The link should probably be changed to official announcement.[1]
That said, this is pretty dismaying. I've been using Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo for years. Their standalone and non-subscription based apps are perfect for my usecase. Compared to Adobe, they are a no-brainer. But, I don't think Canva would leave them be as is. Either next versions will be a subscription or a rug pull is coming for the existing version.
- Affinity team (if they are pressured to go beyond professional designers or change to subscription, go to cloud, web etc.)
- Canva. Professional/enterprise is a very different ball game than the consumer market that they were focussing on. Ex. their mobile app for consumer itself is kind of broken, whereas mobile first experience is very important for the demography that they are targeting.
lstamour said a month ago:
Canva slowly built out enterprise features, but it’s not fully there yet. They seem to be aiming for what Sketch was aiming for before Figma overtook it - the ability for teams to publish and use design systems and templates in Canva. Which is a cool niche to start with, but isn’t flexible enough.
Plus Canva doesn’t really have the concept of “local files” so they’re stuck until they evolve to include every feature of Google Drive, at minimum, including local file sync. Canva ignoring traditional apps is like Chrome pretending the OS doesn’t exist and then building ChromeOS. Some concepts are necessary complexity, particularly for power users. Canva is a bit too simple still, and thus frustrating.
upsuper said a month ago:
Canva and Affinity just released another news [1] which makes the pledge that
> We know this model has been a key part of the Affinity offering and we are committed to continue to offer perpetual licenses in the future. If we do offer a subscription, it will only ever be as an option alongside the perpetual model, for those who prefer it.
Is there a company that doesn't think about profit?
coldtea said a month ago:
Primarily? Yes. But there are even companies that rather lose money than compromise on some product or other principles. Mind you, those are privately owned. Boards and shareholders fuck everything they touch.
objektif said a month ago:
Only is the keyword here.
adamnemecek said a month ago:
If they want to compete with adobe the have to put in some work
tempodox said a month ago:
“Compete with Adobe” presumably means they will enshitten Affinity software even worse than Adobe did theirs. Looking forward to subscription-based ad-infested nagware.
Daub said a month ago:
This is bad news. The Affinity offers a genuine and very high class alternative to the Adobe suite. Its HDRI workflow is league ahead of anything else.
As for Canva, all I can say is that I downgrade any student who makes their research slides using this dumb service. The slides are template-driven horror with each exported pdf slide being rasterized pngs: stupidly large files with text that is impossible to select and copy.
upsuper said a month ago:
Hello, I'm an engineer in Canva's editing team, which is also responsible for rendering of designs.
Text in our PDF export should generally be selectable and copyable. I just tested one presentation template I recently used, and it is indeed so.
I know there were bugs forcing text to be rasterized in certain cases, mostly related to text effects. To my knowledge, they should have been worked around by adding a layer of transparent text on top.
If you know any design that produces PDF file where text becomes not selectable, that might be a bug, and it would be appreciated if you can provide more details so that we can investigate and possibly fix.
nrml_amnt said a month ago:
I love HN.
graypegg said a month ago:
"I wish the Xs at Y would make Y do Z"
> "Hi, I'm a X from Y. Y already does Z. I did that last Tuesday."
Always my favourite genre of interactions on this site.
layer8 said a month ago:
There should be no need for HN to provide this kind of support channel. It exhibits how things don’t work.
dev_tty01 said a month ago:
You are assuming the parent poster actually attempted to go through support and work through the issue. I don't see indication of that. If anything, this thread indicates to me that many people form an opinion of a product and never seek support or never seek to revisit the issue and see if it has been fixed.
thiht said a month ago:
It's not support at all in this case, don't mix everything. Someone says something wrong about a product you're literally working on, there's nothing wrong in responding.
Daub said a month ago:
I confess I have never used Canva myself. However, every pdf that students send our way from Canva is basically just series of flattened images. This also applies to the many Canva derived pdfs which I see from job applicants. So... What is going wrong? I will look into it and message you if I find anything new.
Thanks greatly for making contact. Only on Hacker News.
To be fair to your product, it is the only viable means by which a set of slides can be worked on collaborativly and online. You saw that InDesigns collaboration tools suck and stepped in.
upsuper said a month ago:
I realized that we provide an option called "Flatten PDF" [1] which does exactly what you described: flatten everything including text into a big image per page. It makes all text unselectable and also produces a very large file.
This feature was introduced for printing consistency as PDF viewers and print drivers may render things differently. But I don't think it's selected by default, so users have to consciously tick it to make it happen.
But it seems that our support team sometimes presents this feature as a way to solve user issues, so maybe that's the reason.
I had assumed 'Flatten PDF' was to make the PDF smaller so just used it without thinking or comparing!
Kye said a month ago:
"Flatten" comes from the world of desktop image editors. You "flatten" one layer down to the next to make one layer. Sometimes the people who work on these kinds of things forget their users might have never used software with metaphors like this.
upsuper said a month ago:
I agree that the help page isn't very helpful. I had to reach out internally to understand what it is doing and why it is there.
Stego said a month ago:
Hey, I'm the SGEL for User Voice, ping me on slack and I'll be able to help.
goralph said a month ago:
You don’t sound like a good educator. Perhaps withhold your personal and subjective gripes for the sake of your students
rjzzleep said a month ago:
He does explain the rationale though. They’re both things I didn’t know about canva generated files. Makes sense for them to do that I guess, it means you won’t be able to reuse any of their stuff outside of their platform.
gedy said a month ago:
Almost agree, but submitting research information as an image, and not selectable/copyable text is kind of unacceptable these days.
spaceman_2020 said a month ago:
Except he's wrong and Canva's PDFs have selectable text.
neurostimulant said a month ago:
Telling their students to avoid locking down their works inside a subscription-based service is good imo.
bgirard said a month ago:
It's good advice sure. But downgrading their work, no. Unless you have explicit requirements that aren't met like your text being selectable, downgrading work because you have a prejudice against an authoring tool isn't cool. What if another educator has an issue with Power Point, and another with Sheets. Should students have to match their authoring tool with their educators for each lesson?
Students are there to learn, no to cater to your preferences.
ipaddr said a month ago:
School is about learning to give information in the format requested. When you reach the real world these lessons are the important ones.
user_7832 said a month ago:
What you're saying makes sense... if the OP explicitly tells the students to make their work available in a shareable and copyable format. The vast majority of presentations in schools don't live beyond the moment the presentation is finished.
Daub said a month ago:
I see now that I should have made myself more clear. slides made in InDesign are indeed a stated requirment. Why....
I teach Design. One of the key learning outcomes of most design courses is the ability to handle long documents through their structural styles: heading 1, heading 2, caption, block quote, lists etc. Most design apps offer this functionality, even Powerpoint. However, none do it as elegantly as InDesign. I'm no Adobe fanboy (I do most of my own work in the Affinity suite) but InDesign remains the leader of the pack in this regard.
One crucial strength of InDesign is that it that manages anti aliasing of text very effectively. Just compare the output of ID to MS Word and you will see. I guess you are familiar with pdfs from LaTex? Compare those with pdfs from MS word. Similar difference.
It also does not produce or allow fake bold/italic etc. If a font does not have a built in bold then it won't fake one up by thickening the characters. This is why the font and charter panels in InDesign seem so feature-poor compared to those of Photoshop or Illusustor which offer such fake variants.
One final reason... cloud based services are risky things to rely on, especially in a uni. This year one service many students and staff used closed its doors. Caused a lot of angst.
objektif said a month ago:
He sounds like a very good educator. I wish people always guided me against using shitty services throughout my education.
blowski said a month ago:
> I downgrade any student who makes their research slides using this dumb service
I really hope you’re exaggerating
edu said a month ago:
From another comment, he teaches design. As a designer, I find it’s legit to downgrade a design student for using Canva.
shufflerofrocks said a month ago:
That's important context then.
Using Canva for a design assignment is obviously a mis-step by the student, not a flaw of the tool itself
For short-term & quick usage, canva is a perfectly fine tool for editing/formatting stuff
blowski said a month ago:
On what basis? Is Canva somehow cheating? I don't know, as I'm not a designer in any way.
GlacierFox said a month ago:
Yes.
chrisoconnell said a month ago:
Explain why it's cheating? I'm a designer. I have been for over a decade. I don't use Canva, but I use Sketch, Figma, etc., and create templates or utilize templates made by others as starting places.
How is Canva any different than this? Part of design is being able to recognize what good design is, and utilizing the tools available to you. If Canva get the job done, and looks good, and has been sufficiently modified to meet the specified criteria supplied in the assignment or spec, how is it cheating?
The only way I could see is if they didn't modify the slides and part of the assignment was to create a unique branded slide presentation and they just used an out of the box design. In which case, no design work was done.
Someone shouldn't be penalized for the outcome based on the tools utilized unless the spec specifically excludes it.
It's like telling a clothing e-commerce company that they shouldn't use Shopify. If the work is done, why waste your time building an e-commerce site from scratch if it meets the specified need?
Canva is a great tool, and saves my clients thousands of dollars, while I get to avoid doing the completely mind numbing process of working in PowerPoint or designing social media posts. It's a win/win.
imadj said a month ago:
> Explain why it's cheating?
how would you feel about a student presenting stock images in a photography class?
> I use Sketch, Figma, etc., and create templates or utilize templates made by others as starting places.
Working professionaly has a different objective than school assignments. I think the distinction is very clear on many levels. Also, students using blatant off-the-shelf templates is very different professionals using templates "as starting place".
> If Canva get the job done, and looks good, and has been sufficiently modified to meet the specified criteria supplied in the assignment or spec, how is it cheating?
Well, that's not the case here. OP has explained that the design students in question aren't even using their low-effort canva templates right and exporting them as flattened pdf. It's very unlikely those who are this sloppy and careless have put any attention to the assignment or polishing other areas.
The key point is you can't delegate the main task. To use your Shopify example, if you enrolled in a "Web development using nodejs" class, and presented a premade shopify website that you purchased in a couple of clicks, the instructor won't be impressed, less so when you tell them you did it in 5 minutes "why waste time". If that's the student goal, fine, but they are in the wrong classes.
hhh said a month ago:
Why would you downgrade a student based on the tool they use to create their presentations instead of the content itself?
Terretta said a month ago:
Tapping into both my own uni graphics design and a past life as senior exec at a mega corp: because designers that use bad tools to make unusable presentations are failing "you had one job", to make something presentable across the variety of business modalities.
Being able to email the presentation and copy text from it are generally more important to communications impact and utility in the workplace than how it looks.
Being aware what your tool does to the presentation is part of the job you're learning in school.
ttoinou said a month ago:
Because they made a bad tool choice for their own convenience ? That leads here to big images and unselectable text, no accessibility.
Daub said a month ago:
Exactly: large files, ugly slides (I teach design) and impossible to select text.
The template driven nature on Canva also makes it really hard for them to learn multi page layouts and structured documentation.
The one thing in its favour is that it supports collaboration.
upsuper said a month ago:
In Canva we do care about accessibility. While I admit our editor may still have a long way to go on providing an accessible editing experience, unselectable text in export result is more likely an overlooked bug than anything intentional.
skeeter2020 said a month ago:
And if you're coming from the Affinity side, don't worry your new corporate overlords DO care about people, and employees are their #1 priority </empty_talk>
compootr said a month ago:
> #1 priority
sorry $MEGACORP, but the employees never actually mattered to you. it's all money. every company wants money.
skeeter2020 said a month ago:
same reason you'd downgrade a programming student if they handed in an assignment as an Excel macro? Not just because of the VBA but because to use it you now need to buy MS Office?
madjam002 said a month ago:
I feel sorry for your students. PS Canva can export PDFs with vector graphics
cangeroo said a month ago:
You're a great educator!
I'm surprised that other people here cannot separate their subjective opinions, whether they agree with your judgment, from fact, whether you're a good educator.
It would be more reasonable to say: A good educator would help students understand that PDF files should have a small file size, and if a student fails to notice that, you will have to downgrade them for lack of attention to important detail.
And, of course the acquisition is bad news.
Americans are the only people I've encountered that seem to celebrate the dystopian monopolized unfree market that we're headed towards.
Although I wouldn't be surprised if Canva has people to distort social media to downvote anyone who disagrees with them, as other companies do.
blowski said a month ago:
If the course makes it clear that grading is affected by accessibility and efficiency of file size, and then submitted work ignores those factors - regardless of Canva being used - then downgrading it is justified. Perhaps it’s obvious to designers that Canva has these problems, but to a non-designer like myself, the comment sounds like snobbery, with students’ grades affected by the capricious whims of their teacher.
> I wouldn't be surprised if Canva has people to distort social media to downvote anyone who disagrees with them
Snide remarks about astroturfing are also off topic here.
huntedsnark said a month ago:
> Snide remarks about astroturfing are also off topic here.
How is that off topic when there are literally people in this thread from Canva arguing the framing and not the main point he made? Everything you disagree with isn't off topic.
Marciplan said a month ago:
you don’t sound like a good educator
skrebbel said a month ago:
Wow sucks to be your student
rcarmo said a month ago:
Oh boy. I willingly gave my money to Affinity because I don’t want a subscription model, I don’t want my creative apps to rely on the cloud _at all_ to work _and_ I want native Mac apps. I am not reassured by their FAQ at all.
I suspect a year from now Canva will break at least one (if not all three) of these features and force me to leave Affinity by version 3.
It would be extremely ironic if Gimp was the only graphics app left standing I could use without all of the above nonsense (well, I am happy to keep supporting Pixelmator, but… you get the idea).
WillAdams said a month ago:
In addition to Gimp there are:
- Paint.net
- Pixen
- Inkscape --- straight-forward vector editing
- Seashore --- this is Mac OS UI overlay for GIMP
- Krita --- vector editing with painting features
- Scribus --- page layout
- TeX/LaTeX --- batch/markup driven page layout which can do anything one can put together a TeX macro to achieve (I use it a lot and have written articles for TUGboat on it: https://tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb24-2/tb77adams.pdf
- Blender -- 3D modeling
- GraviT --- another vector editor, this is likely the one most like to Affinity Designer (since they were both modeled on Freehand)
- FontForge
nacs said a month ago:
I wish more people knew-of/promoted Krita - it's far more user friendly than GIMP and just as powerful if not more.
Fantastic for photo editing, digital art/paint and vector tools.
I thought they were different tools. GIMP == Photoshop, Krita == Illustrator.
ZiiS said a month ago:
Krita defaults to a "Paint Layer" behaving very like Photoshop; it can also add "Vector Layers" that behave like Illustrator. I think it is fair to say it replaces both for a lot of use cases.
GIMP is much closer to just Photoshop (and say Inkscape is much more only Illustrator).
basisword said a month ago:
Interesting! I'll have to check it out.
jwells89 said a month ago:
Krita is a close second to Blender in terms of well-run creative FOSS projects. Would love to see more projects take their approach.
jarek-foksa said a month ago:
There is also Graphite (https://graphite.rs/) which, unlike Gimp, has a modern architecture and very ambitious goals (Blender for 2D basically).
Takennickname said a month ago:
Features:
Written in Rust.
Not really a feature.
Also it has very little implemented right now. Kind of disappointing when I clicked through hoping to find a gimp alternative.
samuell said a month ago:
Looks awesome!
rcarmo said a month ago:
I used most of those (I paid my way through college with Photoshop 2.0 and Macromedia stuff). There is really nothing in the Open Source world that is good enough. Maybe Krita, but not for Illustrator-grade vector editing. I really miss Macromedia...
mattanimation said a month ago:
Photopea as well (photoshop clone in browser)
rcarmo said a month ago:
That’s not a real alternative for a high-res workflow.
rpastuszak said a month ago:
> It would be extremely ironic if Gimp was the only graphics app left standing I could use without all of the above nonsense
I know successful agencies relying on OSS tools only (such as Gimp and Penpot) so I wouldn't mind that. I hope Gimp will have its Blender moment (I've been using Blender for years, but always kept coming back to Maya, this changed with the new UI)
kfarr said a month ago:
Agreed, GIMP is powerful and just one UI refresh away from being a true alternative for many.
piperswe said a month ago:
I already started to worry about Affinity's strategy when they introduced online activation in version 2 of their software. I really appreciated the offline activation in the original versions - it means I will forever own Affinity Photo/Designer/Publisher 1 on my NAS, no matter what they decide to do in the future.
LordAtlas said a month ago:
Affinity already disappointed the original believers when they started off telling people they could pay a one-time fee and get all future updates for free. They then ditched version 1.xx buyers by releasing a version 2 that you could only use if you paid them again.
matwood said a month ago:
Affinity should not have said that (if they did), and no one should have believed them. That's just not how software or business works. Even if we go back in time to packaged software, big updates were always a pay for upgrade.
pelagicAustral said a month ago:
I've been using Affinity products forever, in fact since before the Affinity era, then they were branded Serif (DrawPlus, PhotoPlus, etc)... They have been incredibly consistent over the years with the quality of their products, which is why I have purchased many licenses over the years and always recommended people to look into their software... Like others in the thread, I really do hope they don't change to subscription-based pricing, but I assume the worst.
ramijames said a month ago:
It really seems that the whole software world has decided to move to monthly payments. It really irks me. I don't want this.
kossTKR said a month ago:
Even worse many apps now push "Monthly payments (payed yearly)", like some scammy car salesman.
You can try for 7 days, then don't worry we'll charge for 12 months.
Ridiculous for solo devs, full stack, creatives with lots of apps etc.
I use several apps a bit here and there throughout the year but that's seemingly not a usecase for these companies, you're either "in" 365 or won't be able to use the app.
rchaud said a month ago:
Increasingly I'm looking at hoarding "feature-complete" applications that work fine totally offline and don't need updates. Things like text editors, GIMP, Inkscape, Foobar2000, IrfanView, file manager apps.
bogota said a month ago:
Have to extract the most value for shareholders. Only way i see it changing is people start stealing software because they get sick of it or people stop using subscription based licenses all together.
andy_ppp said a month ago:
I absolutely hate it too. I think we all need a subscriptions manager.
Adobe for example were charging me $15 per month for Lightroom forever and Lightroom had broken and deleted all my photos years before. I think there was a problem with their software because I did not have a subscription that I could see when I logged in to any of the accounts I had.
I just gave up at some point trying to cancel (I'd even talked with their chat for several hours). But recently logged in and managed to finally see the hidden subscription! It was still difficult to cancel but at least I could actually do it!
Hard to know what to do apart from take Adobe to the small claims court about this.
a2800276 said a month ago:
Registered mail to Adobe?
mort96 said a month ago:
No, you don't "have to" extract the most value for shareholders.
In fact, you don't "have to" have shareholders at all.
_fat_santa said a month ago:
Pure speculation on my part but I think the way it will go down is Canva will announce that you can get access to Affinity products via a Canva subscription, with an option to buy the individual products outright like today. They have to be looking at Adobe and going "yeah we don't want that kind of reputation".
mdekkers said a month ago:
> They have to be looking at Adobe and going "yeah we don't want that kind of reputation".
They can also look at the market and Adobe and go “yeah, they have no alternatives, everyone is a subscriber now”
curiousigor said a month ago:
Yup, that's also my assumption of what will happen. Ugh...
Canva’s business model is subscription, are there any plans to change how Affinity is sold?
There are no changes to our current pricing model planned at this time, with all our apps still available as a one-off purchase. Existing Affinity users will be able to continue to use your apps in perpetuity as they were originally purchased – with plenty of free updates to V2 still to look forward to!
Am I the only only reading "no changes ... at this time" with a ", but there are going to be ..."
steve1977 said a month ago:
"with plenty of free updates to V2"
But let's not talk about V3...
matwood said a month ago:
> at this time
Anything a business says about current business should have 'at this time' appended. They are simply being honest.
coldtea said a month ago:
This is a different context. Whenever an acquired business says "at this time", it means "forget everything you think you knew about us, so long suckers!".
rjzzleep said a month ago:
You’re definitely not the only one. It’s going to be a matter of time before subscriptions come.
coldtea said a month ago:
>Existing Affinity users will be able to continue to use your apps in perpetuity as they were originally purchased
Until of course Apple changes some API, or Windows users want to jump to ARM or something, and then they're up shit creek.
nocoiner said a month ago:
I know nothing about Canva. As someone who has been a big fan of Affinity, their products and their pricing model, do I start freaking out now or can I just wait until the acquisition closes?
t-writescode said a month ago:
Yeah, as someone that's been very happy with the Affinity Suite and am scared of any major changes to them, this is pretty scary to me, as well. Reminds me of when Jasc was bought by Corel waaaay back in the day.
