The topic of I switched from Adobe to Affinity and found 5 things it actually does better is currently the subject of lively debate — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
This is taking place in a dynamic environment: companies’ decisions and competitors’ reactions can quickly change the picture.
Affinity has been the obvious answer to Adobe pricing for long enough that it barely needs defending anymore, and it probably doesn’t need an introduction at this point. It got even harder to argue against when Canva made the whole suite free last year. And still, the majority of Affinity content reads the same way – lots of praise, followed by the gentle reminder that Adobe is still the real thing. The implication is that Affinity is good enough, not that it’s better. And to be completely fair, that is true a lot of the time.
But I think it’s more so the case that Affinity is just a different tool rather than an Adobe downgrade. “Good enough” undersells it in some areas, and those areas are worth talking about. Not in the vague “the interface is more intuitive” way, but in concrete, feature-level ways where Affinity has built something Adobe hasn’t, or has solved something Adobe has been awkward about for years.
The new Affinity app is Photo, Designer, and Publisher collapsed into one – the Pixel workspace, the Vector workspace, and the Layout workspace sharing a file format and living in the same environment. What makes this more than just a packaging decision is something called StudioLink, which lets you move between those workspaces without leaving your document.
In practice, say you’re doing layout work and you want to do some detailed retouching on a placed image. You click into the Pixel workspace, make the edit, and it shows up in your layout in real-time. You don’t have to open a separate app or set up any type of workaround. In InDesign that whole sequence is a multi-step detour that designers have been complaining about for years – you leave the app, edit elsewhere, and have to come back. Affinity just doesn’t have that detour, so you can combine raster and vector work in the same document, then get it ready for print or publishing, all without app-hopping.
I’ve used Photoshop’s History Brush a couple of times but honestly, I usually forgot it’s there because it requires extra steps that aren’t obvious unless you know to look for it. You have to click the little source box next to a specific history state, or create a named snapshot first.I genuinely think a lot of people just don’t know it’s there.
In Affinity, the Undo Brush has a small icon sitting right next to every single action in the history panel. Click whichever state you want to paint back from, pick up the brush, go. The capability is the same – you’re painting a previous history state back onto specific areas – but the affordance is completely different. It’s more visible and next to every step, so you don’t have to know it exists ahead of time.
Frequency separation is a retouching technique portrait photographers reach for constantly. The idea is splitting an image into two layers – one holding texture detail and one holding tone and color. So you can fix blotchy skin or uneven tones without wiping out the pores and fine detail underneath. When it’s done well, the retouch is invisible.
Photoshop still doesn’t have a native filter for it. You set up the stack manually (duplicate layers, apply blur, set the right blend mode, group it correctly) or download an action someone else made and run that instead. Affinity has it under Filters, one click, dialog opens with a live preview, adjust your radius, pick your blur method, apply, and your two layers are there. For something this common in professional retouching workflows, the fact that Adobe has never shipped it natively while Affinity just has it sitting in the menu is actually quite surprising.
Liquify is one of those tools where performance really matters. You’re dragging pixels in real time – warping an object’s edges, adjusting fabric, nudging things back into shape. And any lag between the brush and what’s happening on screen costs you control. Photoshop has improved here but it’s carrying 35 years of accumulated legacy code, and it still offloads more to the CPU than it should for something this hands-on.
Affinity was built with end-to-end GPU acceleration from the ground up, and Liquify is one of the places where that shows. It’s consistently smoother and more responsive, especially on mid-range hardware. There’s also the non-destructive side of it – Affinity’s Liquify runs as its own Persona, so the mesh distortions aren’t baked into the image. You can go back, adjust them, or remove them entirely. Getting that kind of flexibility in Photoshop requires Smart Object conversion first, which is another deliberate step I’d rather skip. The gap has narrowed as Adobe’s improved its GPU handling, so this isn’t a knockout, just an edge.
Isometric illustration – the flat-but-3D style you see everywhere in app store screenshots, tech explainers, and icon sets – requires your shapes and your grid to be aligned, or you spend the whole time manually correcting angles on every element. Illustrator’s grid system only does horizontal and vertical lines and you can’t easily change the grid angle. Which means isometric work in Illustrator is a lot of scale-shear-rotate sequences done by hand, or you’re buying a third-party plugin to fill the gap.
Affinity’s Vector workspace has a dedicated isometric panel built in. Set up the grid, select which plane you’re drawing on – front, side, top – and the app handles the geometry. Shapes snap directly to the isometric plane you selected. The setup takes about a minute.
Adobe still wins in plenty of areas – the plugin ecosystem, collaboration features, certain specialized tools – and I’m not trying to argue anyone off a subscription they actually need. But the assumption that Affinity is where you go to save money and accept less just doesn’t hold up across the board. Some of this stuff Affinity handles better because it was built without the weight of legacy decisions. Some of it Adobe has just never prioritized.
Why it matters
News like this often changes audience expectations and competitors’ plans.
When one player makes a move, others usually react — it is worth reading the event in context.
What to look out for next
The full picture will become clear in time, but the headline already shows the dynamics of the industry.
Further statements and user reactions will add to the story.