, Pexels' search functions make it pretty easy to track down what you need
• Licensing – it's very straightforward to know what you can and can't do with a Pexels photo, which protects my company and our clients

Incentivized

• I have found some of the tools to be particular. I have to click them in a certain order for it to work.
• Ability to alter or move the icons displayed.
• Auto-save as you work.

Incentivized

• I do think that the library should grow. For example, I was looking for an image of a living room with a fireplace and there were only a few options
• I get tricked sometimes because I see images I want to use but they are from some other company and they are paid
• Improve search understanding for multi-word searches

Incentivized

For a regular user of Photoshop, Affinity is a very easy transition. It has all the same features and once you adapt to it, and it provides a quick return on investment.

Incentivized

Pexels is extremely easy to use. Because it integrates with Canva, it makes our workflow smoother. This also saves us a significant amount of time running our business. The interface is also clean and easy to understand and follow, leading to an increase in productivity and much greater efficiency. Overall, this saves us time and money

Incentivized

I don't have direct experience with a member of Affinity's support, but their forum and YouTube videos that other users have made make it relatively easy to find similar features in Affinity that are available in Photoshop or Illustrator. The differences are negligible for our small, yet experienced team.

Incentivized

I think Affinity Photo is on par with Adobe PhotoShop. They are very similar products with both bringing many features users need. The main reason I picked Affinity Photo was its pricing of it. I didn't require Adobe products all the time. And felt they weren't offering me as much value.

Incentivized

Pexels has a few unique features that stand out, the most important being a 1-click download from the search results. No need to navigate to another page to find a "download" button. This reduces the time required to find and download an appropriate image. The search results load fast, with lazy loading, so there's no annoying pagination at the bottom. I often travel as I work, and at times my internet connection can be slow or unstable. This kind of feature may seem minor to some users, but when on a slower connection, it makes a big difference. If a search term is too broad, it can recommend related keywords to search for - this helps to find the right image faster.

• It's been great knowing I have a tool ready to do intensive work if required on photos.
• Gives me the ability to be more creative with my photos.

Incentivized

• Social media campaigns created with photos from Pexels achieves 40% higher engagement vs others.
• Thanks to faster and easier content sourcing provided by Pexels, our campaign generation period has dropped to an average of 4 hours, instead of 2 days.
• Their stock images adorn our offices.... and it's a much lore cheerful space for that reason. Staff are happier, and stay in the office longer.

Incentivized