Affinity Publisher Reviews

Affinity Publisher allows you to create a whole set of text styles you can switch from master to master. So, on a single file you can have all different sections of a Magazine and all the different styles and you don't need to work them separately.
If you have a one-man-army designer who does it all, this is the best tool as you can switch easily between Photo editing, to vector editing and back to document editing on a mouse-click.
You also have the flexibility of a text processor like Word where you can create the table of contents, for example, but you can now add different styles to this so you can have an attractive table of contents.
If you buy a set of brushes for Photo or Designer, you have them available also here.

Basically nothing. But this isn't a software meant to be used alone without it's companions Photo and Designer.

It is fast - build on game engine in core. You can work with one page document or hundreds of pages with a lot of images and different text styles, but speed will never drop down. It is stabile software and with excellent colour reproduction.

Affinity Publisher lack of some usefull but not mandatory features. There are no classical character and paragraph styles, but there are no combined styles like QuarkXpress have. The are no good indexing and footnote/endnote manipulation.

It allows my team to quickly produce both digital and print creative, including company magazine, has a clear no-nonsense interface, is tightly integrated with Affinity Designer and Photo, allowing to use both programs without having to switch to another app window, and is much more affordable than alternatives

My positive review is based on Affinity Publisher v1. We have already purchased a business version of v2 suite but have not been able to activate it so far due to a software glitch.

Used it as an alternative to adobe products. worked fine, especially if you know what you are doing.

Photo editing needs some expertise for sure. After the trial we decided the price point is not worth it as we could also use the original for around the same price.

The integration of Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo is just superb. It provides a 3-in-1-functionality for the whole program and makes the suite just perfect.

Export for inDesign-Files, which is the industry standard is sadly still missing. Other than that, i am not missing any Features for my use

Affinity Publisher is about as good as you can get for layout software compared to the other big subscription software. It has fully replaced layout for one of my employers since we did not want to move to the subscription model.

Some features common to Adobe indesign do not exist in this software as well as the learning curve while not difficult was a little time consuming.

Affinity Publisher is a clean, fast, feature-rich Desktop Publishing application which makes content creation and manipulation reasonably simple, but also has enough advanced tools that power-users will be satisfied with it as well. It integrates very well with the other Affinity applications (Designer and Photo) and works with files from many other applications as well. For the VERY reasonable price they charge this is a fantastic choice for Desktop Publishing Software.

The biggest criticism I have is that there aren't any document templates included out-of-the-box such as there are with other products like Microsoft Publisher. That being said, there are many options online which can be purchased to make up for this.

Affinity Publisher is an excellent and affordable publishing software with a one-time payment of $69.99. This software does not require you to have a subscription to use it. It is also very user-friendly with lots of design support, pantone support, and other familiar creative tools. You can preview your whole project in the toolbar on the left hand side, viewing every page at once. It makes publishing your projects a breeze.

There is a bit of a learning curve with setting up each project. Even if you are familiar with other publishing software, watching a tutorial or two online is necessary to get the most out of this product.

I like how intuitive to use AP is. Contrary to Adobe Indesign it's easy to get around without a proper background in graphic design. It offers almost as many tools for a fraction of the price. I also greatly appreciate the opportunity to buy it once and be done, contrary to the ongoing trend of subscribe-only softwares forcing you to pay them for eternity.

I like it very much and I've never been displeased with it.

I cannot afford Adobe anymore so switched to Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher. I make my own photography books with it and find it very easy to use. It works really well with Affinity Photo so designing a simple book seems easy! For more complicated projects loads of tutorials are available.

Haven't found any problems yet. I might found some as I work on more complicated book designs.

Being a small office (Just myself) it was increasingly a concern that I was paying a monthly subscription fee and some months it wasn't worth the time at all. With Affinity I can work daily or skip a month and I've already paid for the software.

The only inconvenience, is that Affinity software is separated. Publisher (is great for anything, especially Hard Print Quality, Pre-Flight tests, and even online publishing). But, because they are separate products most of us will need to buy all three (Photo, Publisher, and Designer). That said, it is still worth the value compared to the alternatives available.

The master pages feature is the highlight of this app, in my opinion, as it creates templates based on ODD pages, EVEN pages, FIRST pages, various conditions, and considers not just text layouts but also image layouts. Need a bottom right page number on “recto” pages? Done. Bottom left on “verso” pages? Got it. Need that first page of the chapter to have no headers or footers? No problem. Every odd page to have a bleed graphic behind the text, or wrapping around it? Sure. Whatever the layout need, Affinity Publisher can do it (probably) easily and repetitively with the master page feature. The fact that Publisher accounts for several dozen page sizes and layouts makes it even more versatile. Who needs MS Word for “design”? Of course, it doesn’t benefit just novelists or book designers. The layout features work well for magazine designers, too. Heck, Affinity posted a video a year ago of its product specialist designing a branded restaurant menu. It can do just about anything you need a print designer to do. And that’s not even getting into the weeds about its “Studio Link” feature. Thanks to that feature, users can update book or magazine photos directly in Photo or Designer without having to import or export out of Publisher. Not even Adobe does that with its tools (so I hear)!

