I’ve been using Adobe for design work for as long as I can remember. When I first started creating websites, Photoshop was the industry standard. Looking back, it’s really hard to see why. I pay monthly for Photoshop and Lightroom currently, but they’re definitely photo editing programs (and that’s what I use them for), not fit for designing a website. I decided to look for an alternative, and I found Affinity Designer.
Illustrator Alternatives: Affinity Designer, Inkscape, and Figma. Adobe Illustrator is a powerful program, but there are other options that can help you complete your projects. In this video breakdown, learn about three popular Illustrator alternatives and the features each of them have! If you are looking for a great Adobe Illustrator alternative with a lot of professional tools that you don’t need to pay for monthly, try Affinity Designer. It is available for Mac or Windows for $50. Navigation and interface resemble the capabilities of Illustrator. The arsenal of its drawing tools is really impressive. Adobe 2,831,552 followers on LinkedIn. Adobe is the global leader in digital media and digital marketing solutions. Our creative, marketing and document solutions empower everyone – from. Affinity Designer could quite possible become a true Illustrator killer. At the moment it’s only available to Mac users and the full version comes with a small price tag of $49.99 with free upgrades for two years, but the trial version is still remarkably functional and worth a shot if you’re looking for a free editor. Affinity Designer was created to thrive on the electric pace of the latest computing hardware. Live, responsive and incredibly fluid, it’s simply a joy to use. + Pan and zoom at 60fps + Live gradients, effects.
Adobe isn’t cheap
When I got a new laptop earlier this year, I was 99% sure that a fresh subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud was a no-brainer. Then, I saw the price. £50 per month! Even subtracting the £10 I pay for the Adobe photo bundle, it was a bit steep, especially in the unpredictable times of Covid-19.
I tried to justify the expense by 1) thinking of all the different software that comes with Creative Cloud, and 2) deciding I would switch to Adobe XD for my web design software, rather than paying for Sketch.
Still, the math didn’t add up. I didn’t need all the software Adobe has to offer. I really only needed Illustrator for vector work and XD for web. And I didn’t want XD. I wanted Sketch, which costs a very reasonable £100ish for the first year, and £80ish for renewals (or you can keep the version you have, without updates, forever. Fair enough!).
I went looking for a cheaper solution and, luckily, I found it. Affinity Designer is a piece of software that’s (almost) on par with Illustrator. It also has a very reasonable price tag. Usually, it costs £50, but they’ve had quite a long-running (probably Covid-19 inspired) 50% off promo running, which means I got the whole thing for a one-off cost of £24. Bargain!
Making the transition from Adobe Illustrator to Affinity Designer
I’ve used Affinity Designer for a couple of projects now and have found the transition to be quite simple. Most of the tools work the same, and the few quirks were easy enough to iron out, especially with the help of the Affinity forum.
The only place if falls short is its lack of live trace functionality. In Adobe, this is a game changer. It allows you to take a raster image and convert it to a vector. Affinity have had many requests from their users to add this feature over the years, however at this time they say they only intend to add it if the functionality meets their high standards… and it doesn’t yet.
All is not lost, however. There are third-party programs that offer this functionality. So does Inkscape, although I think it’s overkill to set it up just for this one thing. I ended up downloading Image Vectorizer from the App Store and so far so good. It’s had some issues vectorizing light colours, but if I provide a black and white image it does a great job. Then, I simply add the colours in Affinity Designer.
Affinity for everything
The Affinity suite also includes two more Adobe alternatives: Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher. These are meant to replace Photoshop and InDesign, respectively.
One aspect of the Adobe programs that I really enjoy is the ability to sync my Lightroom files between my laptop and my mobile devices, and, for me, that’s a good enough reason to stick to Adobe on this one. But I have also purchased Affinity Publisher, as InDesign is a program I use sparingly but appreciate having around. Although they don’t have the functionality for interactive forms which is disappointing!
Two of the Affinity apps are also available for iPad, although you do need to buy them separately from the desktop software. You can get Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer for iPad right now, while Affinity Publisher for iPad is due to be released this year. This is speedier than Adobe who have Photoshop on iPad and have announced that Illustrator is coming “soon.” That said, Adobe has quite a few products, many of which are more mobile-specific.
Team Adobe or team Affinity?
It’s safe to say I’m converted! I got to keep my beloved Sketch for web projects, and I got a good piece of software that gets the job done, for a decent price that most people can afford.
I think it also proves that skills are transferrable and the software is less important than people think! So if you’re a beginner in the design space and want to experiment without breaking the bank, I don’t think learning Affinity Designer will hinder you at all if you one day end up using the Adobe ecosystem.
Written by Echo Rivera and Jason Rivera
So you’re an academic, researcher, scientist, or evaluator interested in learning how to create your own visuals and you’re wondering what application to use?
Chances are you already know about Adobe Illustrator, and maybe you’ve even heard of Inkscape. But have you heard about Affinity Designer?
I mean…we’ve only been talking about it for the last few blog posts 🤣, starting with this one about why you should learn how to make your own visuals. And then there’s this post which shows examples of how researchers, academics, and researchers could use it in their work.
So maybe the real question you’re wondering is: Why do we talk so much about Affinity Designer and not Adobe Illustrator?
We ditched Adobe Illustrator for Affinity Designer and are thrilled with this decision. In this blog post, we’ll provide the 4 reasons that we love Affinity Designer and not Adobe Illustrator.