Canva, if you're on HN, seeing how we're going to respond, please don't take away the stand-alone, non-subscription-based, affordable system that Affinity's products are. I love their products. I don't want to have to find alternatives.
freedomben said a month ago:
Hate to say it, but a subscription model is coming. Canva is making money hands over fist by doing that, and I can't imagine they are going to part from what has been so lucrative
pier25 said a month ago:
The only reason people get Affinity is because of the non subscription model.
Adobe software is just better.
Toutouxc said a month ago:
I paid $lot for the entire Affinity suite and DxO Photolab instead of going with the (quite good) Adobe offerings just to avoid the insanity that is the Adobe Creative Cloud launcher. I deeply hate apps that install, auto-run and auto-update other apps. Affinity and DxO give you a DMG.
pier25 said a month ago:
I agree about Creative Cloud. I too hate it with a passion. But when I said "Adobe is better" I was referring to the apps themselves.
buzzerbetrayed said a month ago:
100% this. There is absolutely 0 reason to use Affinity of Adobe besides pricing model. They can play around with the numbers and try to have a cheaper subscription than Adobe, or maybe bundle it with the other software Canva offers, but ultimately I think switching to a subscription model will be the end of the Affinity software suite.
omnimus said a month ago:
Have you tried Affinity? The software itself is a lot better than Adobe in many fundamentals. It’s faster, crashes less, supports a lot more file formats, connection between the individual programs is perfect, they add new quite innovative features at constant pace.
Adobe is pretty much legacy software that gets close to zero development, its ridden with bugs that will be never fixed.
The reason why everyone hates them is that last non subscription version Adobe CS6 from more than 10 years ago is pretty much the same thing what you get now even though users have been screaming for features and bugfixes. Adobe can have their cake and eat it too.
pier25 said a month ago:
> The software itself is a lot better than Adobe in many fundamentals. It’s faster, crashes less, supports a lot more file formats, connection between the individual programs is perfect, they add new quite innovative features at constant pace.
I disagree with all your points.
I've been using Adobe for 20 years and Affinity Design and Photo since they released in 2013 or so.
Adobe apps are faster on Apple Silicon than Affinity.
I haven't experienced a crash in years with Adobe and I have experienced crashes with Affinity quite recently.
Adobe has complete integration between programs. Eg: You can use AE timelines into Premiere, import Photoshop files into AE, edit vector objects from Photoshop in Illustrator, etc.
Affinity innovation pace is just glacial. V2 introduced some new features but it Serif what... like 10 years? And personally I didn't see any value in the new features. Design is still missing a lot from Illustrator.
mandmandam said a month ago:
> I haven't experienced a crash in years with Adobe
Haha wow. I find this incredibly hard to believe (also Apple Silicon). You ought to play the Lotto.
> Design is still missing a lot from Illustrator.
"A lot" is drastically overstating the case. And in many ways Designer is leagues better.
But it's all kinda moot - fuck Adobe. Fuck their dark patterns, fuck their bugs, fuck their pricing, fuck their monopoly.
AuryGlenz said a month ago:
I was a photographer until late last year and there were many weeks I spent 40 hours+ in Photoshop and I don’t remember a single crash.
I’m on Windows, for what it’s worth.
mandmandam said a month ago:
Perhaps Adobe only crashes when it can smell fear... Like printers.
Really though, Photoshop and Illustrator both got buggy on me on a weekly/near daily basis. I used them all for decades. It feels like they were stable for a few years around like 1999-2001.
freedomben said a month ago:
Somewhat off topic, but your comment made me literally laugh out loud in real life. I am working on a receipt printer right now, and it can absolutely smell fear. Its favorite thing to do right now is to use its incredible power of speed to print half my roll of receipt tape with random gibberish in the several seconds it takes me to pull the power cable. I haven't yet let it run to completion to see if it will eat the entire roll of tape, but I suspect it would.
pier25 said a month ago:
> * I find this incredibly hard to believe (also Apple Silicon).*
Believe what you will.
Their software used to crash a lot more for me 5-10 years ago but these days it's pretty solid in this regard.
It used to feel super bloated too but since Apple Silicon it's been working great in terms of perf for me.
> And in many ways Designer is leagues better.
In what ways?
Genuinely interested. I've been using vector graphics software since Corel Draw 4 and Illustrator still seems the gold standard. Figma is great for UI design but it's useless for anything else.
I do think Photo is a lot more usable than Designer and I could see myself using that instead of Photoshop.
> fuck Adobe. Fuck their dark patterns, fuck their bugs, fuck their pricing, fuck their monopoly
Trust me, I too wish there was a good alternative to Adobe. I hope with Canva's money they will be able to improve Affinity's products.
omnimus said a month ago:
I suspect you are very experienced Illustrator and used to its ways and not that experienced Photoshop user. Because Photoshop people around in coments say that Photo is trash but Designer is good.
I think its all inertia to learn new things. Adobe soft has so many wierd things that we got so used to that it gets hard to do it otherwise.
pier25 said a month ago:
I've used both Illustrator and Photoshop for over 20 years.
Before that I was on the Corel suite using Draw and PhotoPaint since the mid 90s.
mandmandam said a month ago:
> In what ways?
Off the top of my head...
Look and feel is a big one. It feels more responsive, and far less bloated.
The Export Persona smokes Illustrator's slices or whatever.
It handles symbols far more smoothly, and I like the way masks work better.
It's better integrated into Publisher, compared to Illustrator/InDesign. Publisher is awesome, and basically has Designer built in.
Working with non-square grids is sooooo much easier.
There's no Creative Cloud malware fouling up my computer, soaking up CPU and memory and storage and spitting pop-ups in my face for no damn reason.
... There are things I miss - vector brushes, and the Transformation tools. But they can usually be worked around. The feeling of being respected by the company more than makes up for those deficits though.
...Which is probably about to change :(
omnimus said a month ago:
On Indesign side - regular almost daily crashes.
Integration in Affinity Publisher is called studiolink you can use all Photo, Designer tools directly inside it by fliping a switch. Google studiolink you will see Adobe never had anything close to this. When you create a book you can actualy edit placed photo inside the layout seeing all changes directly in context. All Adobe cooperation is linking files that you then have to manualy refresh. You cant even easily copy paste vectors into indesign so they are editable.
I get that Adobe works and has some features Affinity does. But Affinity has some killer fundamentaly better features.
buzzerbetrayed said a month ago:
> Have you tried Affinity
Yes. I owned CS6, then switched to Affinity essentially right when it was released. Been using it ever since. Great software. But very much lacking compared to Adobe.
vetinari said a month ago:
Affinity (Photo) still doesn't support tablets properly. You can play around with parameters affected by pressure and tilt, but here Adobe (and Krita) are ahead.
adithyassekhar said a month ago:
The only reason I don't use CS6 is because it doesn't work properly with hidpi displays. It doesn't scale well above 100%.
t-writescode said a month ago:
That's not true at all. There's also the strong dislike of Adobe as a company.
throwaway2990 said a month ago:
Due to subscriptions.
timeon said a month ago:
And bloatware. Affinity runs smoother on Mac.
pier25 said a month ago:
This used to be the case but in my experience Adobe runs better in Apple Silicon than Affinity does.
throwaway2990 said a month ago:
This is true. I bought it because photoshop kept crashing on Mac. And I got tired of watching filters take effect in Lightroom.
aikinai said a month ago:
I switched to Capture One years ago, but recently switched back to Lightroom. It’s much much faster now and they also recently launched advanced color editing, AI masks, and true HDR support which pushed me over the edge.
robertoandred said a month ago:
Eh, they take like 30 seconds just to open the app.
ReleaseCandidat said a month ago:
I also try to avoid the two big "A"s, Autodesk and Adobe.
bayindirh said a month ago:
> Adobe software is just better.
I won't be installing that invasive spyware suite to my system even if they pay me monthly to use the software. It's that bad.
srvmshr said a month ago:
I keep Adobe products only on iPad or iPhone, where the app seems sandboxed. In Mac/Windows, Adobe CC (or any product line FWIW) spawns files and folders like cancer in /Library or /System. It's just hallmark bad software engineering.
browningstreet said a month ago:
But the subscription based company was the one to buy the non-subscription company. Because they generate the funds to do so.
vetinari said a month ago:
With perpetual license, they were getting some money from me for each major release. With subscription, they are going to get exactly 0.
timeon said a month ago:
Not only subscription, but what I find problematic about Adobe is bloatware.
robotshmobot said a month ago:
Exactly. Creative Cloud launcher digs its greedy fingers deep in your system, running hundreds of processes and constantly phoning home. It’s the model I point to when people say they want alternate app stores. I would much rather download apps individually from the App Store, or at worst a dmg.
flenserboy said a month ago:
It would be fantastic for an OS to mandate a particular type of installation (oh how I miss dragging app packages from a .dmg into my Application directory & being done with it) while preventing anything else.
jwells89 said a month ago:
A lot of desktop software devs are averse to anything but old style full access to everything all the time, but yes I agree. Most software has no good reason to put files anywhere outside of its own application bundle and ~/Library/Application Support/<Program Name>/.
facialwipe said a month ago:
I enjoy Serif products but have always wondered how it would survive. Pixelmator stayed a family-run bootstrapped operation while Serif scaled a company in the EU around the Affinity Suite.
rchaud said a month ago:
I have Affinity Designer and Publisher, which I've used to design and publish a music fanzine: https://www.glidermag.com
This is slightly worrying news as Canva is the opposite of the Affinity suite: cloud-only and subscription-based. I could purchase brush sets on Affinity for a fixed price, and many were made available on the user messageboard for free.
lambdas said a month ago:
Looks like it isn’t routing it correctly without the `www.`
Off topic, and if I may be so bold, check out Whitelands. They’re my friends band and they just toured with Slowdive, one to watch out for! (I am 100% biased though).
rchaud said a month ago:
Just updated the link. I will check out Whitelands; I just saw Slowdive in November, they had Drab Majesty open for them in Canada.
lovegrenoble said a month ago:
Ce site est inaccessible
Vérifiez si l'adresse glidermag.com est correcte.
can't access
rchaud said a month ago:
Updated the URL!
bastawhiz said a month ago:
Just so you know, the URL you linked isn't loading for me.
sarreph said a month ago:
There was something so special and powerful about Affinity Designer V1. It was just a supreme amount of value and such a robust application that it became the tool I learned to do graphic design on, and the tool I loved.
I feel like something slipped with Designer V2 - the features went a bit weird and broad, and the amount of bugs got irritating and eroded my love for it and it being my go-to recommendation.
That all said, it’s still good software today and I’m glad the Serif team gets some kind of payday. I think the drop in quality of V2 makes the whole thing a bit less bittersweet for me.
WillAdams said a month ago:
The sad thing is that much of what was really nice in AD came from copying Aldus/Altsys/Macromedia Freehand.
I wish Adobe had at least put all of Freehand's capabilities into InDesign --- I might still be using it if that were the case.
GrumpySloth said a month ago:
This is very sad. I’ve been an Affinity customer since V1. What I expect to happen now is in some future a move to a subscription-based model and more focus on nonsense AI features and some useless cloud integration.
Also: since when a company capable of routinely acquiring other established companies for tens of billions of dollars a startup?
achow said a month ago:
> since when a company capable of routinely acquiring other established companies for tens of billions of dollars a startup
The acquisition was for “several hundred million pounds”, nowhere near tens of billions of dollars.
GrumpySloth said a month ago:
My bad. I got some numbers in the article mixed up.
zubspace said a month ago:
Step 1: Announce the acquisition. Everyone will talk about the company and the fear of subscriptions.
Step 2: Tell everyone, that the current pricing model will stay and no subscriptions will be offered. Everyone will cheer and recommend the products.
Step 3: Wait until the dust settles and switch to subscriptions. The community will say "told you that this will happen" and life goes on.
sotsoguk said a month ago:
Sad, but true
zubspace said a month ago:
Yes, and let me explain why.
Subscriptions are significantly better for a company. They result in a steady income and a predictable growth curve. It's so much easier to plan the upcoming years if you can predict the income.
While we all focus on the latest news, the leaders of those companies already planned their next 10 steps ahead, even taking into account our sentiment towards them. Remember that they aim to maximize profits at all times.
It happened or happens in B2B, car sales, music, film, in games, and drawing apps... Everywhere you see, really. And it's so convenient if there is already a scapegoat like Adobe, which transitioned to subscriptions for the same reason.
And yes, I hate it. Even though it's easier to swallow 10 bucks a month, eventually you will spend more. They know it and we know it. All we can do as customers is to not support those companies, but this only goes so far. And what are we to do, if most offerings are subscription based?
hbn said a month ago:
I feel like they could have a sustainable model if they had a more expensive one-time purchase and every few years released a new major version that required a one-time purchase again. If you bought the old version you can continue to use it, but it's no longer officially supported nor will it receive any future updates.
I wish there was an option for this with e.g. Photoshop. I want to have PS because it's occasionally handy or fun for photoshopping my friends as a joke, but I don't need it for anything that makes me money so I can't justify paying. But if I had a slightly outdated version I could purchase once, I'd be find not getting all the latest updates.
matwood said a month ago:
> I feel like they could have a sustainable model if they had a more expensive one-time purchase and every few years released a new major version that required a one-time purchase again.
And people complain about this also. If everyone is going to complain anyway, they might as well go to subscription which is best for the business.
hbn said a month ago:
Do they? It's not super common, but I can think of the JetBrains IDEs that I believe let you continue to use the last version of the IDE before you stopped paying. Alfred, the Spotlight alternative for Mac does something like that, and you get a discount code if you own the last version.
Both beloved pieces of software.
ireadmevs said a month ago:
> And what are we to do, if most offerings are subscription based?
Support open source software
prox said a month ago:
Inkscape is quite good actually. But GIMP is lightyears away from ever being in the same league. We need an open source Photoshop and Publisher program.
skydhash said a month ago:
I have a few subscriptions and most are annually paid. I consider that as a one time payment with updates free for the year. But what I don’t like is when the price don’t match the value, my data taken hostage, and updates that break my workflow (and “AI” features activated without my knowing). I got rid of anything like this in my personal computing space.
mrd3v0 said a month ago:
It is one of many consequences of giving up software freedom.
MatthiasPortzel said a month ago:
I appreciate that, but it doesn’t deal with the reality that subscriptions are several times more expensive than buying up-front.
I can buy Affinity Designer for $50 and use it for 5 years. That’s less than a dollar a month. If they move to a subscription, I bet it’s going to be more than a dollar a month.
If it was really just about regular reoccurring revenue, we would see more $1 monthly subscriptions and fewer $5/month subscriptions.
archagon said a month ago:
What this means is that OSS offerings will eventually get good enough and eat their lunch, permanently.
fragmede said a month ago:
Yes exactly. See Firefox, Gimp, and Ubuntu's superiority over other offerings.
boraoztunc said a month ago:
We are doomed?
optymizer said a month ago:
I like Affinity products. They replaced all my photoshop/illustrator needs for webdev and it was so easy to switch. The fixed license cost was great too. Now I'm worried that the typical scenario is going to unfold where Canva makes sweeping changes, replaces product vision and licensing model.
I guess I can keep using the current versions for a while, until they stop the updates.
stephen_g said a month ago:
Yeah, I love their Designer and Publisher products. Haven’t used Photo really because I already used Pixelmator Pro but it also looks good, and between those and Final Cut Pro and DaVinci Resolve i’ve cut Adobe out of my life.
So this is a super worrying announcement. I really hope they don’t screw up Affinity - I really wonder how long they can hold off the temptation to let them do what they do without screwing it all up and killing the product line…
lovegrenoble said a month ago:
Same for me, replaced f** Adobe, too expensive, too greedy
soapdog said a month ago:
Why every product I like ends up being bought... argh, we can't have nice things.
chadcmulligan said a month ago:
It's interesting, if a car company is bought then they keep churning out cars (usually), if a software company is bought it's often broken. Software dev is a fragile thing relying on a network of talented individuals which is very easily broken by accountants and bottom lines. In some ways it's more like movie companies with networks of creatives that can be damaged by a takeover - Disney/Marvel immediately comes to mind.
jsjohnst said a month ago:
Because not everyone can or should IPO. Once you get to a certain point in size, your investors will start pushing for an exit (where you have two main options, IPO or sell).
latexr said a month ago:
What investors? As far as I know they were never VC funded. Affinity wasn’t a dinky startup, the parent company (Serif) was founded almost four decades ago.
jsjohnst said a month ago:
> What investors?
GP made a broad statement, I was replying in general following suit.
sofixa said a month ago:
It's sad that management buyouts aren't more popular. It would probably make for more quality products not having to conform to expectations of the market or private equity.
pembrook said a month ago:
Apparently most of the market doesn’t want the same things you want.
Otherwise Affinity would be the giant acquiring a much smaller Canva team.
That said, this is also further proof of why the standalone software license model died. If Affinity had a great business of their own, they wouldn’t need to sell.
Turns out if you want a software team to continue providing value to you, you should probably put them on salary (subscription).
upsuper said a month ago:
> If Affinity had a great business of their own, they wouldn’t need to sell.
They don't need to. They mentioned that in their FAQ:
> We have to say that selling Serif was not on our minds at all, but when Canva contacted us (only a couple of months ago!) there was something about it which just felt right.
pembrook said a month ago:
Riiight. They had a fantastically enjoyable and profitable business going for themselves...but they decided they'd rather give up all control and sell their baby to a much larger corporate entity, give up the future upside from any growth, and play office politics instead of control their own destiny.
...because it just "felt right."
candiodari said a month ago:
Not really. They did so because people pay MUCH more for much less functionality in Canva, and so accepting the offer gives them a payday they couldn't hope to accumulate themselves.
rchaud said a month ago:
Because of the "recurring revenue" SaaS cult.
candiodari said a month ago:
It's not a cult if it works ...
bananapub said a month ago:
what does "work" mean?
that it maximises profits for HN posters?
that it maximises some abstract goodness for society?
that it provides good quality products at the lowest prices?
the fact businesses keep doing something doesn't provide any information on if that's good for anyone else.
candiodari said a month ago:
Profit in software companies does in fact provide most of those example.
Only the last one needs some clarification. If a business did not do things that benefit others, they wouldn't get paid. So, almost by definition, businesses do. You might argue that a bigger value could be provided in another way, but it definitely does provide value.
paxys said a month ago:
Because no one wants to pay for products they like.
hollander said a month ago:
We don't want to pay for software? Look at the Appstore! Good products for reasonable prices are worth the money. Affinity offers a good product for a reasonable price. Adobe offers a better product but the subscription model is hated by many. For me Affinity products are good enough. Let's hope the current versions keep on working on Apple Silicon and Windows 11/12/etc. The current 2 version is good enough for me and for the next ten years. If I really need AI tools for image editing, I'll take a one month subscription to some tool.
whywhywhywhy said a month ago:
> We don't want to pay for software? Look at the Appstore! Good products for reasonable prices are worth the money
Such a strange statement in 2024, we all know almost no developers can afford to live off charging a fair price $20+ for software on there because people wont buy it, or charging the price people will actually pay on there which is $0.
Only way to make money on the App Store is to hammer in ads, sell data, exploit or trick people into subscriptions.
ghaff said a month ago:
I look at app stores and see a lot of "free to play" products. So many users have gotten so accustomed to not paying upfront for products (which historically could be substantial amounts) that the option is often no longer available.
danieldk said a month ago:
Affinity targets professional users who would purchase Adobe products otherwise. Professional users are more willing to pay for products. Affinity was doing pretty well in the Mac App Store (though they moved to free download + in-app purchase or purchase through their website).
soapdog said a month ago:
Well, everyone of their clients was paying for a license. Affinity was not free/fremium.
paxys said a month ago:
Affinity has a $100 one-time payment, and you can use it in perpetuity. Adobe's customers are paying $60+ per month. So there was a lot of unrealized market value. No shit they wanted to cash out on it.
danieldk said a month ago:
And yet, they released a new version and I and every Affinity user I know bought it. Don't forget that a lot of people moved from Adobe to Affinity apps because Adobe rammed subscriptions down their throats. There is a lot of loyalty towards Affinity because they are not Adobe, if they become a mini-Adobe, that loyalty will be burned to the ground. And at that point, why not just use Adobe products? They'll lose playing Adobe's game, Adobe has infinite funds in comparison and can pull an Office 365 on Canva.
soapdog said a month ago:
we all were happily paying for upgrades.
drivingmenuts said a month ago:
I don't mind paying for software, but I don't want to rent it - which is effectively what subscriptions are.
alwillis said a month ago:
I think one thing most people are missing: because Canva has 175 million users with a significant number of them paying a subscription, this enables them to keep the Affinity apps purchase model in place.
Think about it: why would Canva essentially destroy the reason why so many users (around 3 million according to the reporting) went to Affinity in the first place by going to a subscription model? I don't see that happening.
Canva is clear they want a foothold in the professional design market and buying Affinity and its team is the quickest way to get there.
