Canva’s new free Affinity app wants to overwhelm Adobe’s flagship products
By Jesus Diaz | Published: 2025-10-30 17:05:00 | Source: Fast Company – co-design
Last year, Canva reshaped its user experience and tools in a full-frontal attack on the productivity and enterprise markets now dominated by Microsoft Office and Google Workspace. Now the Australian company is turning to Adobe.
Affinity — which was acquired by British company Canva in 2024 — is launching with a new app that aims to take Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign by storm with a simple proposition: If you’re a professional designer, here’s an all-in-one photo editing, vector illustration, and page layout studio seamlessly integrated into a single app, with a feature set similar to Adobe’s apps and a fully customizable user interface. Free.
you know, free free. “Free forever,” Cameron Adams, co-founder and chief product officer at Canva, told me in a video interview. Free as in not paying a dime forever (allegedly) instead of up to $70 per month that Adobe charges for its full Creative Cloud subscription.
If the new Affinity delivers on its promise — and from what I’ve seen, it may already do that and more — it’ll be hard to ignore for any Adobe Creative Cloud user, even if they’re fully invested in the company’s apps.
Product employee Cameron Adams
(Image: Canva)
When Canva bought Affinity, it kept the British company independent and pumped the capital needed to revamp Affinity’s suite of apps into one of Adobe’s true competitors. As Adams told me, the move was born out of a radical rethinking of the entire creative world. “We really look at the entire design ecosystem as one big entity,” he says. “It’s not about breaking up anymore.” It’s not about the professionals on the one hand, and the non-professionals on the other. It’s really about your whole team working together
The company also saw opportunity in the feedback it was receiving from the creative community, Adams says They are tired of “increases in pricing models, lack of transparency, feeling like they are not being listened to, and a lack of creativity in the tools they have been using for too long.”
Break down workflow walls
For Affinity CEO Ashley Hewson, this launch fulfills a vision his team has had for a long time: finally consolidating the separate apps for Affinity Designer, Photo, and Publisher into one unified experience. “This is what we were building — a completely new app,” he says.
Simply called Affinity, it organizes its massive power into dedicated ‘studios’ – Vector, Pixel, and Layout – which you can switch between instantly within the same window, using the button bar switch in the top-left corner of the UI. This is similar to other apps like DaVinci Resolve, which goes from editing to color correction, automatically transforming the interface to show you the tools you need at each stage without having to go to a new app, import a file, save it, and return to the previous tool.
(Photo: Amber Pollack Photography Canvas)
With Affinity, the canvas, layers, and everything else remains as you switch from bitmap to vector to layout and back. This isn’t just about comfort; It’s about eliminating those crazy workflow interruptions that kill creativity.
“Previously, you would have to change the application to do some more advanced types of design work, and that always meant exporting that type, and bringing it into a different application,” Hewson explains. “Now, I can just go into Vector Studio if I want to do any of this work.”
Thanks to full GPU acceleration, everything becomes vivid and non-destructive, from applying a Gaussian blur to a vector object to drawing a pixel-based mask on a filter effect. As Hewson showed me, you can adjust the hue, distort text, or clear your entire editing history without any delay. He claims that even with thousands of layers. “I keep saying it, but it’s very important because obviously it’s kind of what competitors don’t do,” he says with a hint of pride.
Custom interface
In the new Affinity, you can customize the user interface any way you want. Hewson showed me how users can create their own “perfect studio,” a customized workspace that mixes and matches tools from any of the core disciplines. “Let’s say your workflow mostly involves raster brushes, vector tools, and maybe some layout tools as well,” Hewson says. “What you can do is actually create your own studio.”
This is a level of customization that goes beyond simply rearranging a few panels. You can create a simple UI for logo design, a powerful UI for image overlay, and another for post layout. These custom studios can then be saved and shared, creating a new way for teams to standardize workflows.
It’s an attractive proposition, since every designer works differently. It’s also a good solution against the one-size-fits-all that has plagued professional creative software for years. The new Affinity tool gives you the power to create the exact tool you need and hide the rest.
“Craft on a large scale.”
So, how can a free professional tool make good business sense for Canva? Lee Adams explains it with a simple motto: “Craftsmanship and volume.” Sophisticated, pixel-perfect “craftsmanship” happens in Affinity Studio. “Scale” — where that craft is used to create massive amounts of content — happens at Canva. By making the craft tool free, Canva is betting on its ability to grow the entire design ecosystem.€‹
The strategy is to build a frictionless bridge between these two worlds. For enterprise teams, this is the endgame. “Super designers or an in-house creative team will use Affinity to create all their brand assets and templates,” explains Hewson. “But then they upload all of that into Canva seamlessly so the rest of the teams within the company, who aren’t skilled designers, can expand on that.”
Artificial intelligence question
Hewson says that unlike Adobe’s tools, the new Affinity remains a pure, pure artisanal tool with no generative AI except to enhance existing tools like image scaling, which run on-device. However, for those who want to edit using AI, this is available through the new dedicated “Canva AI Studio” panel. In the application.
This is an optional, subscription-based tier. As he explains, you need a Canva Premium plan, and the AI features use the same credit pool as your main Canva account. Most importantly, optionality respects designers who resent paying for AI they don’t want or don’t trust. You can play the entire free trial without touching it (or taking it out of the UI entirely). Generative features, such as Genetic fill, run on cloud servers using models from Leonardo, an AI company acquired by Canva in 2024.
It’s a good approach that goes against Adobe’s overall AI strategy. For professionals who are tired of Adobe feeding them generated AI in their subscriptions, Canva’s Subscription Assistant option will be attractive.
Combined with a good toolset (they have yet to test this one) and zero pricing, Canva may be launching a philosophical and strategic H-bomb at one of its biggest competitors. If it succeeds, the creative world is about to feel a shock that could shatter Adobe’s decades-old foundations.
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(Tags for translation)Canva
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