Canva has acquired Affinity in an effort to compete with Adobe

> 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.

I disagree with all your points.

I've been using Adobe for 20 years and Affinity Design and Photo since they released in 2013 or so.

Adobe apps are faster on Apple Silicon than Affinity.

I haven't experienced a crash in years with Adobe and I have experienced crashes with Affinity quite recently.

Adobe has complete integration between programs. Eg: You can use AE timelines into Premiere, import Photoshop files into AE, edit vector objects from Photoshop in Illustrator, etc.

Affinity innovation pace is just glacial. V2 introduced some new features but it Serif what... like 10 years? And personally I didn't see any value in the new features. Design is still missing a lot from Illustrator.

Increasingly I'm looking at hoarding "feature-complete" applications that work fine totally offline and don't need updates. Things like text editors, GIMP, Inkscape, Foobar2000, IrfanView, file manager apps.

The latter is unlikely. The developers are active on the Affinity messageboards, I don't recall them ever having any interest in building web apps. Just creating a "good enough" cross-platform alternative to Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator is more than a full-time job already.

They don’t need to do that. First, Adobe doesn’t see Affinity as meaningful competition. Adobe sees Figma and Canva (and Blackmagic and Avid in the NLE space) as competition, but a company doing £30m a year in revenue is barely a blip on their radar (Adobe did nearly $20b in revenue in FY23).

Second, for the lowend market that Affinity serves, Adobe Express (its Canva compete) and Photoshop Express ($35 a year) are going to be enough for most of the core users. And Canva has quickly taken on the role for the low cost design tool of choice for normies who want to collaborate. I don’t use it for anything fancy, but I am not going to lie and say it isn’t better/faster at making YouTube thumbnails than basically anything else. Canva is the competitor, not Affinity. And Canva is being smart by buying a tool/team with a lot of users that they have the opportunity to now integrate with Canva. Will that integration be any good? I don’t know. But the leading web tool now has a native app component.

But make no mistake, Adobe has zero incentive to lower its prices for its core products at this time (the web products are a different story). The challenge it faces is when users at scale opt for similarly priced alternatives (Figma over XD, Canva over Adobe Express), not the middling number of users (and I count myself as one of them, but I’m just being honest) that pay for Affinity because it is a nice low cost tool.

I cannot imagine anyone who has a real business need for Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign and has to collaborate with others (and that part is key; if you’re a solo designer who never has to share files with others, that’s great but we’re not the target audience for Adobe anyway and we probably haven’t been since the early 1990s) choosing anything other than Adobe. The $720 a year or whatever it has gone up to is just the price of doing business.

Where Adobe faces challenges is from the people who don’t need to use Illustrator, InDesign or Photoshop for their work but have very strong web-based competition for specific tools. The UX teams that are standardized on Figma, even if they got XD as part of Creative Cloud, who don’t use Photoshop or Illustrator or InDesign, would rather pay the $45 or $75 a month to Figma. And the marketing teams that need to make graphics for social media or newsletters or whatever, would often rather pay $120 per seat for Canva than for Adobe Express (tho my recent experiments with Express show that it is getting very close to Canva in terms of capabilities and is better in some instances, Canva is prob better for that target audience, however). That’s the competition, not the offline design tools.

Krita defaults to a "Paint Layer" behaving very like Photoshop; it can also add "Vector Layers" that behave like Illustrator. I think it is fair to say it replaces both for a lot of use cases. GIMP is much closer to just Photoshop (and say Inkscape is much more only Illustrator).