I paid for V1 of the Affinity suite and happily paid for the universal V2 license upgrade which enabled me to run their apps on my iPad and my Mac and even Windows if I ever needed that. It was a bargain.
Ironically, I just removed the last remnants of Creative Cloud last week. I hadn't been using it, but it was there "just in case…".
Unlike when Adobe tried to buy Figma, I'm more optimistic than most that this going to turn out well for existing Affinity users.
I'd have no problem with being able to roundtrip designs between Affinity and Canva seamlessly. Someone could start on Canva and one a project progressed to a certain point, they could seamlessly transition to Affinity. Depending on what you're doing, you can quickly reach Canva's limits and it should be trivial to pickup where you left on in a future version of Affinity Designer or Photo.
Other than being able to configure DropBox, there's no cloud syncing support built-in to Affinity. Sure, you can glue it together with iCloud, OneBox, etc. but that's not what users should have to do in 2024.
I'm no stranger to bad outcomes from botched and user-hostile mergers and acquisitions of software. But this one has all of the potential to go the right way and I have no reason to think otherwise at this time.
bananapub said a month ago:
> because Canva has 175 million users with a significant number of them paying a subscription, this enables them to keep the Affinity apps purchase model in place.
please bookmark your own post and come back to it in five years so you can have a big a laugh.
Canva wants to be a player in image editing/design/etc. They have a big product that their investors love and has the ever-so-common monthly-tax funding model.
They have now bought a tiny, niche, desktop editing suite that makes approximately zero profit compared to Canva.
Do you think they did this because:
1. they thought it would be fun to own it and not interfere in any way, and to tell their investors to fuck off over and over when they suggest redeploying resources
1. they thought it would provide a good group of people and codebases to expand their existing editing software, and given that the software they currently sell makes essentially no money, at best they'll let it limp along with most staff working on integrating it into Canva-proper, at worst they'll kill it
KingOfCoders said a month ago:
(Customer from the very beginning for Designer&Photo, made a book with Publisher)
They will move to subscriptions (there will be many more of these moves, see VMWare), which will kill their differenitation towards Adobe and kill the product. If subscription, I can use Illustrator (which has 10x more tutorials than Designer). Most companies screw up M&A.
presentation said a month ago:
If the pricing model is the only thing that differentiates Affinity then that wouldn’t have been a very good sign for their future
cageface said a month ago:
As a happy Affinity customer and relatively casual user I prefer them because of their reasonable fixed prices and because and I don't have to run the abomination that is the Adobe Cloud client on my machine.
If they switch to a subscription model I will definitely be looking for alternatives.
abhpro said a month ago:
It's clearly enough for many people. That's the only reason I use Affinity, although I do agree Adobe could change their pricing models overnight and they would be in trouble.
KingOfCoders said a month ago:
Me too.
graypegg said a month ago:
From the forum, on the topic of the buyout:
"[I] Realise there seems to be a distinct lack of faith flying around here, but we'll be revealing more about our plans in the coming days and yes I'm sure you will all be pleased with what we have to say." - Ash
So that's at least possibly a sign of better information to follow.
But I wouldn't get my hopes up. "There are no changes to our current pricing model planned _at this time_" is already a very telling part of Serif's previous statement.
While they have earned a measure of trust, the problem is that they aren't the ones you need to trust anymore - if Canva wants to turn Affinity into a collection of bloodsucking subscription apps, then that's what's going to happen, short of a legally binding guarantee to the contrary.
UberFly said a month ago:
The best redeeming feature of Affinity apps was that they weren't a bloodsucking subscription like Adobe. Hopefully they have a plan for the apps that keeps them the best anti-Adobe option.
bananapub said a month ago:
what could they possibly say?
they can't guarantee they won't move to a subscription service in the future - this entire discussion is about how Affinity management have sold out and no longer control the company.
klelatti said a month ago:
Based on last published accounts (2022) Serif is very profitable and growing strongly: revenue £31.2m (up from £23.4m) and operating profits £17.9m (up from £14.4m). So it doesn't seem like they needed to sell.
Of course it is still small in the scheme of things - Canva seems to have revenue of c$2bn - and seems to be owned by three individuals in their 50s so one can probably understand why they wanted to to sell.
filmgirlcw said a month ago:
>So it doesn't seem like they needed to sell.
They probably didn’t need to sell (but who knows) but an offer of a buyout at a 20x multiple (based on the Bloomberg report) when the core business faces competition from Adobe and Canva, not just for core features where depending on context, Serif can do quite well, but also in the burgeoning AI-assisted space, where Serif has zero ability to compete (and AI is a big part of Canva and Adobe’s plans, whether certain vocal users like it or not), is compelling.
As a longtime user, this move makes me sad because I know I’ll lose some good tools to an inevitable subscription push (I also have Adobe CC and Canva subscriptions that I use for very different tasks so I’m not completely opposed to paying for a sub, but I certainly won’t pay Adobe prices for Affinity), but I can’t fault the company from wanting to exit, especially when the climate is what it is for the tools they sell.
Let’s put it this way, I can’t imagine them doing better than this.
AuryGlenz said a month ago:
I was a professional photographer until late last year.
Photoshop’s new AI tools are an absolutely incredible timesaver. Jobs that would have taken 30+ minutes (and probably wouldn’t look great) can now take 30 seconds. It was kind of amazing watching the perception shift online in photography groups from “AI is evil!” to “Wow, this is really helpful.”
There’s no way they could keep competing, even if they tried to take something off the shelf like Stable Diffusion and integrating it. Without some sort of subscription they’d need to have people run it locally, and that’s really only feasible with high end Nvidia cards too. I suppose the initial plan might be to add tools like that, have a separate subscription for that, and boil the frog to a full subscription.
filmgirlcw said a month ago:
Absolutely agreed. And your observation is the same I’ve seen with many of my artist friends. Everyone went from “fuck this Firefly shit” to “I need all of this yesterday.”
Canva already uses AI in really smart ways and if they can extend that approach into Affinity and have the two products compliment each other, that could def be a value-add for Canva users. But the more I think about it, the more I think this was the only thing Serif could do and although I sympathize with angry Affinity users as one myself, I think we have to acknowledge that Affinity’s chances of survival as a perpetually licensed product were basically over, acquisition or no acquisition, at least if you look out long-term.
klelatti said a month ago:
> Serif can do quite well, but also in the burgeoning AI-assisted space, where Serif has zero ability to compete
I think you've hit the nail on the head. AI tools will become essential and if you haven't got the resources to compete in this area you're likely to fade into relative irrelevance.
And at a 20x multiple probably a steal for Canva too given what this deal will give them - even without raising prices / going to subscription model.
It's a sad state of affair when the first thing people think (myself included, and rightfully so) is "how will the product worsen" (in this case, with subscription) instead of the opposite.
I'm also preparing for a mysterious update that will make the V1 and V1 of the suite non-functional because of non-visible stuff like "security improvement" and "system stability".
I hope that I'm wrong.
appstorelottery said a month ago:
I painfully switched to Affinity because of the rising Adobe subscription prices, I'd been a photoshop/illustrator user from the Dot com boom... I recall paying around 780 every two years for creative suite and given the hell I'd gone through by choosing Flex for a ERP project (Adobe's promises of iOS compatibility never materialising, then breaking compatibility - requiring a close-to-rewrite in their next version of Flex)... to cut a long story short - gave me shall we say - a few resentments towards the company. I suppose it's time to consider Pixelmator now, I'm such a grey-beard... subscriptions suck. ;-)
ihateolives said a month ago:
Pixelmator is nice for tinkering, but in no way it compares to Adobe Ps/Ilustrator for professional use. Workflow you can learn but there are subtle bugs that just crop up here and there like freeform transform handles just disappearing on some backgrounds etc. Some of the design decisions are different enough so that I haven't still gotten used to them after two years because it just doesn't feel intuitive to me, e.g. every single time I mess up working with text tool for the first five minutes time until I recall how it works.
raffraffraff said a month ago:
> Pixelmator Pro requires macOS 12 Monterey or later and is fully optimized for Macs with Apple silicon.
Might save some non-Apple users some time.
infl8ed said a month ago:
This caused me to bite the bullet and buy the v2 universal licence, currently 30% off. If you've ever bought anything v1 including a single app you probably qualify for the upgrade offer which is an extra 25% off on top of the sale https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/store/upgrade-offer/
I'm not necessarily against their inevitable subscription model, but may as well get the standalone while the getting is good. There are also often some good grandfather plan rates, if I decide later to go that path.
microflash said a month ago:
The problem with V2 license is that it cannot be activated offline so Canva can take a courageous decision to stop activations any time in future. V1 is great because it can be activated offline.
infl8ed said a month ago:
Interesting! I didn't realise this, however on balance I think I'm still happy with my purchase. Also looking into it, business licences (minimum of 2 pack purchase) can still be activated offline, just in case that is useful to anyone https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/188396-off...
RicoElectrico said a month ago:
Great to know, I pondered buying V2 as a V1 owner, but now they can kiss my butt.
The only downside is that Affinity V2 has no option to save files in a V1-compatible manner. Which stinks for exchanging stuff with other Affinity users.
bananapub said a month ago:
> I pondered buying V2 as a V1 owner, but now they can kiss my butt.
you're...declining to support a company you like that makes software you like, that is offering a massive discount to you, because at some point in the future they may not allow more activations of version 2, which would not affect your ability to use version 1 in any way?
this is a rather idiosyncratic position to take.
> The only downside is that Affinity V2 has no option to save files in a V1-compatible manner. Which stinks for exchanging stuff with other Affinity users.
as an affinity user, I am glad they didn't do that and instead did almost literally anything else with that engineering time.
redwasp said a month ago:
Ugh. I've seen what happens with Canva's acquisitions once already, albeit at a much smaller scale: I used to use a free service for PowerPoint templates called SlidesCarnival[1]. Decent templates, very customizable, and generally significantly better than the PowerPoint defaults.
They also got bought out by Canva, and I've watched the quality drop massively- any new content is almost entirely unusable, often only available on Canva itself, and chock full of design tropes and poorly SEO-optimized content. (Some of them are so bad as to be unintentionally hilarious.) It's a real mess, and it makes me less than optimistic about them buying out Affinity.
To be fair, their model was wildly different from a fully-featured editing suite, and certainly welcomed this kind of change, but they absolutely gutted that site: the only positive is that the original templates are still there, if you search for them. I'm not holding my breath, but I expect the same treatment now. An absolute shame- I don't use a photo editor enough to warrant an Adobe subscription, so I'll probably stay on Affinity V2 until it stops working.
This would be a great time for Canva to reassure customers that they don’t intend to change Affinity‘s business model. Not to say such assurances are even a reliable indicator of future plans, but it would at least be a nice gesture.
ricardobeat said a month ago:
That would be pointless as they will 100% be changing the business model. We’ve learned that over the past 20 years. RIP Affinity and one-time purchases.
josefresco said a month ago:
No changes "at this time" is the key phrase here. Not exactly reassuring.
graypegg said a month ago:
Well, I’m glad I have my standalone license. I guess I’ll be on Designer V2 for the next 10 years like I was with Illustrator CS3.
chilldsgn said a month ago:
Same. I upgraded last year and the software is fantastic and priced exceptionally well. I used to have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, but it got way too expensive and the frequency I used it didn't justify the price. Glad I found Affinity. I have Designer V2, Photo V2, and Publisher V2. I use all of them occasionally when I have time to work on my side projects. Subscriptions suck.
jwells89 said a month ago:
I’m increasingly tempted to buy a second hand license for one of the old single-purchase Creative Suites and just run that in a VM or with period-accurate hardware forever. For me practically all of the value in current graphic editors is compatibility with modern operating systems… CS1-CS3 are basically feature complete as far as I’m concerned.
graypegg said a month ago:
Honestly there's still things from CS3 that are missing in Designer V2! Being able to auto-trace sketches is still something that Designer can't do. There isn't really much that I'm doing now in a vector editor, that I wasn't doing 15 years ago. "feature complete" is a good way to put it.
user432678 said a month ago:
I wonder if it will work that long without need for patches/updates with the current pace of deprecations in macOS. Using Affinity Photo myself, wondering if I’d better off switching to Windows at this point.
seec said a month ago:
To be honest, that’s only one of the many reason to leave the Apple ecosystem in the near future.
I think that many would be better off switching to Windows (or Linux if they can) but they still believe or are attached to how things use to be.
I use to really love macOS but it has become an annoyance on many front, removing plenty of what made it better all while making it more and more like iOS and generally more closed and inflexible system.
Personally I have lost faith and I think that even if they would start reinvesting right now, it would take 10 years of pain with ever more expensive hardware.
themagician said a month ago:
We really need a version of Docker for desktop apps on macOS now. Would be nice to not have to worry about what's going to be broken after an update.
DHPersonal said a month ago:
I got a press release email from Canva today that included the following about perpetual licenses, which reads to me as if the prices are going to be increasing on those licenses:
> We are committed to fair, transparent and affordable pricing, including the perpetual licenses that have made Affinity special.
> We share a commitment to making design fairer and more accessible. For Canva, this has meant making our core product available for free to millions of people across the globe, and for Affinity, this has meant a fairly priced perpetual license model. We know this model has been a key part of the Affinity offering and we are committed to continue to offer perpetual licenses in the future.
> If we do offer a subscription, it will only ever be as an option alongside the perpetual model, for those who prefer it. This fits with enabling Canva users to start adopting Affinity. It could also allow us to offer Affinity users a way to scale their workflows using Canva as a platform to share and collaborate on their Affinity assets, if they choose to.
dantondwa said a month ago:
I guess there goes Affinity's only reason one might prefer them over Adobe. Personally, I use all their programs quite a bit (Photo, Designer, Publisher). I like them, but I don't think they're better than Adobe's offering. If they'll eventually shift to a subscription model, I guess I won't be interested in Affinity anymore, given their products are inferior.
whywhywhywhy said a month ago:
Not sure why a web based subscription product which already had collaboration features would want to own native one shot apps.
Only way I can see logic for this acquisition is if they're wanting the talent/experience of Affinity's developers to build web based offerings of the feature sets of Photo, Designers, Publisher as part of a Canva web offering.
rchaud said a month ago:
The latter is unlikely. The developers are active on the Affinity messageboards, I don't recall them ever having any interest in building web apps. Just creating a "good enough" cross-platform alternative to Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator is more than a full-time job already.
steve1977 said a month ago:
If Adobe would have a little bit of brain left, they would offer a cheaper subscription now. Essentially covering Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.
Instead of only the reasonably priced PS/LR bundle versus the too expensive "all the products we ever had" bundle.
They could basically wipe out Affinity. But yeah, won't happen I guess...
filmgirlcw said a month ago:
They don’t need to do that. First, Adobe doesn’t see Affinity as meaningful competition. Adobe sees Figma and Canva (and Blackmagic and Avid in the NLE space) as competition, but a company doing £30m a year in revenue is barely a blip on their radar (Adobe did nearly $20b in revenue in FY23).
Second, for the lowend market that Affinity serves, Adobe Express (its Canva compete) and Photoshop Express ($35 a year) are going to be enough for most of the core users. And Canva has quickly taken on the role for the low cost design tool of choice for normies who want to collaborate. I don’t use it for anything fancy, but I am not going to lie and say it isn’t better/faster at making YouTube thumbnails than basically anything else. Canva is the competitor, not Affinity. And Canva is being smart by buying a tool/team with a lot of users that they have the opportunity to now integrate with Canva. Will that integration be any good? I don’t know. But the leading web tool now has a native app component.
But make no mistake, Adobe has zero incentive to lower its prices for its core products at this time (the web products are a different story). The challenge it faces is when users at scale opt for similarly priced alternatives (Figma over XD, Canva over Adobe Express), not the middling number of users (and I count myself as one of them, but I’m just being honest) that pay for Affinity because it is a nice low cost tool.
I cannot imagine anyone who has a real business need for Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign and has to collaborate with others (and that part is key; if you’re a solo designer who never has to share files with others, that’s great but we’re not the target audience for Adobe anyway and we probably haven’t been since the early 1990s) choosing anything other than Adobe. The $720 a year or whatever it has gone up to is just the price of doing business.
Where Adobe faces challenges is from the people who don’t need to use Illustrator, InDesign or Photoshop for their work but have very strong web-based competition for specific tools. The UX teams that are standardized on Figma, even if they got XD as part of Creative Cloud, who don’t use Photoshop or Illustrator or InDesign, would rather pay the $45 or $75 a month to Figma. And the marketing teams that need to make graphics for social media or newsletters or whatever, would often rather pay $120 per seat for Canva than for Adobe Express (tho my recent experiments with Express show that it is getting very close to Canva in terms of capabilities and is better in some instances, Canva is prob better for that target audience, however). That’s the competition, not the offline design tools.
steve1977 said a month ago:
You have a point. I guess Adobe lowering the subscription prices is probably more wishful thinking on my part ;)
filmgirlcw said a month ago:
I def wish they would too! Alas.
phinnaeus said a month ago:
Maybe I'm naive but I'm not so sure Affinity will automatically end up as a subscription-based app like Canva Pro and Creative Cloud. Subscription makes sense for Canva Pro where a lot of the value add is in additional elements and templates and there's not a versioned app you can buy with a certain set of features. For a tool where you release discrete versions with new features it's a lot easier to just sell it as one-off purchases.
Even if Canva was out to milk Affinity for every dollar, the size of the market for the professional-level tools is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the market for Canva-level tools. I can't imagine it would move the needle. But what do I know...
jsjohnst said a month ago:
Looking at Canva’s pricing page makes me glad I have a perpetual license to Affinity’s products. Now the question is, will I ever get any updates to Photo/Design/Publisher? I don’t need new features, but I do care about bug fixes and such.
upsuper said a month ago:
> Now the question is, will I ever get any updates to Photo/Design/Publisher?
They answered the question in their FAQ:
> Will my Affinity apps still get updates?
> Yes! We have many free updates planned for V2, with a continued focus on improvements and the features you ask for.
karaterobot said a month ago:
I depend on Affinity products, and am not sure how to take this news. When Adobe tried to buy Figma, I knew both companies very well and knew equally well that Adobe would ruin Figma if they owned it. I'm glad that it didn't happen. But I don't know anything about Canva as a company. Product acquisitions usually have a certain trajectory, and my default assumption is that this will follow it: deeper, unasked-for integration with Canva's other products, a new pricing model, a brand new feature roadmap driven by the desire to make back their money, the departure of key figures from Affinity about a year from now. I hope I'm wrong though!
dudus said a month ago:
Never heard about Canva. But checking them out they seem to focus on mobile apps and web apps to edit photos and videos. With a very specific focus on social media influencers. Don't be fooled by the cheeky templates and filters,they are going heavy on AI, with some interesting features such as inpainting and video background removal.
I guess that's either a very lucrative business or they have a ton of VC money behind them. This acquisition gives them some good editors on desktop to use as a base to deploy some of this AI tech focusing on a more pro market.
enra said a month ago:
It is fairly lucrative business, $2b last year from serving the lower end of creative tools market.
They are also about to ipo so this acquisition probably gives the an additinal growth story to sell.
Scrounger said a month ago:
> It is fairly lucrative business, $2b last year from serving the lower end of creative tools market.
This is a rather backhanded take. From what I understand of Melanie, she is one of the few folks I've read about that had a rather unique rags to riches story, and is quite driven. I don't begrudge her level of success.
To that end, despite her interesting story around her role in the business, Canva itself really appeals to the lowest common denominator, which probably explains why they have such gangbuster financials. It really isn't great for true creatives though, and I feel Canva is dragging the industry down, not pulling it up, in the name of profits.
goralph said a month ago:
Your point?
Torn said a month ago:
Yes, very lucrative with huge free cash flow. 60% YoY growth last year too
themagician said a month ago:
Canva powers the scam market. It's played a big part helping the scam market expand. Everything from "make money online" creative to flooding Etsy with poorly designed AI garbage to crypto scams. Canva and Stan are the peanut butter and jelly of scammery in 2024.
theshackleford said a month ago:
Your description could equally be describing google, Facebook, twitter or even the internet itself.
fuzztester said a month ago:
>Never heard about Canva. But checking them out they seem to focus on mobile apps and web apps to edit photos and videos. With a very specific focus on social media influencers.
Some WhatsApp group users in India use Canva to create posters for events and then post them on various WhatsApp groups.
jonathanstrange said a month ago:
These kind of acquisitions always astonish me. How does a web company that essentially sells toys get the money to purchase a company that sells professional desktop products?
rchaud said a month ago:
It's 'valued' at $40bn, so if you can figure out the particulars of their VC rain dance, I imagine there's plenty of capital available for acquisitions.
goralph said a month ago:
They’re at a 13x multiple which is fairly conservative for a SaaS with their growth rates, and
have been profitable since 2017.
