Is Affinity Studio Really Better Than Adobe?

So should you switch from Adobe to Affinity Studio? Let's find out. I'm doing a comparison to see what's better. So let's kick it off with price. Now, Adobe has been price gouging for so many years now, so if we look at the prices, it's normally 113 with 50 off, it's 56amonth. And you do get a lot of the programs. You get the full Creative Pro suite, so you get all these apps. It is a lot of value. But. But yeah, sometimes I do feel like for a younger person that doesn't have many clients not making much money, it can be a bit steep every month to pay for that subscription. Whereas Affinity is completely free and Canva bought them out. They've made it free forever. They're saying on the recent launch that they had. But what they are doing is using as a funnel to their main product, which is Canva. And I don't think designers want to go to Canada because it's not really a design tool, it's more of a template tool and it's got AI. So if you do want the AI features in Affinity Studio, you do have to pay that extra $20 a month. So you got Canva Pro 20 bucks a month on the monthly, or you got the business at $27, which includes templates, photos, vectors, brand kits. And then if you go down, you can see it includes some AI ad creation. But then they're actually connecting Leonardo AI. So Leonardo AI is pretty good. It's high on the leaderboard of text image generation, so that would be kind of cool. So that would be the price. It's not that expensive. So if you're someone that's really tight on cash and that's your main thing, then Affinity Studio is probably best for you. But if you're a professional, majority of the industry still use Adobe, I don't think, you know, everyone's going to be jumping on Affinity just because it's free. Now with Adobe, you have each program has its own file. So Adobe Illustrator is dot AI Photoshop will be dot PSD InDesign will be dot IND then you got all the other apps as well have their own files. So you're constantly having to switch between apps. It can use a lot of resources and RAM on your PC or your Mac, whatever you're using. With Affinity, everything is just one file, dot af, which is pretty cool. Now, the cool thing with Affinity is you can actually import AI files, Photoshop files and IDML files from InDesign. So you can't do directly InDesign files but the IDML but it can do PCs and Illustrator files. So for example here I loaded in a logo deck that I presentation that I had for a client and I just imported it. Just press Control o open and then just locate your file, double click it will ask you some PDF options. So make sure that your file is editable and has a PDF editability as well. And then you can, you know, do it as pages or art boards and change the DPI if you're doing print to 300 and then you can replace the missing fonts. So if you've got missing fonts you can select this and it will select the right font I want to press ok. And so you can see it imported it. It's pretty cool. And let's see if we can edit the text. You can actually edit the text which is cool. You can move things around and it works. So I tested AI file so this worked. The logo presentation, some mock ups. I also did a Photoshop file as well. And so we've got the layers here. So if I look at all the layers you can see it's got the reflection, the shadow. So if I just turn all those things off. It's got the rogue business card and then it's got the smart object. So you can see in the layers panel you can see it's an embedded file. So instead of smart objects they have that embedded and I think maybe if I just move this, if I save that. I don't know if it works the same. Okay, cool. So it works similar to like a smart object where it has those embedded files. It's pretty cool. So you can edit that and save that indesign file here. So you can see it's got the blades and the guides there, which is pretty cool. And so this was the indesign. You can edit the text and then you can just do a normal PDF. You can import PDF files and you will get something like this. So you can see it's got the similar vibe. It's got master pages and pages and yeah, everything's editable. You can see here. So it's pretty cool when it comes to file management. It's really great how they integrated it with Adobe to make it easy for people to switch. Which leads me to number three is workspaces. So with Adobe you know you can customize your workspaces. If you go to window you got workspace and you know you've got multiple workspaces. So I can select this one. It will change if I Go Essentials. You can see it adjusts the panels and the windows. You can do the same thing in Adobe Photoshop and InDesign, but in affinity. Up the top, you can see you've got different workspaces. You got Vector, you got Pixel for Photoshop, you got Layout, which is like InDesign. And then you got Canva AI, which is AI generating. So the cool thing is, everything is in one app now. There's no separate apps. It's different from Adobe. It's all within one app and it's just one file af, so. So that's kind of cool and efficient. And the cool thing is I made my own workspace. You can see mirror design. I can click these little three dots and you can actually create your own studio. Or you can turn on these other ones or click Create. You can change the color, do an icon, you know, call it whatever you want, create. And now you've got all these studios with different menus, different layouts. So I think that's really cool. And then you can just, you know, edit it, delete it, turn them off. So we can turn all these off. Now. The thing is, there will be a bit of a learning curve because a lot of tools in Affinity, just by