A message to our amazing Affinity community

As of today (26 March 2024) Affinity is part of the Canva family. Canva has acquired Serif, the company behind the Affinity suite of professional creative software.

From the very early days of developing Affinity, our aim has always been to empower the world to design with incredibly powerful professional creative tools which do not cost a fortune. We are really proud of everything we have achieved so far, with more than three million designers around the world using our apps.

We have to say that selling Serif was not on our minds at all, but when Canva contacted us (only a couple of months ago!) there was something about it which just felt right. Product-wise it is a great fit as Canva do not have professional design tools as part of their offering, and we do not have any cloud or collaboration as part of ours. But more than that, our overall philosophies align so well and Canva’s culture (despite being a much larger company than us) is very similar.

We do believe that together we can produce the world’s most comprehensive visual communications offering, while at the same continuing to serve our existing creative professional community with more rapid development of our apps.

Since our inception, both of our companies have shared the same mission and vision. We were both founded with the belief that design shouldn’t be limited to those who can afford complex software.

Our goal has been to make the highest quality design tools available to the largest number of people with fair, transparent and affordable pricing at our core. By joining forces, we’re looking forward to accelerating this shared vision. As part of that, we’ve made Four Pledges to the Affinity community.

Affinity and Canva share a commitment to making design fairer and more accessible. For Canva, this has meant making its core product available for free to millions of people across the globe. And for Affinity, this has meant a fairly priced perpetual license model. We know this model has been a key part of the Affinity offering and we are committed to continue to offer perpetual licences in the future as one of our Four Pledges to the Affinity community.

If we do offer a subscription, it will only ever be as an option alongside the perpetual model, for those who prefer it. This fits with enabling Canva users to start adopting Affinity. It could also allow us to offer Affinity users a way to scale their workflows using Canva as a platform to share and collaborate on their Affinity assets, if they choose to.

We believe Affinity is the highest-quality professional-grade design suite on the market. It’s non-destructive, superfast, and easy to use. As such, we want to reassure you that Affinity is here to stay – and will only get better.

In fact, as one of our Four Pledges to the Affinity community, we’re committed to using our shared resources to continue expanding Affinity’s products through further investment in Affinity as a standalone product suite.

Absolutely! We’re looking forward to accelerating the rollout of highly requested features such as variable font support, blend and width tools, auto object selection, multi-page spreads, ePub export and much more.

These additions will further cement Affinity as the best advanced design suite on the market and will be released over the coming year as free updates to V2.

We plan to start the beta of version 2.5 in the next month or so – if you would like to get involved in that you can sign up to our beta program.

Yes, it’s likely there will be some integration between Affinity and Canva in the future, particularly in consideration of the workflows of enterprise customers. Creative and brand management teams need professional tools to create and edit assets, images, icons, logos and other elements - and Affinity apps are the perfect choice for that.

Being able to quickly sync those assets to Canva for the wider organisation to easily use within their documents, presentations, whiteboards and other visual communication materials would make a lot of sense.

Any integrations we do will be done using additional resource from Canva and will not get in the way of us continuing to develop the features and improvements you want to the Affinity apps.

Many of you would like to see a way to easily sync your Affinity documents and assets to all your devices, and also to be able to share and collaborate on your Affinity files. For us to build the infrastructure required for this was always going to be challenging, but it’s now certainly achievable via Canva’s platform.

Very early days and we don’t have a specific plan, but the main thing to say is that this is now certainly a possibility in the future!

No, your Affinity account remains the same and our website will continue to sell our apps and add-ons. You can continue to manage your purchases and downloads in the same way you always have.

As for individual users, you can expect to benefit from continued updates to your apps including many new features and improvements. If your school, university or business also uses Canva you will additionally benefit from some of the future integrations mentioned above between our platforms.

In fact Canva, which has pledged 30% of its value as a company towards doing good in the world through its two-step plan, offers premium plans at no cost to schools and nonprofits all over the world. More than 60 million students and teachers, plus 600,000 charities and registered nonprofits, benefit from this each month.

As one of our Four Pledges to the Affinity community we’re excited to extend this programme to include free access for schools and nonprofits to Affinity Designer, Photo and Publisher. These professional-grade tools will add enormous value to this free offering, helping millions of students to master the craft of design, and empowering mission driven organisations to amplify their voices and maximize their impact.

We’ll share more details on this in the coming months, including what it means for our education and NFP customers that already use Affinity.

No, there are not going to be any layoffs. This was something that Canva were immediately clear on when initially discussing the acquisition – they are investing in the team we have here and it’s very important everyone is part of the future.

The team behind Affinity remains in place and our approach remains the same – and this is something that Canva is very focused for us to maintain too. Yes, we are now a division within a larger company, but we believe this will allow us to serve our community even better in the future and give us even greater freedom and ability to challenge the status quo.

There’s every chance there will be some expansion of our team over time – vacancies will be posted on our website as appropriate.