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TECHNOLOGY REPORT

Canva’s free Affinity App

shakes up design market

ne can imagine Adobe execs choking on
their morning latte extra-smoothies,
By comparison, Adobe’s equivalent print-focused
Canva really set the O year.
because this is aimed straight at the design-
apps cost around £767 per year as separate subscriptions
cat among the for-print capabilities of the industry-domi- for InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop. This makes
pigeons in October, nating but decidedly not-free Adobe paying for the vastly larger Creative Cloud bundle a
Creative Cloud: InDesign, Photoshop and
when it introduced a Illustrator. complete no-brainer, as for £30 more it provides all the
industry standard video editors, web design, prototyp-
free, all-in-one ver- In a video released by Canva’s co-founder and chief ing platforms and so on. Adobe’s apps now include
sion of its Affinity pro- product officer, Cameron Adams, he stresses that: extensive and ever- expanding AI toolkits, though some
fessional design and “There is no catch. We don’t sell your data, we don’t incur charges once the relatively generous bundled quo-
imaging suite along- train AI systems, we don’t monetise your creativity tas are exceeded.
behind the scenes.” He adds: “The Affinity App, with all
side its established its professional features and upgrades, will be free for- Adobe’s near-monopoly and its consequences
and highly popular ever.” Since first launching Illustrator in 1987, Adobe has
web design services. The commercial logic, he said, is that professional come to dominate professional creative production in
designers lead visual workflows. If design starts in print, web and video. Growth came via both in-house
Affinity, downstream teams may naturally move into development and strategic acquisitions that took com-
Words by Canva’s online platform for collaboration, driving wider petitors off the table, notably Aldus and Macromedia.
Simon Eccles adoption. Although alternatives still exist, such as Corel or Quark,
However, ‘free’ is relative. The standard Affinity App none approach Adobe’s market presence.
is said to be fully-featured for professional work to out- This dominance enabled Adobe to move to subscrip-
put, but its AI-driven productivity tools are paywalled tion-only licensing and upgrade at its own pace, no
behind Canva’s subscription tiers, starting at £100 per longer constrained by the need to sell perpetual

26 PrintWeek MENA February 2026 www.printweekmena.com