Adobe Creative Cloud vs Canva vs Affinity: design software pricing after Affinity went free

This category got rewritten in late 2025, and if you haven't checked pricing since, the numbers you remember are wrong. Canva bought Affinity back in 2024, and in November 2025 announced Affinity — the professional photo, vector and layout suite that used to cost a one-time $164.97 for all three apps — would become **completely free**, subsidized by Canva's broader business.

That leaves Adobe standing alone as the paid option, and it isn't cheap: Creative Cloud Standard is $54.99/month, and the Pro tier with full AI features is $69.99/month — $839.88/year. Run that gap over five years against free Affinity and you're looking at roughly $4,199 in Adobe subscription fees that simply don't exist on the other side of the comparison.

Canva itself sits underneath all of this at $180/year for Pro, and its real role in this three-way comparison changed too: with Affinity free, Canva Pro is now mainly worth buying for its AI tools and template library, not for professional-grade editing, since Affinity covers that ground at zero cost.

| | Price | What it actually replaces |
|---|---|---|
| Affinity (Photo/Designer/Publisher) | free | Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, for most workflows |
| Canva Pro | $180/yr | templates, brand kits, AI generation |
| Adobe Creative Cloud Pro | $839.88/yr | video, Lightroom, heaviest professional AI tooling |

So who still needs Adobe? Mainly people doing video editing (Premiere), motion graphics (After Effects), heavy Lightroom-based photo workflows, or genuinely complex 3D — none of which Affinity or Canva currently cover. For static graphic design, photo editing, vector illustration, and page layout, Affinity now handles the large majority of professional work at zero licensing cost, which is a real, structural shift in this market, not a marketing claim. If you're paying for Adobe out of habit rather than because you use Premiere or After Effects specifically, this is the year to check whether you still need to.