Why I recommend the Affinity Creative Suite to my clients

Please Note: The opinions expressed in this article are purely my own – I have not received any commissions or sponsorships for publishing the following content or links.

There’s a new kid on the block in the professional design software department, and I’m choosing to write about them today because they’ve not only won me over and become my creative software of choice as a professional designer, but I think they might be worth checking out for my small business client community as well.

There are no shortage of creative software options for non-design-professionals these days, and while I know many of my clients are enjoying using Canva as a user-friendly online solution for performing basic design tasks, if you find yourself needing to edit professional design files from an external designer (like me), or needing to create more sophisticated designs in-house, Affinity’s Creative Suite provides a neat alternative to the software provided by industry heavyweight Adobe.

Here’s why I've started to recommend the Affinity Creative Suite to my small business clients in 2024:

Affordability

Affinity offers an economical perpetual licence model that makes it affordable to even the smallest of small businesses. This pricing model means that once you've purchased the software licence, you own it for life, and are entitled to all of the updates (and there are many) that it receives during its lifespan. Suffice to say, this is a much more economical choice than Adobe’s hefty subscription model pricing for its Creative Cloud software.

Simplicity

For non-design-professionals, professional design software can be overwhelmingly complex and seem a little unwieldy at times, especially when you only really need to understand a very small portion of the tools and functions available to you for your use purposes.

Affinity's apps offer a simplified user interface that takes things back to basics, whilst allowing you to see the effects of changes you’re considering making in real-time on the canvas, which is incredibly handy for beginners and experienced designers alike.

Non-design-professionals will also enjoy the way Affinity handles back-stepping and the all-important 'undo timeline', as we all know being creative involves a lot of back tracking at times!

‍Affinity Designer (the Adobe Illustrator equivalent) and Affinity Photo (the Adobe Photoshop equivalent), both include a handy feature where you can save 'Snapshots' of your file at certain moments in time so you can easily compare alternate versions, and you can even access multiple past timelines of your work with a few clicks.

These features encourage spontaneous creative experimentation without the fear of ruining things – another great feature for beginners and advanced users alike, which was absolutely mind-blowing to me during my transition to Affinity's apps.

Streamlining

Affinity’s 'Studio Link' feature allows you to jump between the feature sets of Designer, Photo and Publisher (the Adobe InDesign equivalent) with the click of a button, meaning that you can edit copy for a multi-page document one moment, and then make high-level photographic adjustments to an image placed within that document the next, without jumping between different software windows.

This way of working helps keep things simple – you don't have to understand the difference between raster and vector editing, because with Affinity, the boundaries between the two have been reduced and certain limitations have been removed. It’s far more intuitive for the lay-person to get to grips with, which means you’ll spend less time swapping windows and waiting for files to load, and more time adjusting and experimenting with your creative ideas in-situ.

Summary

With an affordable pricing model that will undoubtedly appeal to small businesses, a simple interface, and an innovate and streamlined user experience that removes traditional boundaries between raster and vector work, Affinity has developed a creative software suite that is approachable and accessible for a less experienced audience, without sacrificing on performance or functionality.

Having recently been purchased by Canva, this is a really interesting time for Affinity, as it could potentially now have the funding to start tightening up some of its software's less polished areas. I can confidently say that I've put this software well and truly through its paces, and while it isn't without its drawbacks – there are some painful bugs still to be found – Affinity has continued to improve, patch and innovate to the point where I can't help but recommend this software suite to even the more advanced members of my small business client community.