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Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

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Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#61
post #3

I know nothing about Canva. As someone who has been a big fan of Affinity, their products and their pricing model, do I start freaking out now or can I just wait until the acquisition closes?

Yeah, as someone that's been very happy with the Affinity Suite and am scared of any major changes to them, this is pretty scary to me, as well. Reminds me of when Jasc was bought by Corel waaaay back in the day. Canva, if you're on HN, seeing how we're going to respond, please don't take away the stand-alone, non-subscription-based, affordable system that Affinity's products are. I love their products. I don't want…

Not only subscription, but what I find problematic about Adobe is bloatware.

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#62
post #31

This is bad news. The Affinity offers a genuine and very high class alternative to the Adobe suite. Its HDRI workflow is league ahead of anything else. As for Canva, all I can say is that I downgrade any student who makes their research slides using this dumb service. The slides are template-driven horror with each exported pdf slide being rasterized pngs: stupidly large files with text that is impossible to select a…

you don’t sound like a good educator

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#64

The link should probably be changed to official announcement.[1] That said, this is pretty dismaying. I've been using Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo for years. Their standalone and non-subscription based apps are perfect for my usecase. Compared to Adobe, they are a no-brainer. But, I don't think Canva would leave them be as is. Either next versions will be a subscription or a rug pull is coming for the existin…

Here's Serif/Affinity announcements: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/press/newsroom/canva-press-... https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/press/newsroom/canva-statem...

And here's few Affinity forum threads about the topic:

- https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/201405-que...

- https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/201403-can...

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#65

The link should probably be changed to official announcement.[1] That said, this is pretty dismaying. I've been using Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo for years. Their standalone and non-subscription based apps are perfect for my usecase. Compared to Adobe, they are a no-brainer. But, I don't think Canva would leave them be as is. Either next versions will be a subscription or a rug pull is coming for the existin…

of course. big corporations only think about profit. affinity as we know it are dead.

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#66
post #31

This is bad news. The Affinity offers a genuine and very high class alternative to the Adobe suite. Its HDRI workflow is league ahead of anything else. As for Canva, all I can say is that I downgrade any student who makes their research slides using this dumb service. The slides are template-driven horror with each exported pdf slide being rasterized pngs: stupidly large files with text that is impossible to select a…

I feel sorry for your students. PS Canva can export PDFs with vector graphics

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#67
post #38
post #31

This is bad news. The Affinity offers a genuine and very high class alternative to the Adobe suite. Its HDRI workflow is league ahead of anything else. As for Canva, all I can say is that I downgrade any student who makes their research slides using this dumb service. The slides are template-driven horror with each exported pdf slide being rasterized pngs: stupidly large files with text that is impossible to select a…

> I downgrade any student who makes their research slides using this dumb service I really hope you’re exaggerating

From another comment, he teaches design. As a designer, I find it’s legit to downgrade a design student for using Canva.

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#68
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, as someone that's been very happy with the Affinity Suite and am scared of any major changes to them, this is pretty scary to me, as well. Reminds me of when Jasc was bought by Corel waaaay back in the day. Canva, if you're on HN, seeing how we're going to respond, please don't take away the stand-alone, non-subscription-based, affordable system that Affinity's products are. I love their products. I don't want…

Not only subscription, but what I find problematic about Adobe is bloatware.

Exactly. Creative Cloud launcher digs its greedy fingers deep in your system, running hundreds of processes and constantly phoning home. It’s the model I point to when people say they want alternate app stores. I would much rather download apps individually from the App Store, or at worst a dmg.

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#69
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reason people get Affinity is because of the non subscription model. Adobe software is just better.

100% this. There is absolutely 0 reason to use Affinity of Adobe besides pricing model. They can play around with the numbers and try to have a cheaper subscription than Adobe, or maybe bundle it with the other software Canva offers, but ultimately I think switching to a subscription model will be the end of the Affinity software suite.

Have you tried Affinity? The software itself is a lot better than Adobe in many fundamentals. It’s faster, crashes less, supports a lot more file formats, connection between the individual programs is perfect, they add new quite innovative features at constant pace.

Adobe is pretty much legacy software that gets close to zero development, its ridden with bugs that will be never fixed.

The reason why everyone hates them is that last non subscription version Adobe CS6 from more than 10 years ago is pretty much the same thing what you get now even though users have been screaming for features and bugfixes. Adobe can have their cake and eat it too.

Re: Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

#70
Based on last published accounts (2022) Serif is very profitable and growing strongly: revenue £31.2m (up from £23.4m) and operating profits £17.9m (up from £14.4m). So it doesn't seem like they needed to sell.

Of course it is still small in the scheme of things - Canva seems to have revenue of c$2bn - and seems to be owned by three individuals in their 50s so one can probably understand why they wanted to to sell.

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