In October 2025, Canva made Affinity free. Not free with limitations, not free for students. Free for anyone who downloads it, with the full professional feature set intact. Over a million people signed up in the first four days. The design industry's reaction was immediate and split almost exactly in half between genuine excitement and deep suspicion about what comes next.
The suspicion is reasonable. Canva acquired Serif, the UK studio behind Affinity, in 2024 for around $580 million. Canva's business model is subscription-based. History is full of acquisitions where free things became paid things after the user base was large enough. The community remembers what happened to other tools. Canva published a pledge and a FAQ addressing this directly, and the chief product officer clarified that Affinity files will not be used to train AI models. These are meaningful commitments. They're also just words.
Setting aside the strategic uncertainty: what you get for free is substantial. Affinity V3 unifies what were previously three separate applications, Designer for vector work, Photo for raster and raw editing, and Publisher for page layout, into a single app with three studios you switch between. The integration is genuine. You can move between a vector illustration and photo compositing work without exporting or converting. CMYK, spot colors, and ICC color profile support mean it's actually usable for print production, which most design software nominally supports but handles poorly.
The professional features that Adobe charges hundreds per year for are present and functional. Non-destructive editing across raster and vector. Live blending and adjustment layers. Multi-page documents with master pages. Professional typography. The app works offline, with no phone-home requirement. Files are yours locally.
AI is available as an optional add-on through Canva Premium. This is worth noting because it keeps the free product genuinely clean. The free version doesn't nag you toward AI features or lock core functionality behind them. If you want Canva's AI tools, you pay for Canva. If you don't, you don't, and Affinity continues to work as a professional design application.
The gaps compared to Adobe are real but narrowing. The plugin and extension ecosystem is smaller. Third-party integrations are fewer. Some workflows that work in Photoshop through years of accumulated features aren't replicated. For designers who spend most of their time in Illustrator doing vector work or in Affinity Designer's equivalent, the gap is small enough to not matter in practice. For motion, video, or 3D work, Adobe still has no real competition from Affinity.
For the freelancer or studio running on tight margins, or for anyone who makes a reasonable living but resents the perpetual cost of Adobe's Creative Cloud subscription, Affinity V3 is worth taking seriously. It's free. The core product is professionally credible. Whether Canva's intentions will hold over time is unknowable right now, but the software itself exists and works.
The honest advice is to try it on a real project, keep your files in a format you can open elsewhere, and make a judgment in a year based on whether the free terms have changed. The tool earns its evaluation on its own merits. The corporate situation around it warrants watching.
Latest Updates
Affinity 3.1: Convert to Curves, Live Tone Blend Groups, Light UI
First meaningful update since Canva relaunched the suite for free. Convert to Curves turns pixel selections into editable vectors, Live Tone Blend Groups add non-destructive compositing, and Light UI mode is finally available.
In October 2025, Canva made Affinity free. Not free with limitations, not free for students. Free for anyone who downloads it, with the full professional feature set intact. Over a million people signed up in the first four days. The design industry's reaction was immediate and split almost exactly in half between genuine excitement and deep suspicion about what comes next.
The suspicion is reasonable. Canva acquired Serif, the UK studio behind Affinity, in 2024 for around $580 million. Canva's business model is subscription-based. History is full of acquisitions where free things became paid things after the user base was large enough. The community remembers what happened to other tools. Canva published a pledge and a FAQ addressing this directly, and the chief product officer clarified that Affinity files will not be used to train AI models. These are meaningful commitments. They're also just words.
Setting aside the strategic uncertainty: what you get for free is substantial. Affinity V3 unifies what were previously three separate applications, Designer for vector work, Photo for raster and raw editing, and Publisher for page layout, into a single app with three studios you switch between. The integration is genuine. You can move between a vector illustration and photo compositing work without exporting or converting. CMYK, spot colors, and ICC color profile support mean it's actually usable for print production, which most design software nominally supports but handles poorly.
The professional features that Adobe charges hundreds per year for are present and functional. Non-destructive editing across raster and vector. Live blending and adjustment layers. Multi-page documents with master pages. Professional typography. The app works offline, with no phone-home requirement. Files are yours locally.
AI is available as an optional add-on through Canva Premium. This is worth noting because it keeps the free product genuinely clean. The free version doesn't nag you toward AI features or lock core functionality behind them. If you want Canva's AI tools, you pay for Canva. If you don't, you don't, and Affinity continues to work as a professional design application.
The gaps compared to Adobe are real but narrowing. The plugin and extension ecosystem is smaller. Third-party integrations are fewer. Some workflows that work in Photoshop through years of accumulated features aren't replicated. For designers who spend most of their time in Illustrator doing vector work or in Affinity Designer's equivalent, the gap is small enough to not matter in practice. For motion, video, or 3D work, Adobe still has no real competition from Affinity.
For the freelancer or studio running on tight margins, or for anyone who makes a reasonable living but resents the perpetual cost of Adobe's Creative Cloud subscription, Affinity V3 is worth taking seriously. It's free. The core product is professionally credible. Whether Canva's intentions will hold over time is unknowable right now, but the software itself exists and works.
The honest advice is to try it on a real project, keep your files in a format you can open elsewhere, and make a judgment in a year based on whether the free terms have changed. The tool earns its evaluation on its own merits. The corporate situation around it warrants watching.
Latest Updates
Affinity 3.1: Convert to Curves, Live Tone Blend Groups, Light UI
First meaningful update since Canva relaunched the suite for free. Convert to Curves turns pixel selections into editable vectors, Live Tone Blend Groups add non-destructive compositing, and Light UI mode is finally available.