Disclaimer: I used to work there.
luismedel said a month ago:
True. Maybe a proof of the power of subscription based models?
lambdas said a month ago:
Shame. Purchased a V2 suite licence despite being perfectly happy with V1 because I wanted to support them, I don’t see anything good coming from merging with Canva.
gedy said a month ago:
I don't know, products rarely get better with these acquisitions. I like my native app Affinity Designer, with a reasonable one time license very much as is.
thrownawayjests said a month ago:
There goes the last lingering thread of my non-Linux OS use.
duiker101 said a month ago:
oh no, the whole reason why I like Affinity products is the pricing model. I can't imagine that will last long.
hresvelgr said a month ago:
In light of this, I can't help but feel the OSS alternatives to the Adobe graphics suite are pretty abysmal.
Inkscape is passable but aspects like filters are obtuse to use and that's largely because it's trying to be a good compliant SVG editor and not necessarily a good vector graphics editor.
GIMP's user experience in my opinion has been terrible for decades and every time I have given it a chance it's annoyed me into closing it. I can get things done, but it gets in my way.
As for Scribus I've never used it, but based on the previous two I'm not instilled with confidence.
jarek-foksa said a month ago:
> Inkscape is passable but aspects like filters are obtuse to use and that's largely because it's trying to be a good compliant SVG editor and not necessarily a good vector graphics editor.
It is actually possible to build an intuitive UI for filters while staying compliant with SVG. You just have to abstract away the low level SVG primitives ("feColorMatrix", "feComponentTransfer", etc.) with user-friendly presets such as "Sepia" or "Drop shadow". I actually created a mockup for such UI in Inkscape long time ago [1] and I eventually implemented it in Boxy SVG [2].
Advanced filter editing could be improved by switching from tree-based to node-based UI, in similar fashion to e.g. Jasc WebDraw [3].
Personally speaking I’ve always found Inkscape frustrating compared to Sketch or Affinity Designer, but it’s in a different way than GIMP is. GIMP I think would mostly be fine if they just ditched all the quirky GIMP-unique UI conventions in favor of more commonplace counterparts (which in some cases is as “easy” as using standard GTK widgets instead of custom stuff) but who knows when or if that’ll happen.
whitehexagon said a month ago:
I wonder in these type of takeovers, when it seems clear that nothing good can come next for the product users, if it would be somehow possible for a cooperative style takeover by the customer base.
pentagrama said a month ago:
I love Affinity Designer as a tool and his pay once license, I'm pretty sure that if you already purchased current version (V2), you will be fine, but I'm afraid they will go the subscription route soon like Adobe and Canva.
Is suspicious that Affinity marketing was always highlighting the pay once license model and against subscription, and in the official announcement there is no mention of that.
A lesson is that with the good ol Inkscape that type of thing that endangered the tool it doesn't happen.
beezlebroxxxxxx said a month ago:
It will probably go subscription, unfortunately.
But the smart move would be to double the price (obviously not immediately, but eventually) while retaining the pay once model and really doubling down on the professional aspect of the Affinity products (even if, compared to Adobe, they're not super professional grade yet). The reason people bought Affinity stuff was the pay once deal. That's how you retain those customers while aggressively moving into a prosumer market for Canva.
Now, though, Affinity is just another gravestone on the path of insane tech rent-seeking, buy-extract-kill, and financialization.
seec said a month ago:
I agree but if they want to double the price they really need to be a lot better.
Last time I used it for a quick project (relatively simple yet complex restaurant menu layout) I really wished I had used Adobe stuff instead (paid for a month or bootleg version).
On the surface Affinity stuff is nice but it is very lacking in some not even advanced use cases and rather finicky, errors/bugs prone.
You end up spending a lot more time, building up a lot more frustration than you would with Adobe tools.
Adobe is stupid expensive for someone who do not make money off it, but their software are quite good all things considered…
kkirsche said a month ago:
I love their software and am happy for the humans behind it all. As a customer who doesn’t believe they won’t force a subscription on me, I wish I had never supported them
nikolay said a month ago:
A mistake, if you ask me. They can't compete with Adobe.
phinnaeus said a month ago:
Affinity can, though. I haven't touched Photoshop/Illustrator in years since I discovered Affinity.
orbital-decay said a month ago:
You're probably not the target audience though. Adobe products might be old, dysfunctional, and janky under all that cruft, but they have vast amounts of domain knowledge put into them.
Meaningfully competing with Photoshop & co involves breaking the lock-in (nearly impossible) and being much better use-case-wise. It's been done in certain niches where Photoshop is bad/mediocre/stagnates, like digital painting, but for general purpose suites like Affinity it means they have to be better at most things, which they just don't seem to be capable of.
omnimus said a month ago:
Photoshop is the only software Adobe has bern giving atleast some attention.
If you are print designer than Publisher and Designer got to a point where they actually are better at many if not most fundamental things (speed, stability, ux of features, format support).
The main thing that has been keeping Affinity from adoption has been networking effects (adobe is in all companies and gets taught at schools).
Affinity is this close to turning this. Basically everyone has been waiting for them to allow third party plugins/scripting and the whole print industry would start to jump real fast.
nikolay said a month ago:
Adobe is not just Photoshop and Illustrator; Affinity is still subpar, and Adobe products are moving fast ahead.
phinnaeus said a month ago:
Photoshop and Illustrator are surely a vast majority of Adobe product usage. What would be #3? Premiere? Lightroom?
Actually I take it back, Acrobat is probably #1
omnimus said a month ago:
Indesign is the main graphic software after Photoshop. Basically anything that gets printed uses Indesign. Photoshop is more well known because people love photography as a hobby but in professional print setting photos are just smaller component.
phinnaeus said a month ago:
Affinity has an InDesign competitor, so this would seem to be a point in favor of the argument for Affinity being able to compete with Adobe if InDesign is in the top 3 Adobe products.
omnimus said a month ago:
I think they are serious competitor and probably that's why they were able to have payday and sell the product.
yaomtc said a month ago:
Davinci Resolve is on par with Premiere. Quark XPress is a great replacement for InDesign. No need to rely on one company for every type of multimedia software.
lstamour said a month ago:
Have you actually used the products you’re recommending and the Adobe equivalents? I would say that InDesign easily won over then industry-standard Quark nearly two decades ago, and Resolve is okay but not great at most things. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of Resolve and its pricing, but like Affinity, it’s not quite on par with the features of Adobe’s products. I’m routinely frustrated by missing features. I have complaints for Adobe products too, but usually missing features aren’t one of them. (Except if your product is named Captivate or was recently changed from a legacy app to a modern Electron app (or something), then I have a lot of missing features to suggest.)
Heck, I am frustrated that Canva didn’t have a layers panel, and now that they do, that it doesn’t behave the way I expect and I can’t pull it up easily… or that Canva makes it impossible to ensure assets match when searching for a matching sequence or set of templates. Or all the ways I can’t just do the thing I’m thinking of by right clicking or modifying layers or something. Canva itself is an exercise in frustration for power users. Affinity ain’t perfect either. Great matchup, really.
omnimus said a month ago:
Quark is trash but Affinity Publisher is pretty great imho if they added third party scripting/plugins pro market would start moving off Adobe.
lstamour said a month ago:
I’m less convinced. The text features and even how frames resize images were either annoying or lacking when I last used Publisher. Yes, I used it, and yes, it worked. But it’s no contest that in the details, InDesign has more features that are (in some cases) better thought out or for text rendering, just really good. At the moment the two best ways I know of to render text are (1) any Adobe product with their text engine and (2) LaTeX via something like XeTeX, but Adobe’s still wins for ease of use. Maybe third place would go to the Safari web browser if you use the right CSS and presumably export to PDF, though using it to export PDFs isn’t as user-friendly as iOS Share panel, Chrome or Prince - for PDF export, at least. Note that these statements are subjective on my part, I’d welcome evidence to the contrary as a sign of progress away from the Adobe hegemony. ;-)
omnimus said a month ago:
Are you sure this is not just learning inertia? Because frames in Affinity work more like css object-fit and are "live". In Indesign you have to "recalculate" fit/fill every time with action. I would argue if you didn't know Indesign way the Affinity way is superior.
Text rendering algorithms are quite known quantity and lifted from LaTeX. Indesign has paragraph (multi-line) composer which in latex equivalent is microtype package. Affinity doesn't have that but paragraph composer is not really used that much in professional setting because when you do final manual fixes/adjustment of typography then with paragraph composer your changes could affect previous changes in paragraph (so people go by line by line). Paradoxically paragraph composer is pretty good for quickly getting OK enough results especially in more budget/non-pro setting.
Other than that i don't think the typography output (for print) is different I've seen some tests and it seems kinda exactly the same. Affinity might render type on screen a bit differently but the output is solid. I was more afraid of the quality of .pdf itself but even highend offset printers didn't see a difference/complained.
wdb said a month ago:
Resolve is so much better than Premiere. Resolve doesn’t crash half the time
lstamour said a month ago:
Good point. And I should clarify, I’m not a filmmaker and mostly edit screen recordings and home movies. For that, I find that Resolve and Final Cut Pro work equally well and equally poorly. There’s a lot of room in video editing for further innovation, particularly if A.I. or automation can help simplify repetitive tasks. Premiere isn’t the best example of Adobe’s video tools - that title probably belongs to After Effects, an app inexplicably unique in its ease of editing and producing motion video graphics. No need to deal with translating your ideas into Nodes to get it working in Resolve. No need to try to fit within the limitations of titles and effects in FCP, etc. After Effects is Premiere’s killer app.
earthnail said a month ago:
I think Davinci is great. What are you missing?
lstamour said a month ago:
FCP X’s simple timeline which chains clips together making edits easy, though some would call this an anti-feature.
After Effects simplicity compared to the hellscape that can be node-based VG work. I mean, the programmer in me loves nodes, I even used MaxMSP frequently… and Origami. But the simplicity of After Effects is really nice and it has like every plugin in existence.
Don’t get me wrong, I use DaVinci with the quick editor and have considered buying other gear to make it work better, but… it’s really kinda a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-color-grading app. There’s a lot still to wish for.
maxmcorp said a month ago:
With the advent of generative AI the painting has been on the wall for some time. Using it in Photoshop is simply so good that it is a necessity by now. Affinity are not a large enough company to train an AI, and any AI will not be able to run locally for a long time. So it must take place in the cloud and therefore require a subscription.
ocdtrekkie said a month ago:
This is deeply saddening news. I own Affinity Photo and Designer and I'm sure in a few years people won't be able to say that. For most of my usage, mind you, Krita and Inkscape have been able to meet my needs, so more than likely this will just solidify my preference for the open source options out there.
liminal said a month ago:
I don't see the point of this acquisition. The products don't compete, so it's not eliminating market competition. The products also don't 'synergize' (ugh) well: they target different market demographics, have separate learning curves and different business models. Why?
drivingmenuts said a month ago:
Market coverage? Now they're in the desktop app market without having to develop their own thing.
heldrida said a month ago:
Sad news! I've been an Affinity customer for many years; I like it much better than Adobe. Canvas branding is underwhelming, and there is no doubt in my mind that Affinity will change to be at the level of what Canvas represents: a web app.
martin_henk said a month ago:
It could be worse than canva, which is actually pretty great value when used with a free account. Also, Canva seems to take design kind of seriously. For example google Slides still can't do any font kerning after all these years.
jwells89 said a month ago:
Disappointing, because this likely spells the end of one-time-purchase Affinity products, and as mentioned in the article up until now that has been a big selling point for them.
I hope I’m wrong, but if I’m not it doesn’t fare well for Affinity’s future growth and popularity. People are likely to go back to Adobe because there’s no point giving up the compatibility, instructional material, etc that comes with Adobe stuff if they’re stuck with subscriptions either way.
DavidGetchel said a month ago:
I agree. I've been using their programs since they came out and the one-time-purchase helped me get away from adobes clutches.
Another good thing likely bites the dust.
agotterer said a month ago:
I hope you’re wrong as well! As a casual creative with the occasional need for photo editing and vector design tools, I could never justify the price for an Adobe subscription. But I’ve happily bought Affinity Photo and Design. They aren’t as polished as their Adobe counterparts, but the price was just right. I wouldn’t sign up for a monthly subscription.
justaman said a month ago:
I just heard about this software today. Seeing that it was a one time purchase, I almost got out my wallet right then and there. Making it a subscription model would immediately turn me off.
mythz said a month ago:
I'm a happy Affinity Customer thanks to their low cost perpetual licenses and quality software, hoping that none of that changes - don't use it nearly enough to justify maintaining a subscription.
MrTrvp said a month ago:
Canva is subscription based.
pier25 said a month ago:
Hopefully this will allow the Serif team to improve their products. I bought their products from day one with the hope they would get better but after 10 years or so I'm still on Adobe.
It’s hard to sell an entire industry on replacing tools that “just work” with a new set of tools unless they actually work better. Consider what VS Code has had to do to try and get devs switch to it from other IDEs: they had to offer first-class support for pretty much every other IDE’s method of operating, e.g. plugins to take the keyboard shortcuts from other IDEs, plus offer better support for languages (e.g. LSPs, use of TextMate bundles), and on top of that offer new features not seen elsewhere (e.g. devcontainers, web-based IDEs, first-class GitHub integration…) and even then people will obviously still pick JetBrains products for Java or Python because you can’t actually copy every feature and win.
Likewise it only took me 5-10 minutes with Publisher before I started noticing missing features with text (Adobe has an excellent text rendering engine, go figure) and Designer in v1 was so frustrating that I haven’t used v2 much, though my use cases were pretty specific. I’ve actually found myself putting up with the bugs in OmniGraffle (oh so many bugs) because the infinite canvas there works so well when zooming around. When it works, that is.
Got a bit sidetracked in my answer, but Adobe has a lot going for it. Honestly this is probably great news for Figma, as they have an opportunity now to build better web-based photo and publishing apps before Canva can figure it out.
omnimus said a month ago:
Affinity deals with boolean operations in different way Figma/Sketch/Glyphs also dont have pathfinder. They probably added it for some edgecases and because its easier for illustrator users to switch.
Publisher has pretty much same type tools as Indesign only the panels/features are positioned differently. Publisher doesnt have multi-line composer but that is paradoxically not used in professional setting anyway (its great for quick things though).
On the other hand you are overlooking fundamentals where Affinity is so much better than Adobe - stability,speed,connection between the software.
It seems biggest issue Affinity has are networking effects/inertia of the industry unvilling to change.
lstamour said a month ago:
> On the other hand you are overlooking fundamentals where Affinity is so much better than Adobe - stability, speed, connection between the software.
I think others would argue on that last point that Adobe is more than halfway there since Creative Suite and has plans to finish the job with Adobe Express, though we’ll see if they come to fruition.
> It seems biggest issue Affinity has are networking effects/inertia of the industry unvilling to change.
This I agree with, 100%. And now Affinity will have a third struggle in that they are poised to go subscription and lose the pricing model advantage too. Even if they don’t change the pricing model, eventually you’ll need a Canva account to use the apps, ongoing annual support fees, and so on.
Daub said a month ago:
Maybe it is your particular needs, but so far I have been very impressed by the Affinity suite. I render from Blender in open exr, place in an AP document which I then place in a AP document. When I update the render, the whole pipeline is updated. This preservation of high dynamic range info would be impossible in the Adobe Suite.
I think that this is possible because under the hood the Affinity Suite uses the same core engine. In contrast, Adobe bought their suite from diverse sources, and interplay between them is clunky at best.
I agree that text preview in AP can be rough, but the output in pdf is as good as that in InDesign.
pier25 said a month ago:
There's plenty but as an example the group isolation feature in Designer. To me is the biggest deal breaker.
It has been requested plenty of times and there are multiple threads in their forum. This one is 10 years old:
If they move Affinity to subscription, CorelDRAW is probably the only viable (commercial) graphic product left with a perpetual license. Apart from FOSS, of course.
tap-snap-or-nap said a month ago:
The thing I learnt about FOSS which gives me a long term advantage is that I have to learn to do things only once.
pseingatl said a month ago:
No, there's Viva Designer, a German desktop publishing program.
coldtea said a month ago:
OK, there goes a decent-ish Adobe alternative.
Now it will be more subscriptions, polluted with embedded Canva shit, and perhaps phasing out the desktop apps altogether.
bigboy12 said a month ago:
Adobe is for pros.
coldtea said a month ago:
"Pros" is not well defined, unless if it's just used to mean "people getting paid for work they do by using the software" (what actually separates the pros from the non-pros: getting paid).
Otherwise, it's a "no true Scotsman" thing, only including the 10% of hardcore graphic designers deep into Photoshop and Illustrator and such, and not the 90% of web designers, app UI designers, content creators, artists, and others, who might or might not use Adobe, but that still often make more $ than belleguered "pro" graphic designers.
It's like how an exexutive using an MBP and making $500,000k/year is "not a pro" for some, but some guy using it to make $70k/year is, and somehow gets to define what is or isn't a "pro machine".
For what many (or most) people do in 2024, many alternatives, including Affinity, Canva, Figma, Sketch, and others, are fine for their professional (as in, charging customers, or earning money by work created using the software) use cases.
froyolobro said a month ago:
Affinity is amazing (I use Designer, and my dad loves Photo). Canva is actually pretty amazing too. It's going to stir things up, for sure.
pseingatl said a month ago:
Viva Designer is a German desktop publishing program which does not use a subscription-based model.
Haven't seen it mentioned here.
jwr said a month ago:
It's bad news and not because of the "fear of subscription" (if you think you aren't paying for a subscription now, you are deluding yourself).
The problem is that most acquisitions go wrong and that larger companies generally care much less about their users. There are no good scenarios and no possible benefits there for Affinity users (like me). In a small company, management cares about users, because these users provide a direct lifeline for the company. In a large business, management cares about "shareholder value" as measured by their bonuses and this quarter's earnings. That does not map well onto customer satisfaction (see Adobe, Dropbox, or really just about any company that became large or got acquired).
ulfw said a month ago:
Canva seems lost in terms of what they are or want to be. I suppose AI doesn't help businesses like Canva's.
Kye said a month ago:
The fast race toward version 3 has been a cause for concern. It _just_ came out and it's already in the 2.4s.
drivingmenuts said a month ago:
I have this horrible feeling that they're going to convert the Affinity suite to be online-only products.
dinkleberg said a month ago:
We just need to get some big companies to give GIMP (or another OSS alternative) the Blender treatment.
danieldk said a month ago:
Most customers of Adobe and Affinity are on Mac or Windows. I am not sure about Windows, but unfortunately GTK apps are absolutely horrible on macOS. It probably makes more sense so fund something Qt-based for better cross-platform support.
That said, for big companies a Creative Cloud subscription (let alone a single app subscription) is only a drop in the bucket compared to employee salaries.
I think Affinity Suite is probably most popular among indie folks, people who need it less regularly, etc.
joduplessis said a month ago:
As per the article, do people really see Canva as a competitor to Adobe? I must be missing something.
reportgunner said a month ago:
Affinity is the competitor I think.
nipperkinfeet said a month ago:
God, darn it. It's time to disable updates and retain an archived copy of the installer.
getcrunk said a month ago:
What a shame. So far akamais purchase of linode haven’t bourne ill fruit. Time will tell
xoa said a month ago:
While Affinity is a one-time purchase, I'll admit I was very, very disappointed when with the last version they switched from a normal product key to online-only activation requirement which was not at all clear at purchase time. So despite having purchased the whole v2 suite I ended up never using it and staying with v1, and their response was pretty junk as well. That said, I share concerns of other posters that this isn't going to make the trajectory any better. The email sent out by the CEO also gave me very strong "Our Incredible Journey" [0] vibes:
>"In Canva, we've found a kindred spirit who can help us take Affinity to new levels. Their extra resources will mean we can deliver much more, much faster. Beyond that, we can forge new horizons for Affinity products, opening up a world of possibilities that would never previously have been achievable.
>Canva's revolutionary approach to design democratisation and commitment to empowering everyone to create aligns perfectly with our core values and vision. This union is a testament to what can be achieved when two companies that share a common goal of making design accessible and enjoyable for everyone come together."
I can't speak for anyone else on HN but the whole thing (more resources! empowerment! design democratisation!) gives me some serious deja vu.
We’ve been burned so often by those kinds of statements that every time I see a company repeating them I’m left wondering if the founders are unbearably naive or they think users are stupid.
drivingmenuts said a month ago:
It's the usual CEO claptrap before they decimate the company.
1. Acquire company
2. ???
3. Fire developers until profitable without doing actual work
4. Raise CEO Salary
rchaud said a month ago:
Firing them would be stupid, unless Canva has desktop app developers sitting around twiddling their thumbs.