Adobe Illustrator used to be something you could pay for upfront and then use it for years and years. Good cleaner for mac.
LOL not anymore! Sorry, suckers, you’ll now need to pay EVERY SINGLE MONTH FOR ALL OF ETERNITY 💸💸💸, even if you don’t use any of the new features they add or if they remove features you already use.
So, if you want to start learning how to make your own illustrations, and you choose Adobe Illustrator, you could be locked into paying $31.50 EVERY month…FOREVER 💸💸💸. Well, no … actually not forever because they’ll raise their prices so it’ll be even more than that over time.
In contrast, Affinity Designer (cue angelic choir song 🙌) charges a ONE TIME fee for their product. Plus you get free updates (which includes bug and feature updates).
Just in case you think subscription is better for something like Affinity Designer and Adobe Illustrator, you probably won’t benefit from a subscription model because you’re not a graphic design professional. You only need these to do things like make visuals for your PowerPoint or Keynote presentations, visual abstracts, or other materials related to your research or teaching.
Let’s do the maths: in TWO months, you’ve already saved money by choosing Affinity Designer over Adobe Illustrator. Plus if you take our Affinity Designer course, you get 20% off Affinity apps, so you can save even more money. #JustSayin
How much could you save in 1 year by choosing Affinity over Adobe?
COST OF ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR AFTER 12 MOS: $378
COST OF FULL-PRICE AFFINITY DESIGNER AFTER 12 MOS: $50
SAVINGS AFTER 1 YEAR = $328 ($338 for our online course students)
How much could you save in 2 years by choosing Affinity over Adobe?
COST OF ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR AFTER 24 MOS: $756+
COST OF FULL-PRICE AFFINITY DESIGNER AFTER 24 MOS: $50
SAVINGS AFTER 2 YEARS = $706+ ($716+ for our online course students)
Affinity Designer To Adobe Illustrator
Yes, you do need to buy a license for each type of operating system, but even if you have to buy every version of Affinity Designer (Windows, Mac, iPad), you don’t have to endlessly pay a subscription fee, so you will still come out ahead.
Maybe you think Affinity Designer is cheaper because it comes with less features?
Nope.
We check in with the Illustrator updates just to see if we’re missing anything that Affinity Designer doesn’t have and have never felt like we were missing out. To us, it’s not worth the monthly price and we actually do graphic design work(e.g., comics, custom illustrations and visuals) for academics, researchers, evaluators, and scientists. If we don’t feel the need to have it, then you—someone who will probably use it mostly for your own work—probably won’t either.
We use Affinity Designer almost every day for things like infographics, web graphics, social media graphics, theoretical models, and more. It has everything we need. Plus, just like Illustrator, you can add things like brushes, fonts, textures, etc. to Affinity Designer if you ever want to make more advanced images.
Affinity has done things like make a full-featured version of their software for the iPad before Adobe did. So a smaller company like Affinity is just as able to innovate and include features as the big, industry-dominating one.
Is Affinity Designer Compatible With Illustrator
Maybe you think Affinity Designer is cheaper because it’s harder to use?
Nope.
We totally get why you might be worried about this. Have you ever tried using Inkscape? It’s a free, open-source alternative to Adobe Illustrator. When we went looking for Illustrator alternatives, we started there. Jason, who hadn’t used Illustrator very much, found it kinda annoying but okay. Echo, who had used Illustrator for a few years, had a really difficult time figuring it out. Especially after coming from something so easy to use, Inkscape was a frustrating nightmare.
So, we were both skeptical that Affinity Designer would be much better. We’ve never been more happy to be proven wrong.
If you’re worried about the learning curve for digital illustration software, then you’ll be pleased to know that we both find Affinity Designer significantly easier to use than Adobe Illustrator (and a million times easier than Inkscape). Compared to Illustrator, Affinity Designer has a much more user friendly setup that will be easy for beginners to learn.
And get this: If you’ve used Adobe Illustrator in the past, there will be very little learning curve and adjustment for you. Echo used Adobe Illustrator for something like 3-4 years before switching to Affinity Designer, and was able to pick up almost everything in Affinity without even looking up how to do it. And yes, Affinity Designer can open .ai files (and .eps files, obvi) just fine.
Affinity is great because they aren’t overcharging for their software or trying to lock you into a never-ending subscription. They are also great because they don’t do things that Adobe does which we find…disagreeable.
Adobe has done things like “testing” higher pricing for customers even though they didn’t officially raise the price of their subscriptions, so some new customers paid a higher price than they had to. They’ve also tried to scare customers that still use their older, non-subscription software into thinking they could have legal trouble if they keep using their old software. Adobe has also been known to try to make it difficult and annoying to cancel your subscription, kind of like cable companies.
Given these actions you would think Adobe is strapped for cash and selling their products at a loss, but no. These actions are coming from a company that made about $2.5 billion in profit in 2018. And a great way for them to make more money is to just keep increasing their subscription prices without a corresponding increase in features. A quick internet search will lead you to plenty more critiques of Adobe’s business model and practices. (See also: Additional Reading below)
(No, Affinity hasn’t paid us a dime or given me a free license. After a year of publicly telling everyone how much we love Affinity Designer, we were finally able to secure a discount on their apps for our Affinity Course students. We don’t make any money off that, the savings are passed directly onto you. We really just love this program and think it’s a perfect fit for academics, scientists, evaluators, researchers, and educators).
Additional Reading: