Affinity vs Inkscape
Both are bought outright, both sit in design, and both are bought by people leaving Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Creative Cloud. Here is what actually differs — including what each price does not buy.
The short answer
- Inkscape has the cleaner licence: free and open source, against free for Affinity.
- Affinity needs an account with the developer; Inkscape does not.
Side by side
 AffinityFreeFree |  InkscapeFreeOpen source | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | the whole design suite, now free for individuals | SVG-native vector editor with no licence to buy at all |
| Price | Free | Free |
| Licence | Free | Free and open source |
| What you get | No licence to buy. | No licence to buy, and the source is public. |
| The catch | Free, but the download runs through a Canva account and the AI tools need a paid Canva plan | The macOS build is a GTK port — menus, shortcuts and dialogs don't behave like a Mac app |
| Macs per licence | not established | not established |
| Account required | yes | no |
| Works offline | partly | yes |
| Apple Silicon | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| On Setapp | No | No |
| Minimum macOS | not established | not established |
| App Store rating | not established | not established |
| Last updated | not established | not established |
| Price checked | 2026-09-22 | 2026-09-22 |
Apple’s public API reports a rating for only a small minority of Mac apps, and returns zero for most of the rest even when the store page plainly shows reviews. A blank here means we could not read a number, never that an app is unrated or disliked.
In their own right
Affinity
The former Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher merged into one app with vector, pixel and page layout in a single document, and given away to individuals by Canva.
Inkscape
A long-running free vector graphics editor with node editing, live path effects, boolean operations, bitmap tracing and a document model that is plain SVG all the way down.