V__ said a month ago:
I hate these statements. They could have said something like:
"We got bought by Canva because they want more independence/alternatives from Adobe. We can invest more in development. Expect more integrations with Canva. Currently there are no plans for changes to our business model"
But they didn't. Their statement was meaningless with zero information. Which means either they will absolutely enshitificate everything or they didn't care to ask or they didn't clarify it during negotiations.
All reasons to stay far away from now on. I was planning to buy their suit for a whole team next month. Time to look elsewhere.
upsuper said a month ago:
> "... Currently there are no plans for changes to our business model"
They mentioned exactly that in the FAQ:
> Canva’s business model is subscription, are there any plans to change how Affinity is sold?
> There are no changes to our current pricing model planned at this time, with all our apps still available as a one-off purchase.
oliwarner said a month ago:
I'd perform undignified sex acts on camera for supported Linux and Android versions. I'd pay too if that helps. I think lot of Linux developer-creatives would.
I love Inkscape and GIMP but they desperately need domestic competition.
What I didn't manage to read was are they buying Serif or buying this from Serif?
ergonaught said a month ago:
I began migrating stuff away as soon as I got their email announcement today.
potta_coffee said a month ago:
I love Affinity and I don't love Canva. I'm hopeful nothing much changes but I'm not holding my breath. I'll pay a subscription over my dead body.
gkoberger said a month ago:
Agreed, but Canva isn't really for us. Canva is for the types of people who "want a poster/t-shirt/etc that's pretty enough and have no skills with Photoshop." Canva is buying Affinity to expand their market into professionals, not to water it down.
pers0n said a month ago:
It’s a matter of time before Adobe buys them and kills everything
WillAdams said a month ago:
Fortunately, it looks as if Adobe has gotten so big that they won't be allowed to buy much more --- witness the recent Figma deal which was shut down.
lloydatkinson said a month ago:
Ah great. More fucking enshittification. What a disaster.
ksec said a month ago:
Yet another UK business in tech with great potential now gone. It just seems UK cant grow any big tech company. Even ignoring Tech, most if not all of the big UK companies are in Finances and Services.
MichaelMug said a month ago:
Canva's approach has been to create a convoluted, frankenstein's monster, browser-first, mixed media editor that is largely inadequate for professional workflows. Also everything is locked away in their cloud from files to assets. I hate everything about Canva's UX and performance.
I suspect Canva will attempt to integrate Affinity into their cloud offering without fully comprehending the specific use cases and features that made Affinity successful in the first place. Canva's target is the novice and social media influencer, Affinity is a different market.
Sad day...
returnInfinity said a month ago:
Canva wants to be the next Adobe
Acquire figma next.
KingOfCoders said a month ago:
Oh no!
telegtron said a month ago:
... and let the enshittification begin!
s4mw1se said a month ago:
now they just need to train generative AI models by opting in all of their users to allow training in on their data and forcing them to opt-out if they want otherwise. To compete with adobe that is.
thrillgore said a month ago:
Oh jesus christ, can we stop with the acquisitions?
TheCapeGreek said a month ago:
I've never seen much hate for Canva until this thread.
HN will really hate on any kind of acquisition, regardless of if the acquirer is a "big bad" like Adobe or not.
heldrida said a month ago:
Most comments seem to be from Affinity customers. I've been a customer for many years. They have incredible software, and it's extremely sad because past acquisitions seem to destroy the applications people like and support, not the other way around. Canva looks like McDonalds.
bluescrn said a month ago:
It’s not about hate for Canva. It’s about love for Affinity. Who are now being gobbled up by a bigger fish, with the inevitable consequence being enshittification.
omgmajk said a month ago:
It's not really hard to see why though. Software which only real saving grace is a better license model than the bigger fish gets bought by another bigger fish to ultimately, most likely, get put in the same license model.
352 Comments:
The link should probably be changed to official announcement.[1]
That said, this is pretty dismaying. I've been using Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo for years. Their standalone and non-subscription based apps are perfect for my usecase. Compared to Adobe, they are a no-brainer. But, I don't think Canva would leave them be as is. Either next versions will be a subscription or a rug pull is coming for the existing version.
[1]: https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/affinity/
Here's Serif/Affinity announcements: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/press/newsroom/canva-press-... https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/press/newsroom/canva-statem...
And here's few Affinity forum threads about the topic:
- https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/201405-que...
- https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/201403-can...
Also, this maybe distracting for either parties
- Affinity team (if they are pressured to go beyond professional designers or change to subscription, go to cloud, web etc.)
- Canva. Professional/enterprise is a very different ball game than the consumer market that they were focussing on. Ex. their mobile app for consumer itself is kind of broken, whereas mobile first experience is very important for the demography that they are targeting.
Canva slowly built out enterprise features, but it’s not fully there yet. They seem to be aiming for what Sketch was aiming for before Figma overtook it - the ability for teams to publish and use design systems and templates in Canva. Which is a cool niche to start with, but isn’t flexible enough.
Plus Canva doesn’t really have the concept of “local files” so they’re stuck until they evolve to include every feature of Google Drive, at minimum, including local file sync. Canva ignoring traditional apps is like Chrome pretending the OS doesn’t exist and then building ChromeOS. Some concepts are necessary complexity, particularly for power users. Canva is a bit too simple still, and thus frustrating.
Canva and Affinity just released another news [1] which makes the pledge that
> We know this model has been a key part of the Affinity offering and we are committed to continue to offer perpetual licenses in the future. If we do offer a subscription, it will only ever be as an option alongside the perpetual model, for those who prefer it.
[1]: https://www.canva.com/newsroom/news/affinity-canva-pledge/
Guess we'll see how well this ages.
Companies always keep promises like this, so I'm sure we have nothing to worry about.
of course. big corporations only think about profit. affinity as we know it are dead.
Unlike small corporations who only think about selling themselves out to the big ones
There are small or comparatively small corporations who proudly and decidedly stay small, and even refuse to sell.
https://cdm.link/2021/11/ableton-reportedly-refused-investme...
Is there a company that doesn't think about profit?
Primarily? Yes. But there are even companies that rather lose money than compromise on some product or other principles. Mind you, those are privately owned. Boards and shareholders fuck everything they touch.
Only is the keyword here.
If they want to compete with adobe the have to put in some work
“Compete with Adobe” presumably means they will enshitten Affinity software even worse than Adobe did theirs. Looking forward to subscription-based ad-infested nagware.
This is bad news. The Affinity offers a genuine and very high class alternative to the Adobe suite. Its HDRI workflow is league ahead of anything else.
As for Canva, all I can say is that I downgrade any student who makes their research slides using this dumb service. The slides are template-driven horror with each exported pdf slide being rasterized pngs: stupidly large files with text that is impossible to select and copy.
Hello, I'm an engineer in Canva's editing team, which is also responsible for rendering of designs.
Text in our PDF export should generally be selectable and copyable. I just tested one presentation template I recently used, and it is indeed so.
I know there were bugs forcing text to be rasterized in certain cases, mostly related to text effects. To my knowledge, they should have been worked around by adding a layer of transparent text on top.
If you know any design that produces PDF file where text becomes not selectable, that might be a bug, and it would be appreciated if you can provide more details so that we can investigate and possibly fix.
I love HN.
"I wish the Xs at Y would make Y do Z"
> "Hi, I'm a X from Y. Y already does Z. I did that last Tuesday."
Always my favourite genre of interactions on this site.
There should be no need for HN to provide this kind of support channel. It exhibits how things don’t work.
You are assuming the parent poster actually attempted to go through support and work through the issue. I don't see indication of that. If anything, this thread indicates to me that many people form an opinion of a product and never seek support or never seek to revisit the issue and see if it has been fixed.
It's not support at all in this case, don't mix everything. Someone says something wrong about a product you're literally working on, there's nothing wrong in responding.
I confess I have never used Canva myself. However, every pdf that students send our way from Canva is basically just series of flattened images. This also applies to the many Canva derived pdfs which I see from job applicants. So... What is going wrong? I will look into it and message you if I find anything new.
Thanks greatly for making contact. Only on Hacker News.
To be fair to your product, it is the only viable means by which a set of slides can be worked on collaborativly and online. You saw that InDesigns collaboration tools suck and stepped in.
I realized that we provide an option called "Flatten PDF" [1] which does exactly what you described: flatten everything including text into a big image per page. It makes all text unselectable and also produces a very large file.
This feature was introduced for printing consistency as PDF viewers and print drivers may render things differently. But I don't think it's selected by default, so users have to consciously tick it to make it happen.
But it seems that our support team sometimes presents this feature as a way to solve user issues, so maybe that's the reason.
[1] https://www.canva.com/help/download-flattened-pdf/
I had assumed 'Flatten PDF' was to make the PDF smaller so just used it without thinking or comparing!
"Flatten" comes from the world of desktop image editors. You "flatten" one layer down to the next to make one layer. Sometimes the people who work on these kinds of things forget their users might have never used software with metaphors like this.
I agree that the help page isn't very helpful. I had to reach out internally to understand what it is doing and why it is there.
Hey, I'm the SGEL for User Voice, ping me on slack and I'll be able to help.
You don’t sound like a good educator. Perhaps withhold your personal and subjective gripes for the sake of your students
He does explain the rationale though. They’re both things I didn’t know about canva generated files. Makes sense for them to do that I guess, it means you won’t be able to reuse any of their stuff outside of their platform.
Almost agree, but submitting research information as an image, and not selectable/copyable text is kind of unacceptable these days.
Except he's wrong and Canva's PDFs have selectable text.
Telling their students to avoid locking down their works inside a subscription-based service is good imo.
It's good advice sure. But downgrading their work, no. Unless you have explicit requirements that aren't met like your text being selectable, downgrading work because you have a prejudice against an authoring tool isn't cool. What if another educator has an issue with Power Point, and another with Sheets. Should students have to match their authoring tool with their educators for each lesson?
Students are there to learn, no to cater to your preferences.
School is about learning to give information in the format requested. When you reach the real world these lessons are the important ones.
What you're saying makes sense... if the OP explicitly tells the students to make their work available in a shareable and copyable format. The vast majority of presentations in schools don't live beyond the moment the presentation is finished.
I see now that I should have made myself more clear. slides made in InDesign are indeed a stated requirment. Why....
I teach Design. One of the key learning outcomes of most design courses is the ability to handle long documents through their structural styles: heading 1, heading 2, caption, block quote, lists etc. Most design apps offer this functionality, even Powerpoint. However, none do it as elegantly as InDesign. I'm no Adobe fanboy (I do most of my own work in the Affinity suite) but InDesign remains the leader of the pack in this regard.
One crucial strength of InDesign is that it that manages anti aliasing of text very effectively. Just compare the output of ID to MS Word and you will see. I guess you are familiar with pdfs from LaTex? Compare those with pdfs from MS word. Similar difference.
It also does not produce or allow fake bold/italic etc. If a font does not have a built in bold then it won't fake one up by thickening the characters. This is why the font and charter panels in InDesign seem so feature-poor compared to those of Photoshop or Illusustor which offer such fake variants.
One final reason... cloud based services are risky things to rely on, especially in a uni. This year one service many students and staff used closed its doors. Caused a lot of angst.
He sounds like a very good educator. I wish people always guided me against using shitty services throughout my education.
> I downgrade any student who makes their research slides using this dumb service
I really hope you’re exaggerating
From another comment, he teaches design. As a designer, I find it’s legit to downgrade a design student for using Canva.
That's important context then.
Using Canva for a design assignment is obviously a mis-step by the student, not a flaw of the tool itself
For short-term & quick usage, canva is a perfectly fine tool for editing/formatting stuff
On what basis? Is Canva somehow cheating? I don't know, as I'm not a designer in any way.
Yes.
Explain why it's cheating? I'm a designer. I have been for over a decade. I don't use Canva, but I use Sketch, Figma, etc., and create templates or utilize templates made by others as starting places.
How is Canva any different than this? Part of design is being able to recognize what good design is, and utilizing the tools available to you. If Canva get the job done, and looks good, and has been sufficiently modified to meet the specified criteria supplied in the assignment or spec, how is it cheating?
The only way I could see is if they didn't modify the slides and part of the assignment was to create a unique branded slide presentation and they just used an out of the box design. In which case, no design work was done.
Someone shouldn't be penalized for the outcome based on the tools utilized unless the spec specifically excludes it.
It's like telling a clothing e-commerce company that they shouldn't use Shopify. If the work is done, why waste your time building an e-commerce site from scratch if it meets the specified need?
Canva is a great tool, and saves my clients thousands of dollars, while I get to avoid doing the completely mind numbing process of working in PowerPoint or designing social media posts. It's a win/win.
> Explain why it's cheating?
how would you feel about a student presenting stock images in a photography class?
> I use Sketch, Figma, etc., and create templates or utilize templates made by others as starting places.
Working professionaly has a different objective than school assignments. I think the distinction is very clear on many levels. Also, students using blatant off-the-shelf templates is very different professionals using templates "as starting place".
> If Canva get the job done, and looks good, and has been sufficiently modified to meet the specified criteria supplied in the assignment or spec, how is it cheating?
Well, that's not the case here. OP has explained that the design students in question aren't even using their low-effort canva templates right and exporting them as flattened pdf. It's very unlikely those who are this sloppy and careless have put any attention to the assignment or polishing other areas.
The key point is you can't delegate the main task. To use your Shopify example, if you enrolled in a "Web development using nodejs" class, and presented a premade shopify website that you purchased in a couple of clicks, the instructor won't be impressed, less so when you tell them you did it in 5 minutes "why waste time". If that's the student goal, fine, but they are in the wrong classes.
Why would you downgrade a student based on the tool they use to create their presentations instead of the content itself?
Tapping into both my own uni graphics design and a past life as senior exec at a mega corp: because designers that use bad tools to make unusable presentations are failing "you had one job", to make something presentable across the variety of business modalities.
Being able to email the presentation and copy text from it are generally more important to communications impact and utility in the workplace than how it looks.
Being aware what your tool does to the presentation is part of the job you're learning in school.
Because they made a bad tool choice for their own convenience ? That leads here to big images and unselectable text, no accessibility.
Exactly: large files, ugly slides (I teach design) and impossible to select text.
The template driven nature on Canva also makes it really hard for them to learn multi page layouts and structured documentation.
The one thing in its favour is that it supports collaboration.
In Canva we do care about accessibility. While I admit our editor may still have a long way to go on providing an accessible editing experience, unselectable text in export result is more likely an overlooked bug than anything intentional.
And if you're coming from the Affinity side, don't worry your new corporate overlords DO care about people, and employees are their #1 priority </empty_talk>
> #1 priority
sorry $MEGACORP, but the employees never actually mattered to you. it's all money. every company wants money.
same reason you'd downgrade a programming student if they handed in an assignment as an Excel macro? Not just because of the VBA but because to use it you now need to buy MS Office?
I feel sorry for your students. PS Canva can export PDFs with vector graphics
You're a great educator!
I'm surprised that other people here cannot separate their subjective opinions, whether they agree with your judgment, from fact, whether you're a good educator.
It would be more reasonable to say: A good educator would help students understand that PDF files should have a small file size, and if a student fails to notice that, you will have to downgrade them for lack of attention to important detail.
And, of course the acquisition is bad news. Americans are the only people I've encountered that seem to celebrate the dystopian monopolized unfree market that we're headed towards.
Although I wouldn't be surprised if Canva has people to distort social media to downvote anyone who disagrees with them, as other companies do.
If the course makes it clear that grading is affected by accessibility and efficiency of file size, and then submitted work ignores those factors - regardless of Canva being used - then downgrading it is justified. Perhaps it’s obvious to designers that Canva has these problems, but to a non-designer like myself, the comment sounds like snobbery, with students’ grades affected by the capricious whims of their teacher.
> I wouldn't be surprised if Canva has people to distort social media to downvote anyone who disagrees with them
Snide remarks about astroturfing are also off topic here.
> Snide remarks about astroturfing are also off topic here.
How is that off topic when there are literally people in this thread from Canva arguing the framing and not the main point he made? Everything you disagree with isn't off topic.
you don’t sound like a good educator
Wow sucks to be your student
Oh boy. I willingly gave my money to Affinity because I don’t want a subscription model, I don’t want my creative apps to rely on the cloud _at all_ to work _and_ I want native Mac apps. I am not reassured by their FAQ at all.
I suspect a year from now Canva will break at least one (if not all three) of these features and force me to leave Affinity by version 3.
It would be extremely ironic if Gimp was the only graphics app left standing I could use without all of the above nonsense (well, I am happy to keep supporting Pixelmator, but… you get the idea).
In addition to Gimp there are:
- Paint.net
- Pixen
- Inkscape --- straight-forward vector editing
- Seashore --- this is Mac OS UI overlay for GIMP
- Krita --- vector editing with painting features
- Scribus --- page layout
- TeX/LaTeX --- batch/markup driven page layout which can do anything one can put together a TeX macro to achieve (I use it a lot and have written articles for TUGboat on it: https://tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb24-2/tb77adams.pdf
- Blender -- 3D modeling
- GraviT --- another vector editor, this is likely the one most like to Affinity Designer (since they were both modeled on Freehand)
- FontForge
I wish more people knew-of/promoted Krita - it's far more user friendly than GIMP and just as powerful if not more.
Fantastic for photo editing, digital art/paint and vector tools.
https://krita.org/en/features/
I thought they were different tools. GIMP == Photoshop, Krita == Illustrator.
Krita defaults to a "Paint Layer" behaving very like Photoshop; it can also add "Vector Layers" that behave like Illustrator. I think it is fair to say it replaces both for a lot of use cases. GIMP is much closer to just Photoshop (and say Inkscape is much more only Illustrator).
Interesting! I'll have to check it out.
Krita is a close second to Blender in terms of well-run creative FOSS projects. Would love to see more projects take their approach.
There is also Graphite (https://graphite.rs/) which, unlike Gimp, has a modern architecture and very ambitious goals (Blender for 2D basically).
Features: Written in Rust.
Not really a feature.
Also it has very little implemented right now. Kind of disappointing when I clicked through hoping to find a gimp alternative.
Looks awesome!
I used most of those (I paid my way through college with Photoshop 2.0 and Macromedia stuff). There is really nothing in the Open Source world that is good enough. Maybe Krita, but not for Illustrator-grade vector editing. I really miss Macromedia...
Photopea as well (photoshop clone in browser)
That’s not a real alternative for a high-res workflow.
> It would be extremely ironic if Gimp was the only graphics app left standing I could use without all of the above nonsense
I know successful agencies relying on OSS tools only (such as Gimp and Penpot) so I wouldn't mind that. I hope Gimp will have its Blender moment (I've been using Blender for years, but always kept coming back to Maya, this changed with the new UI)
Agreed, GIMP is powerful and just one UI refresh away from being a true alternative for many.
I already started to worry about Affinity's strategy when they introduced online activation in version 2 of their software. I really appreciated the offline activation in the original versions - it means I will forever own Affinity Photo/Designer/Publisher 1 on my NAS, no matter what they decide to do in the future.
Affinity already disappointed the original believers when they started off telling people they could pay a one-time fee and get all future updates for free. They then ditched version 1.xx buyers by releasing a version 2 that you could only use if you paid them again.
Affinity should not have said that (if they did), and no one should have believed them. That's just not how software or business works. Even if we go back in time to packaged software, big updates were always a pay for upgrade.
I've been using Affinity products forever, in fact since before the Affinity era, then they were branded Serif (DrawPlus, PhotoPlus, etc)... They have been incredibly consistent over the years with the quality of their products, which is why I have purchased many licenses over the years and always recommended people to look into their software... Like others in the thread, I really do hope they don't change to subscription-based pricing, but I assume the worst.
It really seems that the whole software world has decided to move to monthly payments. It really irks me. I don't want this.
Even worse many apps now push "Monthly payments (payed yearly)", like some scammy car salesman.
You can try for 7 days, then don't worry we'll charge for 12 months.
Ridiculous for solo devs, full stack, creatives with lots of apps etc.
I use several apps a bit here and there throughout the year but that's seemingly not a usecase for these companies, you're either "in" 365 or won't be able to use the app.
Increasingly I'm looking at hoarding "feature-complete" applications that work fine totally offline and don't need updates. Things like text editors, GIMP, Inkscape, Foobar2000, IrfanView, file manager apps.
Have to extract the most value for shareholders. Only way i see it changing is people start stealing software because they get sick of it or people stop using subscription based licenses all together.
I absolutely hate it too. I think we all need a subscriptions manager.
Adobe for example were charging me $15 per month for Lightroom forever and Lightroom had broken and deleted all my photos years before. I think there was a problem with their software because I did not have a subscription that I could see when I logged in to any of the accounts I had.
I just gave up at some point trying to cancel (I'd even talked with their chat for several hours). But recently logged in and managed to finally see the hidden subscription! It was still difficult to cancel but at least I could actually do it!
Hard to know what to do apart from take Adobe to the small claims court about this.
Registered mail to Adobe?
No, you don't "have to" extract the most value for shareholders.
In fact, you don't "have to" have shareholders at all.
Pure speculation on my part but I think the way it will go down is Canva will announce that you can get access to Affinity products via a Canva subscription, with an option to buy the individual products outright like today. They have to be looking at Adobe and going "yeah we don't want that kind of reputation".
> They have to be looking at Adobe and going "yeah we don't want that kind of reputation".
They can also look at the market and Adobe and go “yeah, they have no alternatives, everyone is a subscriber now”
Yup, that's also my assumption of what will happen. Ugh...
Official statement from Affinity (Serif):
https://affinity.serif.com/de/press/newsroom/canva-statement...
Am I the only only reading "no changes ... at this time" with a ", but there are going to be ...""with plenty of free updates to V2"
But let's not talk about V3...
> at this time
Anything a business says about current business should have 'at this time' appended. They are simply being honest.
This is a different context. Whenever an acquired business says "at this time", it means "forget everything you think you knew about us, so long suckers!".
You’re definitely not the only one. It’s going to be a matter of time before subscriptions come.
>Existing Affinity users will be able to continue to use your apps in perpetuity as they were originally purchased
Until of course Apple changes some API, or Windows users want to jump to ARM or something, and then they're up shit creek.
I know nothing about Canva. As someone who has been a big fan of Affinity, their products and their pricing model, do I start freaking out now or can I just wait until the acquisition closes?
Yeah, as someone that's been very happy with the Affinity Suite and am scared of any major changes to them, this is pretty scary to me, as well. Reminds me of when Jasc was bought by Corel waaaay back in the day.
Canva, if you're on HN, seeing how we're going to respond, please don't take away the stand-alone, non-subscription-based, affordable system that Affinity's products are. I love their products. I don't want to have to find alternatives.
Hate to say it, but a subscription model is coming. Canva is making money hands over fist by doing that, and I can't imagine they are going to part from what has been so lucrative
The only reason people get Affinity is because of the non subscription model.
Adobe software is just better.
I paid $lot for the entire Affinity suite and DxO Photolab instead of going with the (quite good) Adobe offerings just to avoid the insanity that is the Adobe Creative Cloud launcher. I deeply hate apps that install, auto-run and auto-update other apps. Affinity and DxO give you a DMG.
I agree about Creative Cloud. I too hate it with a passion. But when I said "Adobe is better" I was referring to the apps themselves.
100% this. There is absolutely 0 reason to use Affinity of Adobe besides pricing model. They can play around with the numbers and try to have a cheaper subscription than Adobe, or maybe bundle it with the other software Canva offers, but ultimately I think switching to a subscription model will be the end of the Affinity software suite.
Have you tried Affinity? The software itself is a lot better than Adobe in many fundamentals. It’s faster, crashes less, supports a lot more file formats, connection between the individual programs is perfect, they add new quite innovative features at constant pace.
Adobe is pretty much legacy software that gets close to zero development, its ridden with bugs that will be never fixed.
The reason why everyone hates them is that last non subscription version Adobe CS6 from more than 10 years ago is pretty much the same thing what you get now even though users have been screaming for features and bugfixes. Adobe can have their cake and eat it too.
> The software itself is a lot better than Adobe in many fundamentals. It’s faster, crashes less, supports a lot more file formats, connection between the individual programs is perfect, they add new quite innovative features at constant pace.
I disagree with all your points.
I've been using Adobe for 20 years and Affinity Design and Photo since they released in 2013 or so.
Adobe apps are faster on Apple Silicon than Affinity.
I haven't experienced a crash in years with Adobe and I have experienced crashes with Affinity quite recently.
Adobe has complete integration between programs. Eg: You can use AE timelines into Premiere, import Photoshop files into AE, edit vector objects from Photoshop in Illustrator, etc.
Affinity innovation pace is just glacial. V2 introduced some new features but it Serif what... like 10 years? And personally I didn't see any value in the new features. Design is still missing a lot from Illustrator.
> I haven't experienced a crash in years with Adobe
Haha wow. I find this incredibly hard to believe (also Apple Silicon). You ought to play the Lotto.
> Design is still missing a lot from Illustrator.
"A lot" is drastically overstating the case. And in many ways Designer is leagues better.
But it's all kinda moot - fuck Adobe. Fuck their dark patterns, fuck their bugs, fuck their pricing, fuck their monopoly.
I was a photographer until late last year and there were many weeks I spent 40 hours+ in Photoshop and I don’t remember a single crash.
I’m on Windows, for what it’s worth.
Perhaps Adobe only crashes when it can smell fear... Like printers.
Really though, Photoshop and Illustrator both got buggy on me on a weekly/near daily basis. I used them all for decades. It feels like they were stable for a few years around like 1999-2001.
Somewhat off topic, but your comment made me literally laugh out loud in real life. I am working on a receipt printer right now, and it can absolutely smell fear. Its favorite thing to do right now is to use its incredible power of speed to print half my roll of receipt tape with random gibberish in the several seconds it takes me to pull the power cable. I haven't yet let it run to completion to see if it will eat the entire roll of tape, but I suspect it would.
> * I find this incredibly hard to believe (also Apple Silicon).*
Believe what you will.
Their software used to crash a lot more for me 5-10 years ago but these days it's pretty solid in this regard.
It used to feel super bloated too but since Apple Silicon it's been working great in terms of perf for me.
> And in many ways Designer is leagues better.
In what ways?
Genuinely interested. I've been using vector graphics software since Corel Draw 4 and Illustrator still seems the gold standard. Figma is great for UI design but it's useless for anything else.
I do think Photo is a lot more usable than Designer and I could see myself using that instead of Photoshop.
> fuck Adobe. Fuck their dark patterns, fuck their bugs, fuck their pricing, fuck their monopoly
Trust me, I too wish there was a good alternative to Adobe. I hope with Canva's money they will be able to improve Affinity's products.
I suspect you are very experienced Illustrator and used to its ways and not that experienced Photoshop user. Because Photoshop people around in coments say that Photo is trash but Designer is good.
I think its all inertia to learn new things. Adobe soft has so many wierd things that we got so used to that it gets hard to do it otherwise.
I've used both Illustrator and Photoshop for over 20 years.
Before that I was on the Corel suite using Draw and PhotoPaint since the mid 90s.
> In what ways?
Off the top of my head...
Look and feel is a big one. It feels more responsive, and far less bloated.
The Export Persona smokes Illustrator's slices or whatever.
It handles symbols far more smoothly, and I like the way masks work better.
It's better integrated into Publisher, compared to Illustrator/InDesign. Publisher is awesome, and basically has Designer built in.
Working with non-square grids is sooooo much easier.
There's no Creative Cloud malware fouling up my computer, soaking up CPU and memory and storage and spitting pop-ups in my face for no damn reason.
... There are things I miss - vector brushes, and the Transformation tools. But they can usually be worked around. The feeling of being respected by the company more than makes up for those deficits though.
...Which is probably about to change :(
On Indesign side - regular almost daily crashes.
Integration in Affinity Publisher is called studiolink you can use all Photo, Designer tools directly inside it by fliping a switch. Google studiolink you will see Adobe never had anything close to this. When you create a book you can actualy edit placed photo inside the layout seeing all changes directly in context. All Adobe cooperation is linking files that you then have to manualy refresh. You cant even easily copy paste vectors into indesign so they are editable.
I get that Adobe works and has some features Affinity does. But Affinity has some killer fundamentaly better features.
> Have you tried Affinity
Yes. I owned CS6, then switched to Affinity essentially right when it was released. Been using it ever since. Great software. But very much lacking compared to Adobe.
Affinity (Photo) still doesn't support tablets properly. You can play around with parameters affected by pressure and tilt, but here Adobe (and Krita) are ahead.
The only reason I don't use CS6 is because it doesn't work properly with hidpi displays. It doesn't scale well above 100%.
That's not true at all. There's also the strong dislike of Adobe as a company.
Due to subscriptions.
And bloatware. Affinity runs smoother on Mac.
This used to be the case but in my experience Adobe runs better in Apple Silicon than Affinity does.
This is true. I bought it because photoshop kept crashing on Mac. And I got tired of watching filters take effect in Lightroom.
I switched to Capture One years ago, but recently switched back to Lightroom. It’s much much faster now and they also recently launched advanced color editing, AI masks, and true HDR support which pushed me over the edge.
Eh, they take like 30 seconds just to open the app.
I also try to avoid the two big "A"s, Autodesk and Adobe.
> Adobe software is just better.
I won't be installing that invasive spyware suite to my system even if they pay me monthly to use the software. It's that bad.
I keep Adobe products only on iPad or iPhone, where the app seems sandboxed. In Mac/Windows, Adobe CC (or any product line FWIW) spawns files and folders like cancer in /Library or /System. It's just hallmark bad software engineering.
But the subscription based company was the one to buy the non-subscription company. Because they generate the funds to do so.
With perpetual license, they were getting some money from me for each major release. With subscription, they are going to get exactly 0.
Not only subscription, but what I find problematic about Adobe is bloatware.
Exactly. Creative Cloud launcher digs its greedy fingers deep in your system, running hundreds of processes and constantly phoning home. It’s the model I point to when people say they want alternate app stores. I would much rather download apps individually from the App Store, or at worst a dmg.
It would be fantastic for an OS to mandate a particular type of installation (oh how I miss dragging app packages from a .dmg into my Application directory & being done with it) while preventing anything else.
A lot of desktop software devs are averse to anything but old style full access to everything all the time, but yes I agree. Most software has no good reason to put files anywhere outside of its own application bundle and ~/Library/Application Support/<Program Name>/.
I enjoy Serif products but have always wondered how it would survive. Pixelmator stayed a family-run bootstrapped operation while Serif scaled a company in the EU around the Affinity Suite.
I have Affinity Designer and Publisher, which I've used to design and publish a music fanzine: https://www.glidermag.com
This is slightly worrying news as Canva is the opposite of the Affinity suite: cloud-only and subscription-based. I could purchase brush sets on Affinity for a fixed price, and many were made available on the user messageboard for free.
Looks like it isn’t routing it correctly without the `www.`
https://www.glidermag.com/ <- this works.
Off topic, and if I may be so bold, check out Whitelands. They’re my friends band and they just toured with Slowdive, one to watch out for! (I am 100% biased though).
Just updated the link. I will check out Whitelands; I just saw Slowdive in November, they had Drab Majesty open for them in Canada.
Ce site est inaccessible Vérifiez si l'adresse glidermag.com est correcte.
can't access
Updated the URL!
Just so you know, the URL you linked isn't loading for me.
There was something so special and powerful about Affinity Designer V1. It was just a supreme amount of value and such a robust application that it became the tool I learned to do graphic design on, and the tool I loved.
I feel like something slipped with Designer V2 - the features went a bit weird and broad, and the amount of bugs got irritating and eroded my love for it and it being my go-to recommendation.
That all said, it’s still good software today and I’m glad the Serif team gets some kind of payday. I think the drop in quality of V2 makes the whole thing a bit less bittersweet for me.
The sad thing is that much of what was really nice in AD came from copying Aldus/Altsys/Macromedia Freehand.
I wish Adobe had at least put all of Freehand's capabilities into InDesign --- I might still be using it if that were the case.
This is very sad. I’ve been an Affinity customer since V1. What I expect to happen now is in some future a move to a subscription-based model and more focus on nonsense AI features and some useless cloud integration.
Also: since when a company capable of routinely acquiring other established companies for tens of billions of dollars a startup?
> since when a company capable of routinely acquiring other established companies for tens of billions of dollars a startup
The acquisition was for “several hundred million pounds”, nowhere near tens of billions of dollars.
My bad. I got some numbers in the article mixed up.
Step 1: Announce the acquisition. Everyone will talk about the company and the fear of subscriptions.
Step 2: Tell everyone, that the current pricing model will stay and no subscriptions will be offered. Everyone will cheer and recommend the products.
Step 3: Wait until the dust settles and switch to subscriptions. The community will say "told you that this will happen" and life goes on.
Sad, but true
Yes, and let me explain why.
Subscriptions are significantly better for a company. They result in a steady income and a predictable growth curve. It's so much easier to plan the upcoming years if you can predict the income.
While we all focus on the latest news, the leaders of those companies already planned their next 10 steps ahead, even taking into account our sentiment towards them. Remember that they aim to maximize profits at all times.
It happened or happens in B2B, car sales, music, film, in games, and drawing apps... Everywhere you see, really. And it's so convenient if there is already a scapegoat like Adobe, which transitioned to subscriptions for the same reason.
And yes, I hate it. Even though it's easier to swallow 10 bucks a month, eventually you will spend more. They know it and we know it. All we can do as customers is to not support those companies, but this only goes so far. And what are we to do, if most offerings are subscription based?
I feel like they could have a sustainable model if they had a more expensive one-time purchase and every few years released a new major version that required a one-time purchase again. If you bought the old version you can continue to use it, but it's no longer officially supported nor will it receive any future updates.
I wish there was an option for this with e.g. Photoshop. I want to have PS because it's occasionally handy or fun for photoshopping my friends as a joke, but I don't need it for anything that makes me money so I can't justify paying. But if I had a slightly outdated version I could purchase once, I'd be find not getting all the latest updates.
> I feel like they could have a sustainable model if they had a more expensive one-time purchase and every few years released a new major version that required a one-time purchase again.
And people complain about this also. If everyone is going to complain anyway, they might as well go to subscription which is best for the business.
Do they? It's not super common, but I can think of the JetBrains IDEs that I believe let you continue to use the last version of the IDE before you stopped paying. Alfred, the Spotlight alternative for Mac does something like that, and you get a discount code if you own the last version.
Both beloved pieces of software.
> And what are we to do, if most offerings are subscription based?
Support open source software
Inkscape is quite good actually. But GIMP is lightyears away from ever being in the same league. We need an open source Photoshop and Publisher program.
I have a few subscriptions and most are annually paid. I consider that as a one time payment with updates free for the year. But what I don’t like is when the price don’t match the value, my data taken hostage, and updates that break my workflow (and “AI” features activated without my knowing). I got rid of anything like this in my personal computing space.
It is one of many consequences of giving up software freedom.
I appreciate that, but it doesn’t deal with the reality that subscriptions are several times more expensive than buying up-front.
I can buy Affinity Designer for $50 and use it for 5 years. That’s less than a dollar a month. If they move to a subscription, I bet it’s going to be more than a dollar a month.
If it was really just about regular reoccurring revenue, we would see more $1 monthly subscriptions and fewer $5/month subscriptions.
What this means is that OSS offerings will eventually get good enough and eat their lunch, permanently.
Yes exactly. See Firefox, Gimp, and Ubuntu's superiority over other offerings.
We are doomed?
I like Affinity products. They replaced all my photoshop/illustrator needs for webdev and it was so easy to switch. The fixed license cost was great too. Now I'm worried that the typical scenario is going to unfold where Canva makes sweeping changes, replaces product vision and licensing model.
I guess I can keep using the current versions for a while, until they stop the updates.
Yeah, I love their Designer and Publisher products. Haven’t used Photo really because I already used Pixelmator Pro but it also looks good, and between those and Final Cut Pro and DaVinci Resolve i’ve cut Adobe out of my life.
So this is a super worrying announcement. I really hope they don’t screw up Affinity - I really wonder how long they can hold off the temptation to let them do what they do without screwing it all up and killing the product line…
Same for me, replaced f** Adobe, too expensive, too greedy
Why every product I like ends up being bought... argh, we can't have nice things.
It's interesting, if a car company is bought then they keep churning out cars (usually), if a software company is bought it's often broken. Software dev is a fragile thing relying on a network of talented individuals which is very easily broken by accountants and bottom lines. In some ways it's more like movie companies with networks of creatives that can be damaged by a takeover - Disney/Marvel immediately comes to mind.
Because not everyone can or should IPO. Once you get to a certain point in size, your investors will start pushing for an exit (where you have two main options, IPO or sell).
What investors? As far as I know they were never VC funded. Affinity wasn’t a dinky startup, the parent company (Serif) was founded almost four decades ago.
> What investors?
GP made a broad statement, I was replying in general following suit.
It's sad that management buyouts aren't more popular. It would probably make for more quality products not having to conform to expectations of the market or private equity.
Apparently most of the market doesn’t want the same things you want.
Otherwise Affinity would be the giant acquiring a much smaller Canva team.
That said, this is also further proof of why the standalone software license model died. If Affinity had a great business of their own, they wouldn’t need to sell.
Turns out if you want a software team to continue providing value to you, you should probably put them on salary (subscription).
> If Affinity had a great business of their own, they wouldn’t need to sell.
They don't need to. They mentioned that in their FAQ:
> We have to say that selling Serif was not on our minds at all, but when Canva contacted us (only a couple of months ago!) there was something about it which just felt right.
Riiight. They had a fantastically enjoyable and profitable business going for themselves...but they decided they'd rather give up all control and sell their baby to a much larger corporate entity, give up the future upside from any growth, and play office politics instead of control their own destiny.
...because it just "felt right."
Not really. They did so because people pay MUCH more for much less functionality in Canva, and so accepting the offer gives them a payday they couldn't hope to accumulate themselves.
Because of the "recurring revenue" SaaS cult.
It's not a cult if it works ...
what does "work" mean?
that it maximises profits for HN posters?
that it maximises some abstract goodness for society?
that it provides good quality products at the lowest prices?
the fact businesses keep doing something doesn't provide any information on if that's good for anyone else.
Profit in software companies does in fact provide most of those example.
Only the last one needs some clarification. If a business did not do things that benefit others, they wouldn't get paid. So, almost by definition, businesses do. You might argue that a bigger value could be provided in another way, but it definitely does provide value.
Because no one wants to pay for products they like.
We don't want to pay for software? Look at the Appstore! Good products for reasonable prices are worth the money. Affinity offers a good product for a reasonable price. Adobe offers a better product but the subscription model is hated by many. For me Affinity products are good enough. Let's hope the current versions keep on working on Apple Silicon and Windows 11/12/etc. The current 2 version is good enough for me and for the next ten years. If I really need AI tools for image editing, I'll take a one month subscription to some tool.
> We don't want to pay for software? Look at the Appstore! Good products for reasonable prices are worth the money
Such a strange statement in 2024, we all know almost no developers can afford to live off charging a fair price $20+ for software on there because people wont buy it, or charging the price people will actually pay on there which is $0.
Only way to make money on the App Store is to hammer in ads, sell data, exploit or trick people into subscriptions.
I look at app stores and see a lot of "free to play" products. So many users have gotten so accustomed to not paying upfront for products (which historically could be substantial amounts) that the option is often no longer available.
Affinity targets professional users who would purchase Adobe products otherwise. Professional users are more willing to pay for products. Affinity was doing pretty well in the Mac App Store (though they moved to free download + in-app purchase or purchase through their website).
Well, everyone of their clients was paying for a license. Affinity was not free/fremium.
Affinity has a $100 one-time payment, and you can use it in perpetuity. Adobe's customers are paying $60+ per month. So there was a lot of unrealized market value. No shit they wanted to cash out on it.
And yet, they released a new version and I and every Affinity user I know bought it. Don't forget that a lot of people moved from Adobe to Affinity apps because Adobe rammed subscriptions down their throats. There is a lot of loyalty towards Affinity because they are not Adobe, if they become a mini-Adobe, that loyalty will be burned to the ground. And at that point, why not just use Adobe products? They'll lose playing Adobe's game, Adobe has infinite funds in comparison and can pull an Office 365 on Canva.
we all were happily paying for upgrades.
I don't mind paying for software, but I don't want to rent it - which is effectively what subscriptions are.
I think one thing most people are missing: because Canva has 175 million users with a significant number of them paying a subscription, this enables them to keep the Affinity apps purchase model in place.
Think about it: why would Canva essentially destroy the reason why so many users (around 3 million according to the reporting) went to Affinity in the first place by going to a subscription model? I don't see that happening.
Canva is clear they want a foothold in the professional design market and buying Affinity and its team is the quickest way to get there.
I paid for V1 of the Affinity suite and happily paid for the universal V2 license upgrade which enabled me to run their apps on my iPad and my Mac and even Windows if I ever needed that. It was a bargain.
Ironically, I just removed the last remnants of Creative Cloud last week. I hadn't been using it, but it was there "just in case…".
Unlike when Adobe tried to buy Figma, I'm more optimistic than most that this going to turn out well for existing Affinity users.
