The future of Affinity Designer, Photo and Publisher, subscription-free alternatives to Adobe Creative Cloud, was uncertain after the apps’ developer Serif was acquired by Canva in 2024. Now, over a year later, the changes Canva has introduced are big, but not necessarily unwelcome. The newly relaunched Affinity by Canva combines all three apps into a single piece of illustration, photo editing and layout software, and rather than move to a subscription model as many feared, Canva’s made it entirely free. Or, at least, freemium.

Affinity is available now as a desktop app for macOS and Windows, with an iPadOS version on the way at some point in the future. The basic functionality of the app doesn’t seem all that different from the three separate apps Serif offered before, only now you can toggle between their tools via separate Vector, Pixel and Layout tabs. Canva stresses you also have the option to mix and match tools, and save custom toolbars to use for specific types of projects, if you want.

Beyond layering in chunky serif fonts, Canva’s touch seems relatively light. The Affinity app now requires a free Canva account to use and offers integrations with the company’s suite of tools, with a new option to send an Affinity project directly to Canva. The company is also making its Canva AI Studio tools available in Affinity, giving users the ability to automatically remove a background or use Generative Fill to edit part of a photo. How well veteran Affinity users will take to these changes remains to be seen, but they’ll at least be able to continue using their existing copies of the old Affinity V2 lineup.

Free sounds good, but one of the draws of the original Affinity creative suite is that you could purchase a license for Serif’s individual apps and not ever have to think about it again. Canva is promising that the new Affinity will be free going forward, but a free app that requires an account and might try to upsell you on subscription-based AI features is not quite the same thing.

Affinity wasn’t the only Adobe competitor to be acquired in 2024. Pixelmator, a developer of popular photo and image editing tools for iOS, iPadOS and macOS, was absorbed by Apple in November that same year. The company’s apps continue to be maintained, but it’s still not clear if Apple plans to shift them to a subscription model in the future.

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