Affinity

Honestly, was ready to hate this because of Canva's acquisition, but honestly, ignoring the uh... questionable decision of signing in (which is entirely understandable, their licenses are free now and there would need a way to activate the license someway or another), great alternative to the Adobe suite of graphic design software (if you do the bare minimum and doesn't require the more specific features that Adobe softwares provide). I've been using Affinity as an alternative to InDesign, and it has served me well for graphic and editorial of my publishing works.

"Free version with limited functionality." is incorrect. The app requires an account, and if you stop just a second to skim several pages or T&Cs spread into intentionally ambiguous areas, and plus the pages that pertain to privacy, or more appropriately lack thereof, it should take anybody no time to realize they're paying with their data.

If anything "with limiting functionality" would fit better. Although it would still not be free.

I knew Affinity was going to end up as this dumpster fire. When v2 came out I hesitated to get it because somewhere along the line the hostile takeover happened. I wondered if I was being paranoid for holding on to v1 Designer for too long.

But it seems it wasn't long enough.

You rent services, not software. A service is work continuously done for you. A piece of software is work already being done. You pay for it, you expect it to work as advertised, if the provider has any decency they'll handled unforeseen bugs for a short time, And that's it. No new features messing up with your workflow, in the case of subscription software often useless features and bug fixes—although keep in mind you were supposed to be getting something finished—are the hooks so paying a subscription fools people to think they're not paying for the same old, increasingly bloated idea again, and again, and again.

Rent a VPS, or even stupid AI if you're into that, because at least energy is used somewhere on your behalf. But SaaS are leeches that seek to do the least amount of work to be have a charge card or whatever. In this case it's not even their work, they took over somebody else's, how do you think it's going to end if you trust them. If you were an older user, they already betrayed your trust a number of times, doing what they said there weren't going to do, and they even closed the forums so you couldn't complain (i.e; they muzzled customers), making it easy to equate metrics such as high downloads volume of a product deceptively free product to user satisfaction. As I saw somebody keeps repeating in other comments. Do you really think they're gonna stop now because a new version number?

I liked the "old" Affinity suite because it was one time payment (well, I paid two times with Affinity 2). The Affinity Canva version is free (with an account). Difficult to beat this price. And development is faster. And it solved bugs never fixed in Affinity 2 (Tourbox management, keyboard shortcuts for French keyboards).

The + :

• with all the suite for free, it becomes easy to create a poster after drawing an illustration (in vector or not) and you can easily switch from one tool to another
• it looks weird, but I prefer the rendering of realistic brushes in Affinity than in Krita (I like very much Krita) or Clip Studio Paint (it needs more work to have a correct result)
• I use Affinity a lot for its filters. Faster than Krita and more accurate, much more complete than CSP

The - :

• with all the tools in one place, it needs more clicks to find some actions. UI needs some work
• not so complete in ergonomy as Krita or CSP if you draw and paint
• selection tools are very poor compared to Krita or CSP. It’s very difficult to color comics easily with so poor features
• reference layer management is very poor compared to Krita and CSP

About Photoshop : I never learned to work with Photoshop (I’m quite old) and began with The Gimp, CSP and Krita. So I cannot compare with Affinity in terms of UI, efficiency and so on. I can only say that Photoshop is the faster in filters work with the best result in my opinion. But I don’t use Photoshop in everyday work.

Affinity now provides a special version for Chinese market, which available on this site: https://www.canva.cn/affinity

I've been a graphic designer for over 7 years now and i've been using Adobe products in the past, but after affinity aggregated their products into one software I honestly cant switch back to those laggy pieces of mess Adobe has made. Just compare to normal workflow Affinity is so much more responsive, faster to start up, and has everything in one place, photoshop, illustrator, indesign, camera raw etc. I dont have a subscription to Canva and i dont need to use any of their AI so far, although I will dock 1 star off since photoshop still has superior selection and AI selection tools i use.