A cost-effective way to get out of Adobe's expensive, fractionated product model!
January 18, 2020
A cost-effective way to get out of Adobe's expensive, fractionated product model!
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Affinity Publisher
Our design team uses Affinity Publisher in place of Adobe InDesign. It helps us to build out print design campaigns as part of our broader marketing efforts for our clients. We are all in on the cost-effectiveness of Affinity's tools versus Adobe's, with a more than comparable feature set.
- Affinity Publisher has to be number one. You can do ~99% of what you can do with Adobe's InDesign, for $50/user lifetime (even cheaper if you buy in bulk), as opposed to a recurring charge from Adobe every month.
- Affinity Publisher helps us do all of our print design work for our clients, including seminar stands, marketing flyers, and even billboards.
- Affinity Publisher is very similar in look and feels to Adobe products, which was suitable for our transition to using it. The downside is it uses different terminology for some of the tools/functions. These were minor gripes from our design team, and usually, a quick Google would help them to do what they were trying to accomplish. I'm sure there are probably copyright/legal reasons why, but worth mentioning, no doubt.
- I think Affinity Publisher will come with time and is to be expected, but the amount of web articles/YouTube videos, while growing, is still a fraction compared to Adobe's products. That being said, there is a very passionate community of users behind Affinity's product line that makes up for quantity, with quality. There have been rare instances where we couldn't find a resolution when seeking help online about this product.
- We went from paying several hundred dollars per month for Adobe's suite of products to a one time, a lump sum of transferrable licenses with Affinity Publisher.
- Assuming our output is the same, the cost savings provide huge ROI since the software is already paid for, and yet we keep producing and getting paid for more work.
Affinity Publisher has a comparable feature set to Adobe InDesign, but for a fraction of the cost. You can technically create print graphics in Illustrator and Sketch (and some of our people still do), but you have to worry about converting pixels to inches pretty regularly to make print graphics. Additionally, Sketch is Mac only, while Affinity Publisher is cross-platform. This has been an excellent decision for our organization to switch.
Do you think Affinity Publisher delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Affinity Publisher's feature set?
Yes
Did Affinity Publisher live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Affinity Publisher go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Affinity Publisher again?
Yes
Evaluating Affinity Publisher and Competitors
Yes - Affinity Publisher is a direct replacement for Adobe's InDesign in our org. We have transferrable, one-time fee licenses that can transition if our employees do. No more expensive monthly charges from Adobe when we only use about 3-4 of their products out of the 20+ we're paying for, we didn't feel like they were innovating enough to justify the considerable monthly expense, so we transitioned, and are happy we did so. We hit a few snags, which is to be expected in a transition like this, but we're satisfied with the tremendous cost savings!
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Prior Experience with the Product
- Vendor Reputation
Pricing, pricing, pricing. I can say that in terms of features, it's almost 1:1 against InDesign, so when you compare cost, it's an absolute no brainer for our organization. We have 6 in-house designers, so for smaller teams, it's worth it. I'd imagine that the transition would be met with more resistance at a larger organization, just in terms of sheer volume, but we are so thrilled we made the switch. The finance team is happy, and so is our Design team who uses it.
I don't think we would. I personally tried the product first because I have personal experience in print design before getting into leadership. After I vetted it, we picked one team member to try/advocate to the rest of the team. This helped to get everyone on board. Finance was thrilled. We'd do it again if we needed to.