Last month I decided to see about switching to Affinity software and limiting my Adobe subscription to Photoshop and Lightroom only for the time being. A big part of that decision came down to pricing and a general dislike of the subscription cloud based service platforms. There are some advantages to them such as being able to save a file to the Adobe cloud and easily import/export that file to various software within the Adobe suite.
Affinity is getting a lot of attention as a viable alternative to Adobe and while it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles it is a formidable software package in its own right. It also have an attractive price point, currently at $54.99 each with no additional fees. In other words you can get Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, and Affinity Publisher for the price of $167.92. Compare that to Adobe’s current monthly rate ($69.72) for the creative suite. To be fair for that price you do get access to all of Adobe’s software, both for the desktop and tablets. I subscribed for years, however, and very rarely used anything outside of Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. The very three pieces of software that Affinity has created alternatives to.
A while back all Affinity software was half off which meant they were $25.00 each (at the time the full price was $50.00) which was a one time fee. (So far all updates to the software has been included as well.) I don’t know if they will ever have a sale like that again but it’s well worth keeping an eye out!
So how’s the transition? Not bad! It takes a while to get used to the different settings, and as stated Affinity doesn’t have all of the features Adobe has but for the price I feel it’s more than worth it.
Will I ever go back to Adobe? Possibly. As said I do still use photoshop and I do miss some features of Adobe but for now I’m having fun experimenting and learning.