I'd have no problem with being able to roundtrip designs between Affinity and Canva seamlessly. Someone could start on Canva and one a project progressed to a certain point, they could seamlessly transition to Affinity. Depending on what you're doing, you can quickly reach Canva's limits and it should be trivial to pickup where you left on in a future version of Affinity Designer or Photo.
Other than being able to configure DropBox, there's no cloud syncing support built-in to Affinity. Sure, you can glue it together with iCloud, OneBox, etc. but that's not what users should have to do in 2024.
I'm no stranger to bad outcomes from botched and user-hostile mergers and acquisitions of software. But this one has all of the potential to go the right way and I have no reason to think otherwise at this time.
> because Canva has 175 million users with a significant number of them paying a subscription, this enables them to keep the Affinity apps purchase model in place.
please bookmark your own post and come back to it in five years so you can have a big a laugh.
Canva wants to be a player in image editing/design/etc. They have a big product that their investors love and has the ever-so-common monthly-tax funding model.
They have now bought a tiny, niche, desktop editing suite that makes approximately zero profit compared to Canva.
Do you think they did this because:
1. they thought it would be fun to own it and not interfere in any way, and to tell their investors to fuck off over and over when they suggest redeploying resources
1. they thought it would provide a good group of people and codebases to expand their existing editing software, and given that the software they currently sell makes essentially no money, at best they'll let it limp along with most staff working on integrating it into Canva-proper, at worst they'll kill it
(Customer from the very beginning for Designer&Photo, made a book with Publisher)
They will move to subscriptions (there will be many more of these moves, see VMWare), which will kill their differenitation towards Adobe and kill the product. If subscription, I can use Illustrator (which has 10x more tutorials than Designer). Most companies screw up M&A.
If the pricing model is the only thing that differentiates Affinity then that wouldn’t have been a very good sign for their future
As a happy Affinity customer and relatively casual user I prefer them because of their reasonable fixed prices and because and I don't have to run the abomination that is the Adobe Cloud client on my machine.
If they switch to a subscription model I will definitely be looking for alternatives.
It's clearly enough for many people. That's the only reason I use Affinity, although I do agree Adobe could change their pricing models overnight and they would be in trouble.
Me too.
From the forum, on the topic of the buyout:
"[I] Realise there seems to be a distinct lack of faith flying around here, but we'll be revealing more about our plans in the coming days and yes I'm sure you will all be pleased with what we have to say." - Ash
So that's at least possibly a sign of better information to follow.
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/201413-aff...
Well, we'll see what they have to say.
But I wouldn't get my hopes up. "There are no changes to our current pricing model planned _at this time_" is already a very telling part of Serif's previous statement.
While they have earned a measure of trust, the problem is that they aren't the ones you need to trust anymore - if Canva wants to turn Affinity into a collection of bloodsucking subscription apps, then that's what's going to happen, short of a legally binding guarantee to the contrary.
The best redeeming feature of Affinity apps was that they weren't a bloodsucking subscription like Adobe. Hopefully they have a plan for the apps that keeps them the best anti-Adobe option.
what could they possibly say?
they can't guarantee they won't move to a subscription service in the future - this entire discussion is about how Affinity management have sold out and no longer control the company.
Based on last published accounts (2022) Serif is very profitable and growing strongly: revenue £31.2m (up from £23.4m) and operating profits £17.9m (up from £14.4m). So it doesn't seem like they needed to sell.
Of course it is still small in the scheme of things - Canva seems to have revenue of c$2bn - and seems to be owned by three individuals in their 50s so one can probably understand why they wanted to to sell.
>So it doesn't seem like they needed to sell.
They probably didn’t need to sell (but who knows) but an offer of a buyout at a 20x multiple (based on the Bloomberg report) when the core business faces competition from Adobe and Canva, not just for core features where depending on context, Serif can do quite well, but also in the burgeoning AI-assisted space, where Serif has zero ability to compete (and AI is a big part of Canva and Adobe’s plans, whether certain vocal users like it or not), is compelling.
As a longtime user, this move makes me sad because I know I’ll lose some good tools to an inevitable subscription push (I also have Adobe CC and Canva subscriptions that I use for very different tasks so I’m not completely opposed to paying for a sub, but I certainly won’t pay Adobe prices for Affinity), but I can’t fault the company from wanting to exit, especially when the climate is what it is for the tools they sell.
Let’s put it this way, I can’t imagine them doing better than this.
I was a professional photographer until late last year.
Photoshop’s new AI tools are an absolutely incredible timesaver. Jobs that would have taken 30+ minutes (and probably wouldn’t look great) can now take 30 seconds. It was kind of amazing watching the perception shift online in photography groups from “AI is evil!” to “Wow, this is really helpful.”
There’s no way they could keep competing, even if they tried to take something off the shelf like Stable Diffusion and integrating it. Without some sort of subscription they’d need to have people run it locally, and that’s really only feasible with high end Nvidia cards too. I suppose the initial plan might be to add tools like that, have a separate subscription for that, and boil the frog to a full subscription.
Absolutely agreed. And your observation is the same I’ve seen with many of my artist friends. Everyone went from “fuck this Firefly shit” to “I need all of this yesterday.”
Canva already uses AI in really smart ways and if they can extend that approach into Affinity and have the two products compliment each other, that could def be a value-add for Canva users. But the more I think about it, the more I think this was the only thing Serif could do and although I sympathize with angry Affinity users as one myself, I think we have to acknowledge that Affinity’s chances of survival as a perpetually licensed product were basically over, acquisition or no acquisition, at least if you look out long-term.
> Serif can do quite well, but also in the burgeoning AI-assisted space, where Serif has zero ability to compete
I think you've hit the nail on the head. AI tools will become essential and if you haven't got the resources to compete in this area you're likely to fade into relative irrelevance.
And at a 20x multiple probably a steal for Canva too given what this deal will give them - even without raising prices / going to subscription model.
Mel and Cliff are not even 40. See the Australian young rich list, they are the first one and two: https://www.afr.com/young-rich/the-10-richest-young-australi...
Serif’s owners not Canva’s.
What's the net profit?
It's a sad state of affair when the first thing people think (myself included, and rightfully so) is "how will the product worsen" (in this case, with subscription) instead of the opposite.
I'm also preparing for a mysterious update that will make the V1 and V1 of the suite non-functional because of non-visible stuff like "security improvement" and "system stability".
I hope that I'm wrong.
I painfully switched to Affinity because of the rising Adobe subscription prices, I'd been a photoshop/illustrator user from the Dot com boom... I recall paying around 780 every two years for creative suite and given the hell I'd gone through by choosing Flex for a ERP project (Adobe's promises of iOS compatibility never materialising, then breaking compatibility - requiring a close-to-rewrite in their next version of Flex)... to cut a long story short - gave me shall we say - a few resentments towards the company. I suppose it's time to consider Pixelmator now, I'm such a grey-beard... subscriptions suck. ;-)
Pixelmator is nice for tinkering, but in no way it compares to Adobe Ps/Ilustrator for professional use. Workflow you can learn but there are subtle bugs that just crop up here and there like freeform transform handles just disappearing on some backgrounds etc. Some of the design decisions are different enough so that I haven't still gotten used to them after two years because it just doesn't feel intuitive to me, e.g. every single time I mess up working with text tool for the first five minutes time until I recall how it works.
> Pixelmator Pro requires macOS 12 Monterey or later and is fully optimized for Macs with Apple silicon.
Might save some non-Apple users some time.
This caused me to bite the bullet and buy the v2 universal licence, currently 30% off. If you've ever bought anything v1 including a single app you probably qualify for the upgrade offer which is an extra 25% off on top of the sale https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/store/upgrade-offer/
I'm not necessarily against their inevitable subscription model, but may as well get the standalone while the getting is good. There are also often some good grandfather plan rates, if I decide later to go that path.
The problem with V2 license is that it cannot be activated offline so Canva can take a courageous decision to stop activations any time in future. V1 is great because it can be activated offline.
Interesting! I didn't realise this, however on balance I think I'm still happy with my purchase. Also looking into it, business licences (minimum of 2 pack purchase) can still be activated offline, just in case that is useful to anyone https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/188396-off...
Great to know, I pondered buying V2 as a V1 owner, but now they can kiss my butt.
The only downside is that Affinity V2 has no option to save files in a V1-compatible manner. Which stinks for exchanging stuff with other Affinity users.
> I pondered buying V2 as a V1 owner, but now they can kiss my butt.
you're...declining to support a company you like that makes software you like, that is offering a massive discount to you, because at some point in the future they may not allow more activations of version 2, which would not affect your ability to use version 1 in any way?
this is a rather idiosyncratic position to take.
> The only downside is that Affinity V2 has no option to save files in a V1-compatible manner. Which stinks for exchanging stuff with other Affinity users.
as an affinity user, I am glad they didn't do that and instead did almost literally anything else with that engineering time.
Ugh. I've seen what happens with Canva's acquisitions once already, albeit at a much smaller scale: I used to use a free service for PowerPoint templates called SlidesCarnival[1]. Decent templates, very customizable, and generally significantly better than the PowerPoint defaults.
They also got bought out by Canva, and I've watched the quality drop massively- any new content is almost entirely unusable, often only available on Canva itself, and chock full of design tropes and poorly SEO-optimized content. (Some of them are so bad as to be unintentionally hilarious.) It's a real mess, and it makes me less than optimistic about them buying out Affinity.
To be fair, their model was wildly different from a fully-featured editing suite, and certainly welcomed this kind of change, but they absolutely gutted that site: the only positive is that the original templates are still there, if you search for them. I'm not holding my breath, but I expect the same treatment now. An absolute shame- I don't use a photo editor enough to warrant an Adobe subscription, so I'll probably stay on Affinity V2 until it stops working.
[1]: https://www.slidescarnival.com/
Welp, as if Affinity didn't already have problems...
Also, this. https://twitter.com/affinitybyserif/status/15707285663500206...
This would be a great time for Canva to reassure customers that they don’t intend to change Affinity‘s business model. Not to say such assurances are even a reliable indicator of future plans, but it would at least be a nice gesture.
That would be pointless as they will 100% be changing the business model. We’ve learned that over the past 20 years. RIP Affinity and one-time purchases.
No changes "at this time" is the key phrase here. Not exactly reassuring.
Well, I’m glad I have my standalone license. I guess I’ll be on Designer V2 for the next 10 years like I was with Illustrator CS3.
Same. I upgraded last year and the software is fantastic and priced exceptionally well. I used to have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, but it got way too expensive and the frequency I used it didn't justify the price. Glad I found Affinity. I have Designer V2, Photo V2, and Publisher V2. I use all of them occasionally when I have time to work on my side projects. Subscriptions suck.
I’m increasingly tempted to buy a second hand license for one of the old single-purchase Creative Suites and just run that in a VM or with period-accurate hardware forever. For me practically all of the value in current graphic editors is compatibility with modern operating systems… CS1-CS3 are basically feature complete as far as I’m concerned.
Honestly there's still things from CS3 that are missing in Designer V2! Being able to auto-trace sketches is still something that Designer can't do. There isn't really much that I'm doing now in a vector editor, that I wasn't doing 15 years ago. "feature complete" is a good way to put it.
I wonder if it will work that long without need for patches/updates with the current pace of deprecations in macOS. Using Affinity Photo myself, wondering if I’d better off switching to Windows at this point.
To be honest, that’s only one of the many reason to leave the Apple ecosystem in the near future.
I think that many would be better off switching to Windows (or Linux if they can) but they still believe or are attached to how things use to be.
I use to really love macOS but it has become an annoyance on many front, removing plenty of what made it better all while making it more and more like iOS and generally more closed and inflexible system.
Personally I have lost faith and I think that even if they would start reinvesting right now, it would take 10 years of pain with ever more expensive hardware.
We really need a version of Docker for desktop apps on macOS now. Would be nice to not have to worry about what's going to be broken after an update.
I got a press release email from Canva today that included the following about perpetual licenses, which reads to me as if the prices are going to be increasing on those licenses:
> We are committed to fair, transparent and affordable pricing, including the perpetual licenses that have made Affinity special.
> We share a commitment to making design fairer and more accessible. For Canva, this has meant making our core product available for free to millions of people across the globe, and for Affinity, this has meant a fairly priced perpetual license model. We know this model has been a key part of the Affinity offering and we are committed to continue to offer perpetual licenses in the future.
> If we do offer a subscription, it will only ever be as an option alongside the perpetual model, for those who prefer it. This fits with enabling Canva users to start adopting Affinity. It could also allow us to offer Affinity users a way to scale their workflows using Canva as a platform to share and collaborate on their Affinity assets, if they choose to.
I guess there goes Affinity's only reason one might prefer them over Adobe. Personally, I use all their programs quite a bit (Photo, Designer, Publisher). I like them, but I don't think they're better than Adobe's offering. If they'll eventually shift to a subscription model, I guess I won't be interested in Affinity anymore, given their products are inferior.
Not sure why a web based subscription product which already had collaboration features would want to own native one shot apps.
Only way I can see logic for this acquisition is if they're wanting the talent/experience of Affinity's developers to build web based offerings of the feature sets of Photo, Designers, Publisher as part of a Canva web offering.
The latter is unlikely. The developers are active on the Affinity messageboards, I don't recall them ever having any interest in building web apps. Just creating a "good enough" cross-platform alternative to Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator is more than a full-time job already.
If Adobe would have a little bit of brain left, they would offer a cheaper subscription now. Essentially covering Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.
Instead of only the reasonably priced PS/LR bundle versus the too expensive "all the products we ever had" bundle.
They could basically wipe out Affinity. But yeah, won't happen I guess...
They don’t need to do that. First, Adobe doesn’t see Affinity as meaningful competition. Adobe sees Figma and Canva (and Blackmagic and Avid in the NLE space) as competition, but a company doing £30m a year in revenue is barely a blip on their radar (Adobe did nearly $20b in revenue in FY23).
Second, for the lowend market that Affinity serves, Adobe Express (its Canva compete) and Photoshop Express ($35 a year) are going to be enough for most of the core users. And Canva has quickly taken on the role for the low cost design tool of choice for normies who want to collaborate. I don’t use it for anything fancy, but I am not going to lie and say it isn’t better/faster at making YouTube thumbnails than basically anything else. Canva is the competitor, not Affinity. And Canva is being smart by buying a tool/team with a lot of users that they have the opportunity to now integrate with Canva. Will that integration be any good? I don’t know. But the leading web tool now has a native app component.
But make no mistake, Adobe has zero incentive to lower its prices for its core products at this time (the web products are a different story). The challenge it faces is when users at scale opt for similarly priced alternatives (Figma over XD, Canva over Adobe Express), not the middling number of users (and I count myself as one of them, but I’m just being honest) that pay for Affinity because it is a nice low cost tool.
I cannot imagine anyone who has a real business need for Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign and has to collaborate with others (and that part is key; if you’re a solo designer who never has to share files with others, that’s great but we’re not the target audience for Adobe anyway and we probably haven’t been since the early 1990s) choosing anything other than Adobe. The $720 a year or whatever it has gone up to is just the price of doing business.
Where Adobe faces challenges is from the people who don’t need to use Illustrator, InDesign or Photoshop for their work but have very strong web-based competition for specific tools. The UX teams that are standardized on Figma, even if they got XD as part of Creative Cloud, who don’t use Photoshop or Illustrator or InDesign, would rather pay the $45 or $75 a month to Figma. And the marketing teams that need to make graphics for social media or newsletters or whatever, would often rather pay $120 per seat for Canva than for Adobe Express (tho my recent experiments with Express show that it is getting very close to Canva in terms of capabilities and is better in some instances, Canva is prob better for that target audience, however). That’s the competition, not the offline design tools.
You have a point. I guess Adobe lowering the subscription prices is probably more wishful thinking on my part ;)
I def wish they would too! Alas.
Maybe I'm naive but I'm not so sure Affinity will automatically end up as a subscription-based app like Canva Pro and Creative Cloud. Subscription makes sense for Canva Pro where a lot of the value add is in additional elements and templates and there's not a versioned app you can buy with a certain set of features. For a tool where you release discrete versions with new features it's a lot easier to just sell it as one-off purchases.
Even if Canva was out to milk Affinity for every dollar, the size of the market for the professional-level tools is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the market for Canva-level tools. I can't imagine it would move the needle. But what do I know...
Looking at Canva’s pricing page makes me glad I have a perpetual license to Affinity’s products. Now the question is, will I ever get any updates to Photo/Design/Publisher? I don’t need new features, but I do care about bug fixes and such.
> Now the question is, will I ever get any updates to Photo/Design/Publisher?
They answered the question in their FAQ:
> Will my Affinity apps still get updates?
> Yes! We have many free updates planned for V2, with a continued focus on improvements and the features you ask for.
I depend on Affinity products, and am not sure how to take this news. When Adobe tried to buy Figma, I knew both companies very well and knew equally well that Adobe would ruin Figma if they owned it. I'm glad that it didn't happen. But I don't know anything about Canva as a company. Product acquisitions usually have a certain trajectory, and my default assumption is that this will follow it: deeper, unasked-for integration with Canva's other products, a new pricing model, a brand new feature roadmap driven by the desire to make back their money, the departure of key figures from Affinity about a year from now. I hope I'm wrong though!
Never heard about Canva. But checking them out they seem to focus on mobile apps and web apps to edit photos and videos. With a very specific focus on social media influencers. Don't be fooled by the cheeky templates and filters,they are going heavy on AI, with some interesting features such as inpainting and video background removal.
I guess that's either a very lucrative business or they have a ton of VC money behind them. This acquisition gives them some good editors on desktop to use as a base to deploy some of this AI tech focusing on a more pro market.
It is fairly lucrative business, $2b last year from serving the lower end of creative tools market.
They are also about to ipo so this acquisition probably gives the an additinal growth story to sell.
> It is fairly lucrative business, $2b last year from serving the lower end of creative tools market.
Started by some 30 yo Australian chick with no tech background too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep21f3ncvBk
This is a rather backhanded take. From what I understand of Melanie, she is one of the few folks I've read about that had a rather unique rags to riches story, and is quite driven. I don't begrudge her level of success.
To that end, despite her interesting story around her role in the business, Canva itself really appeals to the lowest common denominator, which probably explains why they have such gangbuster financials. It really isn't great for true creatives though, and I feel Canva is dragging the industry down, not pulling it up, in the name of profits.
Your point?
Yes, very lucrative with huge free cash flow. 60% YoY growth last year too
Canva powers the scam market. It's played a big part helping the scam market expand. Everything from "make money online" creative to flooding Etsy with poorly designed AI garbage to crypto scams. Canva and Stan are the peanut butter and jelly of scammery in 2024.
Your description could equally be describing google, Facebook, twitter or even the internet itself.
>Never heard about Canva. But checking them out they seem to focus on mobile apps and web apps to edit photos and videos. With a very specific focus on social media influencers.
Some WhatsApp group users in India use Canva to create posters for events and then post them on various WhatsApp groups.
These kind of acquisitions always astonish me. How does a web company that essentially sells toys get the money to purchase a company that sells professional desktop products?
It's 'valued' at $40bn, so if you can figure out the particulars of their VC rain dance, I imagine there's plenty of capital available for acquisitions.
They’re at a 13x multiple which is fairly conservative for a SaaS with their growth rates, and have been profitable since 2017.
Disclaimer: I used to work there.
True. Maybe a proof of the power of subscription based models?
Shame. Purchased a V2 suite licence despite being perfectly happy with V1 because I wanted to support them, I don’t see anything good coming from merging with Canva.
I don't know, products rarely get better with these acquisitions. I like my native app Affinity Designer, with a reasonable one time license very much as is.
There goes the last lingering thread of my non-Linux OS use.
oh no, the whole reason why I like Affinity products is the pricing model. I can't imagine that will last long.
In light of this, I can't help but feel the OSS alternatives to the Adobe graphics suite are pretty abysmal.
Inkscape is passable but aspects like filters are obtuse to use and that's largely because it's trying to be a good compliant SVG editor and not necessarily a good vector graphics editor.
GIMP's user experience in my opinion has been terrible for decades and every time I have given it a chance it's annoyed me into closing it. I can get things done, but it gets in my way.
As for Scribus I've never used it, but based on the previous two I'm not instilled with confidence.
> Inkscape is passable but aspects like filters are obtuse to use and that's largely because it's trying to be a good compliant SVG editor and not necessarily a good vector graphics editor.
It is actually possible to build an intuitive UI for filters while staying compliant with SVG. You just have to abstract away the low level SVG primitives ("feColorMatrix", "feComponentTransfer", etc.) with user-friendly presets such as "Sepia" or "Drop shadow". I actually created a mockup for such UI in Inkscape long time ago [1] and I eventually implemented it in Boxy SVG [2].
Advanced filter editing could be improved by switching from tree-based to node-based UI, in similar fashion to e.g. Jasc WebDraw [3].