looking at it, there's a lot of menus, a lot of things going on. I haven't really optimized the app now when it comes to speed, I've just tested it a little bit and I found that it's pretty snappy. Sometimes it does get a bit laggy with those bigger files like Photoshop and InDesign. But I'm a pretty strong PC, so it's pretty responsive now when it comes to Adobe, it's always been pretty speedy and works well. I'm in Illustrator. I can move things, edit things, change colors very fast. You know, I can have big Photoshop images and it works really well, so I don't have issues with Illustrator. Photoshop is pretty good, too. Sometimes Photoshop does lag a bit. I feel like with Adobe introducing too many AI tools, it's just bloating the software a bit. So I'd prefer if they just keep AI separate. But yeah, Photoshop is usually pretty snappy as well. With Affinity, you can zoom in really far. So they said you can go 10 million percent or something. So you can see I'm going in very far. So that's really good. And then you've also got artboards at the top left. We can just add art boards, very similar to Illustrator and Photoshop, as you can see. You can drag artboards and start creating. They've got all the same tools like pencil tool, the knife tool, pen tool. You can start making shapes, clicking and dragging. You know I can do, just go to shapes here. You can make some donuts or whatever you want. Love how they got pre made shapes for you. And then you've got the normal type tools, so you can click and drag and type or you can press T. And then it's got similar shortcuts to Adobe as well with the text tools. I'm not going to dive too much into that. It's got all my fonts here that I already have on my computer. Adjust the kerning really well. So it's pretty cool. And then if you want to like make some weird effects or something, you basically can go switch to pixel workspace and start. You know you got playing around, so you've got brushes. So just press B and then you can select a brush on the right hand side, just change the menus and we can start painting. Maybe you want to change color. Pretty cool. So I love how you can just do that and then just switch the vector and then start like building stuff, copy, paste stuff. Just making whatever here. So that's really fun. So we've also got filters. So if I click on the blue shape at the back. Let's go up top. Pixel and filters, you got blur, sharpen, distort. Same stuff as Photoshop, basically. I don't think there's anything too different. There are some new lighting tools and stuff, but I haven't really played around with that, so I'm not gonna try and figure that out. So if we go to distort, you got, you know, glitch, you got mirror, start glitching things out. As you can see, that's pretty cool. And we can see that layer now, the layer, the little icons in the layers change. So create that cool glitch effect, apply it by Photoshop. Same type of thing. You know, we got brushes here, I can come in here and just start painting. You know, we can add solid colors. Got hue saturation. You got all your tools here, you got your filters. We can do, you know, Gaussian blur, noise, pixelate, render, sharpen, stylize. And it's got in built AI as well. You got all effects there and all the layers on the right hand side and you have full control over everything. You can right click close the menus. Same thing as everything is snappy. So you can snap menus in affinity. Same thing, you can bring menus out and you can snap everything stamp to the side and you have full control over that. So let's do a test. Let's try and make a logo. I'm gonna use the Illustrator for this. Beans burgers. Let's just do something really quick. Object. I'm gonna go envelope restore. Make it the warp. Maybe we're gonna warp it like this. 92, something like that. Tree bold we can duplicate. I'm gonna expand it and then let's do a fun gradient. I'm going to go to my gradient tool. I'm going to go object and go compound path. And then we'll do like 90 and. Or we could select this grading here. I don't know. Classic sunrise type of gradient. And then we go effect. Maybe we want to like roughen it up a bit. Made a quick logo. Now let's try and do it in affinity. So you can press Ctrl N and you've got a lot of templates here that you can just start off with. So you can just double click. It'll load in. If you press tab it will hide the menu. So similar shortcut to Adobe and press T for the type tool. And burgers. Make it big. Let's just do a different font and change line center with the line tool at the top. 22. Okay. Now with this we'll go vector, make new warp and we'll do arc horizontal and let's see if we can click on gradients and you can press Shift X similar to Illustrator. And we've got this gradient. I want to change it. Okay. I don't know why it's just going on the stroke. Well, I'll leave a gradient out and there you go. So you can make logos pretty, pretty easy overall, should you switch? It really depends. I feel like I personally like the ecosystem of Adobe. I've been using for so many years that I'm not going to start to learn a whole new program. And there's more support and forums and stuff out there for Adobe and I've done a lot of tutorials on them. So I'm more faster with Adobe. So I don't know. I don't have any plans to switch. But if you're someone maybe just new starting out, like why not try affinity? It has very similar tools. They'll probably update it in the future. They said there will be free updates. My thoughts. Yeah. Use what is best for your situation. Yeah. Hope you enjoy this comparison. Do you think it's going to be a industry changer and Adobe killer? Let me know your thoughts below.