A more cost-effective version of Photoshop/Illustrator for small, scrappy teams.
Rating: 10 out of 10
November 26, 2019
Vetted Review
Verified User
3 years of experience
We use Affinity Photo and Designer as budget alternatives to Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. For our small company, it's a much more affordable solution, and provides an almost unnoticeable feature set for a fraction of the cost. For companies that have a more robust/historical graphic design business, it may not be a 1:1 solution, but for us, we haven't looked back. For a small set of users on Photo and Designer, Adobe has no answer.
- 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.
Cons
- If you're a long time Adobe user of Photoshop or Illustrator, there is a learning curve, but it's not too major. This learning curve was well worth the cost of admissions for our organization.
- I'd like to see them use the same names for certain features as Adobe's products, but feel like licensing/copyright concerns as the reasoning behind this. Overall, the transition has been smooth from Adobe to Affinity.
- They just recently released their Publisher program for print designs, similar to InDesign. They're a little late to the game in this arena, but I'm very interested in a low-cost alternative to Adobe. I wonder how they'll compare to other competitors like Canva in the space?
- It has reduced our cost per seat as compared to Adobe's solution, but for our small team, it's a great savings.
- Some of our most experienced designers griped a bit at first, but came around fairly quickly. Well worth the cost savings we are still benefiting from.
- Affinity has allowed us to save cost, and still produce solid designs with a negligible difference to our clients or employees for that matter. Our clients absolutely did not notice, while the savings really helped our bottom line.
Adobe is the most established in the industry, but Affinity is the young, scrappy alternative, that is more cost-effective ta boot. If you have even a small bit of flexibility, or are new, try this instead of Adobe's products - you'll be glad you did. We also used a (mostly) online tool called Pixlr which offered a few features of Photoshop, but was really only for resizing photos, etc. Not as full-featured. Affinity is by far the best balance of cost and features.