[1] https://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/SpecSimpleFiltersUi
[2] https://boxy-svg.com/blog/19
[3] https://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/webdraw02.png
Personally speaking I’ve always found Inkscape frustrating compared to Sketch or Affinity Designer, but it’s in a different way than GIMP is. GIMP I think would mostly be fine if they just ditched all the quirky GIMP-unique UI conventions in favor of more commonplace counterparts (which in some cases is as “easy” as using standard GTK widgets instead of custom stuff) but who knows when or if that’ll happen.
I wonder in these type of takeovers, when it seems clear that nothing good can come next for the product users, if it would be somehow possible for a cooperative style takeover by the customer base.
I love Affinity Designer as a tool and his pay once license, I'm pretty sure that if you already purchased current version (V2), you will be fine, but I'm afraid they will go the subscription route soon like Adobe and Canva.
Is suspicious that Affinity marketing was always highlighting the pay once license model and against subscription, and in the official announcement there is no mention of that.
A lesson is that with the good ol Inkscape that type of thing that endangered the tool it doesn't happen.
It will probably go subscription, unfortunately.
But the smart move would be to double the price (obviously not immediately, but eventually) while retaining the pay once model and really doubling down on the professional aspect of the Affinity products (even if, compared to Adobe, they're not super professional grade yet). The reason people bought Affinity stuff was the pay once deal. That's how you retain those customers while aggressively moving into a prosumer market for Canva.
Now, though, Affinity is just another gravestone on the path of insane tech rent-seeking, buy-extract-kill, and financialization.
I agree but if they want to double the price they really need to be a lot better. Last time I used it for a quick project (relatively simple yet complex restaurant menu layout) I really wished I had used Adobe stuff instead (paid for a month or bootleg version). On the surface Affinity stuff is nice but it is very lacking in some not even advanced use cases and rather finicky, errors/bugs prone. You end up spending a lot more time, building up a lot more frustration than you would with Adobe tools.
Adobe is stupid expensive for someone who do not make money off it, but their software are quite good all things considered…
I love their software and am happy for the humans behind it all. As a customer who doesn’t believe they won’t force a subscription on me, I wish I had never supported them
A mistake, if you ask me. They can't compete with Adobe.
Affinity can, though. I haven't touched Photoshop/Illustrator in years since I discovered Affinity.
You're probably not the target audience though. Adobe products might be old, dysfunctional, and janky under all that cruft, but they have vast amounts of domain knowledge put into them.
Meaningfully competing with Photoshop & co involves breaking the lock-in (nearly impossible) and being much better use-case-wise. It's been done in certain niches where Photoshop is bad/mediocre/stagnates, like digital painting, but for general purpose suites like Affinity it means they have to be better at most things, which they just don't seem to be capable of.
Photoshop is the only software Adobe has bern giving atleast some attention.
If you are print designer than Publisher and Designer got to a point where they actually are better at many if not most fundamental things (speed, stability, ux of features, format support).
The main thing that has been keeping Affinity from adoption has been networking effects (adobe is in all companies and gets taught at schools).
Affinity is this close to turning this. Basically everyone has been waiting for them to allow third party plugins/scripting and the whole print industry would start to jump real fast.
Adobe is not just Photoshop and Illustrator; Affinity is still subpar, and Adobe products are moving fast ahead.
Photoshop and Illustrator are surely a vast majority of Adobe product usage. What would be #3? Premiere? Lightroom?
Actually I take it back, Acrobat is probably #1
Indesign is the main graphic software after Photoshop. Basically anything that gets printed uses Indesign. Photoshop is more well known because people love photography as a hobby but in professional print setting photos are just smaller component.
Affinity has an InDesign competitor, so this would seem to be a point in favor of the argument for Affinity being able to compete with Adobe if InDesign is in the top 3 Adobe products.
I think they are serious competitor and probably that's why they were able to have payday and sell the product.
Davinci Resolve is on par with Premiere. Quark XPress is a great replacement for InDesign. No need to rely on one company for every type of multimedia software.
Have you actually used the products you’re recommending and the Adobe equivalents? I would say that InDesign easily won over then industry-standard Quark nearly two decades ago, and Resolve is okay but not great at most things. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of Resolve and its pricing, but like Affinity, it’s not quite on par with the features of Adobe’s products. I’m routinely frustrated by missing features. I have complaints for Adobe products too, but usually missing features aren’t one of them. (Except if your product is named Captivate or was recently changed from a legacy app to a modern Electron app (or something), then I have a lot of missing features to suggest.)
Heck, I am frustrated that Canva didn’t have a layers panel, and now that they do, that it doesn’t behave the way I expect and I can’t pull it up easily… or that Canva makes it impossible to ensure assets match when searching for a matching sequence or set of templates. Or all the ways I can’t just do the thing I’m thinking of by right clicking or modifying layers or something. Canva itself is an exercise in frustration for power users. Affinity ain’t perfect either. Great matchup, really.
Quark is trash but Affinity Publisher is pretty great imho if they added third party scripting/plugins pro market would start moving off Adobe.
I’m less convinced. The text features and even how frames resize images were either annoying or lacking when I last used Publisher. Yes, I used it, and yes, it worked. But it’s no contest that in the details, InDesign has more features that are (in some cases) better thought out or for text rendering, just really good. At the moment the two best ways I know of to render text are (1) any Adobe product with their text engine and (2) LaTeX via something like XeTeX, but Adobe’s still wins for ease of use. Maybe third place would go to the Safari web browser if you use the right CSS and presumably export to PDF, though using it to export PDFs isn’t as user-friendly as iOS Share panel, Chrome or Prince - for PDF export, at least. Note that these statements are subjective on my part, I’d welcome evidence to the contrary as a sign of progress away from the Adobe hegemony. ;-)
Are you sure this is not just learning inertia? Because frames in Affinity work more like css object-fit and are "live". In Indesign you have to "recalculate" fit/fill every time with action. I would argue if you didn't know Indesign way the Affinity way is superior.
Text rendering algorithms are quite known quantity and lifted from LaTeX. Indesign has paragraph (multi-line) composer which in latex equivalent is microtype package. Affinity doesn't have that but paragraph composer is not really used that much in professional setting because when you do final manual fixes/adjustment of typography then with paragraph composer your changes could affect previous changes in paragraph (so people go by line by line). Paradoxically paragraph composer is pretty good for quickly getting OK enough results especially in more budget/non-pro setting.
Other than that i don't think the typography output (for print) is different I've seen some tests and it seems kinda exactly the same. Affinity might render type on screen a bit differently but the output is solid. I was more afraid of the quality of .pdf itself but even highend offset printers didn't see a difference/complained.
Resolve is so much better than Premiere. Resolve doesn’t crash half the time
Good point. And I should clarify, I’m not a filmmaker and mostly edit screen recordings and home movies. For that, I find that Resolve and Final Cut Pro work equally well and equally poorly. There’s a lot of room in video editing for further innovation, particularly if A.I. or automation can help simplify repetitive tasks. Premiere isn’t the best example of Adobe’s video tools - that title probably belongs to After Effects, an app inexplicably unique in its ease of editing and producing motion video graphics. No need to deal with translating your ideas into Nodes to get it working in Resolve. No need to try to fit within the limitations of titles and effects in FCP, etc. After Effects is Premiere’s killer app.
I think Davinci is great. What are you missing?
FCP X’s simple timeline which chains clips together making edits easy, though some would call this an anti-feature.
After Effects simplicity compared to the hellscape that can be node-based VG work. I mean, the programmer in me loves nodes, I even used MaxMSP frequently… and Origami. But the simplicity of After Effects is really nice and it has like every plugin in existence.
Don’t get me wrong, I use DaVinci with the quick editor and have considered buying other gear to make it work better, but… it’s really kinda a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-color-grading app. There’s a lot still to wish for.
With the advent of generative AI the painting has been on the wall for some time. Using it in Photoshop is simply so good that it is a necessity by now. Affinity are not a large enough company to train an AI, and any AI will not be able to run locally for a long time. So it must take place in the cloud and therefore require a subscription.
This is deeply saddening news. I own Affinity Photo and Designer and I'm sure in a few years people won't be able to say that. For most of my usage, mind you, Krita and Inkscape have been able to meet my needs, so more than likely this will just solidify my preference for the open source options out there.
I don't see the point of this acquisition. The products don't compete, so it's not eliminating market competition. The products also don't 'synergize' (ugh) well: they target different market demographics, have separate learning curves and different business models. Why?
Market coverage? Now they're in the desktop app market without having to develop their own thing.
Sad news! I've been an Affinity customer for many years; I like it much better than Adobe. Canvas branding is underwhelming, and there is no doubt in my mind that Affinity will change to be at the level of what Canvas represents: a web app.
It could be worse than canva, which is actually pretty great value when used with a free account. Also, Canva seems to take design kind of seriously. For example google Slides still can't do any font kerning after all these years.
Disappointing, because this likely spells the end of one-time-purchase Affinity products, and as mentioned in the article up until now that has been a big selling point for them.
I hope I’m wrong, but if I’m not it doesn’t fare well for Affinity’s future growth and popularity. People are likely to go back to Adobe because there’s no point giving up the compatibility, instructional material, etc that comes with Adobe stuff if they’re stuck with subscriptions either way.
I agree. I've been using their programs since they came out and the one-time-purchase helped me get away from adobes clutches.
Another good thing likely bites the dust.
I hope you’re wrong as well! As a casual creative with the occasional need for photo editing and vector design tools, I could never justify the price for an Adobe subscription. But I’ve happily bought Affinity Photo and Design. They aren’t as polished as their Adobe counterparts, but the price was just right. I wouldn’t sign up for a monthly subscription.
I just heard about this software today. Seeing that it was a one time purchase, I almost got out my wallet right then and there. Making it a subscription model would immediately turn me off.
I'm a happy Affinity Customer thanks to their low cost perpetual licenses and quality software, hoping that none of that changes - don't use it nearly enough to justify maintaining a subscription.
Canva is subscription based.
Hopefully this will allow the Serif team to improve their products. I bought their products from day one with the hope they would get better but after 10 years or so I'm still on Adobe.
What could they do better? I am interested.
Let’s see… they’re so far behind they only recently added pathfinder tools to their illustrator app with v2… initially claimed it wasn’t necessary https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/68819-bett... but then gave in and basically shipped it https://affinity.help/designer2/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=...
It’s hard to sell an entire industry on replacing tools that “just work” with a new set of tools unless they actually work better. Consider what VS Code has had to do to try and get devs switch to it from other IDEs: they had to offer first-class support for pretty much every other IDE’s method of operating, e.g. plugins to take the keyboard shortcuts from other IDEs, plus offer better support for languages (e.g. LSPs, use of TextMate bundles), and on top of that offer new features not seen elsewhere (e.g. devcontainers, web-based IDEs, first-class GitHub integration…) and even then people will obviously still pick JetBrains products for Java or Python because you can’t actually copy every feature and win.
Likewise it only took me 5-10 minutes with Publisher before I started noticing missing features with text (Adobe has an excellent text rendering engine, go figure) and Designer in v1 was so frustrating that I haven’t used v2 much, though my use cases were pretty specific. I’ve actually found myself putting up with the bugs in OmniGraffle (oh so many bugs) because the infinite canvas there works so well when zooming around. When it works, that is.
Got a bit sidetracked in my answer, but Adobe has a lot going for it. Honestly this is probably great news for Figma, as they have an opportunity now to build better web-based photo and publishing apps before Canva can figure it out.
Affinity deals with boolean operations in different way Figma/Sketch/Glyphs also dont have pathfinder. They probably added it for some edgecases and because its easier for illustrator users to switch.
Publisher has pretty much same type tools as Indesign only the panels/features are positioned differently. Publisher doesnt have multi-line composer but that is paradoxically not used in professional setting anyway (its great for quick things though).
On the other hand you are overlooking fundamentals where Affinity is so much better than Adobe - stability,speed,connection between the software.
It seems biggest issue Affinity has are networking effects/inertia of the industry unvilling to change.
> On the other hand you are overlooking fundamentals where Affinity is so much better than Adobe - stability, speed, connection between the software.
I think others would argue on that last point that Adobe is more than halfway there since Creative Suite and has plans to finish the job with Adobe Express, though we’ll see if they come to fruition.
> It seems biggest issue Affinity has are networking effects/inertia of the industry unvilling to change.
This I agree with, 100%. And now Affinity will have a third struggle in that they are poised to go subscription and lose the pricing model advantage too. Even if they don’t change the pricing model, eventually you’ll need a Canva account to use the apps, ongoing annual support fees, and so on.
Maybe it is your particular needs, but so far I have been very impressed by the Affinity suite. I render from Blender in open exr, place in an AP document which I then place in a AP document. When I update the render, the whole pipeline is updated. This preservation of high dynamic range info would be impossible in the Adobe Suite.
I think that this is possible because under the hood the Affinity Suite uses the same core engine. In contrast, Adobe bought their suite from diverse sources, and interplay between them is clunky at best.
I agree that text preview in AP can be rough, but the output in pdf is as good as that in InDesign.
There's plenty but as an example the group isolation feature in Designer. To me is the biggest deal breaker.
It has been requested plenty of times and there are multiple threads in their forum. This one is 10 years old:
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/1640-ad-is...
Affinity Publisher lacks epub export.
If they move Affinity to subscription, CorelDRAW is probably the only viable (commercial) graphic product left with a perpetual license. Apart from FOSS, of course.
The thing I learnt about FOSS which gives me a long term advantage is that I have to learn to do things only once.
No, there's Viva Designer, a German desktop publishing program.
OK, there goes a decent-ish Adobe alternative.
Now it will be more subscriptions, polluted with embedded Canva shit, and perhaps phasing out the desktop apps altogether.
Adobe is for pros.
"Pros" is not well defined, unless if it's just used to mean "people getting paid for work they do by using the software" (what actually separates the pros from the non-pros: getting paid).
Otherwise, it's a "no true Scotsman" thing, only including the 10% of hardcore graphic designers deep into Photoshop and Illustrator and such, and not the 90% of web designers, app UI designers, content creators, artists, and others, who might or might not use Adobe, but that still often make more $ than belleguered "pro" graphic designers.
It's like how an exexutive using an MBP and making $500,000k/year is "not a pro" for some, but some guy using it to make $70k/year is, and somehow gets to define what is or isn't a "pro machine".
For what many (or most) people do in 2024, many alternatives, including Affinity, Canva, Figma, Sketch, and others, are fine for their professional (as in, charging customers, or earning money by work created using the software) use cases.
Affinity is amazing (I use Designer, and my dad loves Photo). Canva is actually pretty amazing too. It's going to stir things up, for sure.
Viva Designer is a German desktop publishing program which does not use a subscription-based model. Haven't seen it mentioned here.
It's bad news and not because of the "fear of subscription" (if you think you aren't paying for a subscription now, you are deluding yourself).
The problem is that most acquisitions go wrong and that larger companies generally care much less about their users. There are no good scenarios and no possible benefits there for Affinity users (like me). In a small company, management cares about users, because these users provide a direct lifeline for the company. In a large business, management cares about "shareholder value" as measured by their bonuses and this quarter's earnings. That does not map well onto customer satisfaction (see Adobe, Dropbox, or really just about any company that became large or got acquired).
Canva seems lost in terms of what they are or want to be. I suppose AI doesn't help businesses like Canva's.
The fast race toward version 3 has been a cause for concern. It _just_ came out and it's already in the 2.4s.
I have this horrible feeling that they're going to convert the Affinity suite to be online-only products.
We just need to get some big companies to give GIMP (or another OSS alternative) the Blender treatment.
Most customers of Adobe and Affinity are on Mac or Windows. I am not sure about Windows, but unfortunately GTK apps are absolutely horrible on macOS. It probably makes more sense so fund something Qt-based for better cross-platform support.
That said, for big companies a Creative Cloud subscription (let alone a single app subscription) is only a drop in the bucket compared to employee salaries.
I think Affinity Suite is probably most popular among indie folks, people who need it less regularly, etc.
As per the article, do people really see Canva as a competitor to Adobe? I must be missing something.
Affinity is the competitor I think.
God, darn it. It's time to disable updates and retain an archived copy of the installer.
What a shame. So far akamais purchase of linode haven’t bourne ill fruit. Time will tell
While Affinity is a one-time purchase, I'll admit I was very, very disappointed when with the last version they switched from a normal product key to online-only activation requirement which was not at all clear at purchase time. So despite having purchased the whole v2 suite I ended up never using it and staying with v1, and their response was pretty junk as well. That said, I share concerns of other posters that this isn't going to make the trajectory any better. The email sent out by the CEO also gave me very strong "Our Incredible Journey" [0] vibes:
>"In Canva, we've found a kindred spirit who can help us take Affinity to new levels. Their extra resources will mean we can deliver much more, much faster. Beyond that, we can forge new horizons for Affinity products, opening up a world of possibilities that would never previously have been achievable.
>Canva's revolutionary approach to design democratisation and commitment to empowering everyone to create aligns perfectly with our core values and vision. This union is a testament to what can be achieved when two companies that share a common goal of making design accessible and enjoyable for everyone come together."
I can't speak for anyone else on HN but the whole thing (more resources! empowerment! design democratisation!) gives me some serious deja vu.
----
0: https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/
We’ve been burned so often by those kinds of statements that every time I see a company repeating them I’m left wondering if the founders are unbearably naive or they think users are stupid.
It's the usual CEO claptrap before they decimate the company.
1. Acquire company
2. ???
3. Fire developers until profitable without doing actual work
4. Raise CEO Salary
Firing them would be stupid, unless Canva has desktop app developers sitting around twiddling their thumbs.
I hate these statements. They could have said something like:
"We got bought by Canva because they want more independence/alternatives from Adobe. We can invest more in development. Expect more integrations with Canva. Currently there are no plans for changes to our business model"
But they didn't. Their statement was meaningless with zero information. Which means either they will absolutely enshitificate everything or they didn't care to ask or they didn't clarify it during negotiations.
All reasons to stay far away from now on. I was planning to buy their suit for a whole team next month. Time to look elsewhere.
> "... Currently there are no plans for changes to our business model"
They mentioned exactly that in the FAQ:
> Canva’s business model is subscription, are there any plans to change how Affinity is sold?
> There are no changes to our current pricing model planned at this time, with all our apps still available as a one-off purchase.
I'd perform undignified sex acts on camera for supported Linux and Android versions. I'd pay too if that helps. I think lot of Linux developer-creatives would.
I love Inkscape and GIMP but they desperately need domestic competition.
What I didn't manage to read was are they buying Serif or buying this from Serif?
I began migrating stuff away as soon as I got their email announcement today.
I love Affinity and I don't love Canva. I'm hopeful nothing much changes but I'm not holding my breath. I'll pay a subscription over my dead body.
Agreed, but Canva isn't really for us. Canva is for the types of people who "want a poster/t-shirt/etc that's pretty enough and have no skills with Photoshop." Canva is buying Affinity to expand their market into professionals, not to water it down.
It’s a matter of time before Adobe buys them and kills everything
Fortunately, it looks as if Adobe has gotten so big that they won't be allowed to buy much more --- witness the recent Figma deal which was shut down.
Ah great. More fucking enshittification. What a disaster.
Yet another UK business in tech with great potential now gone. It just seems UK cant grow any big tech company. Even ignoring Tech, most if not all of the big UK companies are in Finances and Services.
Canva's approach has been to create a convoluted, frankenstein's monster, browser-first, mixed media editor that is largely inadequate for professional workflows. Also everything is locked away in their cloud from files to assets. I hate everything about Canva's UX and performance.
I suspect Canva will attempt to integrate Affinity into their cloud offering without fully comprehending the specific use cases and features that made Affinity successful in the first place. Canva's target is the novice and social media influencer, Affinity is a different market.
Sad day...
Canva wants to be the next Adobe
Acquire figma next.
Oh no!
... and let the enshittification begin!
now they just need to train generative AI models by opting in all of their users to allow training in on their data and forcing them to opt-out if they want otherwise. To compete with adobe that is.
Oh jesus christ, can we stop with the acquisitions?
I've never seen much hate for Canva until this thread.
HN will really hate on any kind of acquisition, regardless of if the acquirer is a "big bad" like Adobe or not.
Most comments seem to be from Affinity customers. I've been a customer for many years. They have incredible software, and it's extremely sad because past acquisitions seem to destroy the applications people like and support, not the other way around. Canva looks like McDonalds.
It’s not about hate for Canva. It’s about love for Affinity. Who are now being gobbled up by a bigger fish, with the inevitable consequence being enshittification.
It's not really hard to see why though. Software which only real saving grace is a better license model than the bigger fish gets bought by another bigger fish to ultimately, most likely, get put in the same license model.