An affinity for Affinity

04 Feb 2026 - An update to this post: Mike Chambers of Adobe shared on Reddit that Adobe Animate will instead be in "maintenance mode", meaning it will be available to both new & existing users, at least for the immediate future. Original post below.

Beginning March 1st of this year, Adobe will no longer make it possible to download Adobe Animate. Next year, there will be no technical support (meaning service + software updates with security/bug fixes). If you're a big-boy business/enterprise customer of Adobe, you have three years as of writing to redownload the program + download your own creations from the cloud. For the rest of us common creative folk, when March eventually comes around:

It's over

A friend on social media pointed out a very funny thing about this entire situation: If you bought Adobe's Creative Suite 6 all the way back in 2012, you could still use Flash Professional CS6. But if you started paying for Adobe's Creative Cloud subscription service in 2013, after March 2027 there will be no way for you to run Adobe Animate (at least, legally). You'd also had paid thousands of dollars to Adobe by now (and don't forget that from the very start it was made clear that you do not, and will never own any piece of software through Creative Cloud).

You don't have to keep living like this

Back in the old days (basically like around 2015 or something like that) someone tight on a budget who needed access to competent & capable creative software had pretty much one option: taking a gamble on cracked Adobe software downloaded from mysterious places on the internet (that weren't in English most of the time). The more ethical, free and/or open source alternatives just... weren't quite there yet. Internet people would have thrown digital tomatoes at you if you ever suggested GIMP as a Photoshop alternative.

Fast forward a few U.S. presidencies later, and the landscape has changed significantly. While piracy is still been an option (and will possibly become more popular as Adobe makes even more ridiculous business decisions...), free and/or open source alternatives have reached a point where they are as capable as Adobe's offerings, with some providing more lovely quality-of-life features and an overall better experience.

Presenting Affinity

Affinity is not an open-source program. It is also developed by Serif, who has been owned by Canva since 2024, a company that has been expanding into and promoting (brace yourself) AI-powered "creativity tools", with some of these "tools" being integrated into Affinity itself. During the Canva takeover, many creatives that had paid for the former Affinity suite (Photo, Designer, and Publisher) became worried that Serif would go the same direction as Adobe, possibly moving into an ensh*ttified, AI-ridden, subscription-based model.

To everyone's surprise: things went in the complete opposite direction.

1: THEY MADE AN EVEN BETTER PROGRAM

The new Affinity has taken all three of the core Affinity applications - Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, and Affinity Publisher - then combined them into the new Affinity app, each now taking the form of "studios". There's no need to go to a different app if you need to get Designer or Publisher specific work done. Just click on the "Vector" or "Layout" studios at the top left to switch, and you'll be able to put the right tools for the job to work.

For Adobe users unfamiliar with the former Affinity suite - imagine if Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign had a three- I mean.. combined.. somehow.. to make one amazing app. I've come to appreciate it, and wonder why Adobe hasn't tried doing something like this a long time ago. Companies love combininations. Maybe they just wanted more to sell?

2: IT'S FREE, NO CATCH (UNLESS YOU LOVE AI)

And not in a creepy way. Okay, sure, you need to make a Canva account in order to download + activate it, but that's pretty much it. Your work stays on your machine by default, and if you're in the anti-(brace yourself) AI camp, the "slop" features are kept away in another studio, and require a paid Canva subcription if you actually want to use them (You can also just turn that studio off, or delete it altogether!).

Other than that, there are very few limitations, and for most of what I do, there has never been a single moment where these limitations impeded my work. For most things that are free nowadays, you are the product. Here... somehow it doesn't feel that way.

3: SWITCH FROM ADOBE AT ANY TIME (LIKE, RIGHT NOW)

If you're coming from Adobe, you can just switch.. like.. whenever you want to. Affinity is compatible with your .PSDs, .AIs, and much more. I was in the middle of a project when I had switched from Photoshop to Affinity, and everything that I've done in Photoshop just transfers beautifully to Affinity and looks just as good. I even noticed it was smoother and less laggy working on some files compared to Photoshop.

Anything you can do on Photoshop, you could do here - and possibly better. There's a lot to love while using Affinity, and there are so much little things that once you learn them, just make you wish that you'd have ditched Adobe a long time ago. It's hard to put all of it into words. I think it's better if you tried yourself.

(I was not paid or compensated in any way by Serif or Canva. All opinions are my own.)