Design, graphics & illustration
Affinity is what used to be Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher. Canva bought Serif, merged the three into a single app in late 2025 and made it free for individuals, which is the largest thing to happen to buy-once Mac design software in years.
The app is still the professional one. Real CMYK and spot colour, bleed and press-ready PDF export, PSD and AI import, linked resources, and a switch between vector, pixel and layout work inside one document instead of three files passed between three programs. Nothing is watermarked, nothing is size-capped, and there is no export tier to unlock.
What you trade is control of the terms. The download goes through Canva sign-in, the AI features are reserved for people already paying Canva, and a company that gave something away can decide otherwise — the paid v2 licences are already off sale. That is not a reason to avoid it, but it is a reason to keep your masters in PDF, TIFF, PSD or SVG rather than trusting a decade of work to one proprietary format.
If you are a designer or small studio paying Adobe monthly for Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, this is the first genuinely serious reason in years to cancel. If you crop holiday photos twice a year, Preview already handles that and the download is not worth the account.
ImageOptim
Inkscape
Krita
Aseprite