Canva has taken a significant step toward attracting design professionals this week, acquiring Serif, makers of the Affinity suite of products. This includes Affinity Publisher (an InDesign competitor), Photo (a Photoshop competitor), and Designer (an Illustrator competitor).
The Affinity products have been increasingly attractive in recent years as their feature sets have matured, and because they have been sold at low price points with perpetual licensing, rather than forcing users into a subscription model. By contrast, Canva is a subscription-based service, with a single-user Pro license costing $120 per year. In their official statement on the acquisition, Serif claims there are no plans to extend the subscription model to the Affinity apps.
The acquisition makes sense because both companies have long emphasized the democratization of design tools by making them available to the largest number of people possible at reasonable costs. A Universal License to all three Affinity apps is currently on sale for $115 (regular price $165). Furthermore, each company has strengths in areas the other lacks. Canva is very strong in AI and web services. And Affinity offers pro-level tools, desktop and iPad apps, and an extensive user base of creatives.
However, both companies have been criticized for not supporting several key technologies that the professional design community requires:
- Extensibility: One of Adobe’s key strengths over the past 30 years has been the support of third-party developers building tools and workflows to automate production. Scripters, plug-in and add-on developers, and other IT providers have built robust ecosystems for designers and organizations.
- Accessibility: To date, neither Canva nor Affinity have released core accessibility features. This is a major problem for users, who are increasingly required by government regulations to build accessible documents.
- Prepress: Adobe basically invented prepress and print-ready workflows. As much as some want to believe that “print is dead,” that is far from true. It’s unclear whether Canva recognizes this.
- Server Solutions: Large scale publishing increasingly relies on template-driven, automated document construction, often run on servers, rather than on a desktop or laptop or phone.
It remains to be seen whether Canva will be able to—or is even interested in—developing their tools in these areas. Nevertheless, the acquisition of the Affinity suite should be seen as a “shot across the bow” of Adobe’s Creative Cloud battleship.
Will Adobe respond by doubling down on Adobe Express, their AI-based design-for-everyone service? Or will they devote more resources toward extending their dominance in pro-level tools for the most discerning of designers? Stay tuned.
This article was last modified on March 27, 2024
This article was first published on March 26, 2024
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