Barring the fact that I can never remember all the hotkeys (I’d have to remove the cut-out hotkey sheet from the back of my Affinity Publisher Workbook to remember them all, and I’m not going to deface my book that way!—even if it’s designed for that purpose), the biggest “con” I have with Publisher is with the limitations it has with font design. Specifically, drop cap layout with margins can be improved, as well as the ability to combine bold and italics to form special case typographical designs. That said, this probably isn’t a fair con, since Affinity Publisher (and all three Affinity apps, for that matter) respects each fonts’ native design, and most of them aren’t designed with bold italic versions. But it would be nice to have the option to force a design style that merges bold and italics together, just in case. It’s fine, though. I’m really only annoyed with my margin limitations. The page design features more than make up for any con.

There's much to like about Affinity Publisher. For one thing, it's a one-time payment, and an inexpensive purchase at that. During the COVID lockdowns they even halved the price which was a classy thing to do and helpful for many people. The price is now back up at around $55 at the time of writing which, when compared to the cost of an ongoing subscription for InDesign, is a complete steal.

But the pricing wouldn't be enough, on its own, to make me love this product.

What I really love is that it's professional-level publishing software with excellent accompanying tutorials and enormously flexibility. I can create everything from simple flyers to complex magazines and brochures and I don't feel that I'm compromising on style or formatting in the least.

It's not complicated to figure out, and the ability to use master pages makes everything much faster and easier. It's more complex than Word in terms of output, but definitely not harder to learn.

There are two other programs in the Affinity stable - Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer. Both work seamlessly with Affinity Publisher which is just a joy and a huge stress reducer - especially when I'm working to a deadline and I need everything to go without a hitch.

There aren't too many cons to Affinity Publisher. I do have a minor gripe about the Affinity Publisher book which looks really interesting but which costs almost as much as the software itself. I would have appreciated a PDF manual instead of an expensive, glossy coffee-book.

If you gave me the choice between InDesign or Affinity Publisher, 9/10 times I would pick publisher.

Affinity’s UI is similar to InDesign, but easy to learn and it’s UI is intuitive.

Also, you can open up designer and photo while working inside their and allows you to do multiple things within one app. It would be like being able to do the same work as Photoshop and Illustrator all within InDesign. Yes, it’s that’s amazing.

It does not have every feature InDesign has, but for the average designer you wouldn’t even notice.

PRICE. Like most users of Affinity products I was initially attracted by the price. Now that Adobe 'rent' you their software I was looking for an alternative. You can't fault the price of any of the Affinity products. They could double the price and they would still be incredibly good value for money.

FEATURES. But that doesn't mean that Publisher is a budget product. Far from it. Once you get your head around the slightly different way of working, I have found that Publisher will do everything I ever asked InDesign to do. Yes InDesign has more 'features', but Publisher does everything I need. I designed market-leading magazines for more than 20 years, so I know what I am talking about.

LEARNING CURVE. As expected with any new software there is a bit of a learning curve. Affinity do things differently to Adobe. But stick with it, because once the penny drops and you 'get it' it all makes sense. I really like the way the Affinity Apps (Publisher, Designer and Photo) all work seamlessly together.

I like how easy it is to select what you'd like to do with photos. With drone photography (especially at night), you most likely will be taking photos with the auto exposure bracketing (AEB) setting which takes several photos really fast to allow the most light into the sensor to help the photos appear brighter at night. You'd simply take all of the photos and combine them. With a drone, you have to account for any type of movement like wind and the drone itself adjusting to the gps position where you have it hovering so each photo may be slightly off. Affinity has a photo combining/stacking option. When you combine the photos... it does a great job at stacking without it looking blurry. You can choose 3 settings that will show the difference in any effects used. You have a before/after (side by side is best), the before and after split photo then the regular photo itself that will show you the difference once applied.

I haven't figured this out yet, but when working with stacked photos I have a hard time seeing the difference in the before and after photo when doing side by sides. Maybe it's just me but I don't really see the difference unless I do a large effect like making the contrast really dark.

Affinity Publisher is packed with all the editing features we need and use in daily workflows and operations, and their studiolink technology really sets it apart as you can quickly switch to leverage the editing power of Affinity Designer or Affinity Photos directly within the app. It's also extremely fast and has a light load on your device, and best of all, you get to buy your license once and use it as long as you wish. No more monthly charges that bundle features we don't use.

Out of the 3 Affinity software this is the one that took the less getting used to, but there definitely is a small learning curve when switching to this suite. Once you get the hang of it though it gets pretty intuitive with all applications mostly using the same layout and design philosophy.

The ability to use both Affinity photo and Affinity Designer within Affinity Publisher make it the best desktop publishing application. This goes with affordable price with advanced pro features and user-friendly interface.
Affinity Publisher makes it much easier than InDesign to use automated table of contents.
Easy transition from InDesign as the interface is as easy and intuitive and no learning is required.

Limited interactivity because with only hyperlinks and bookmarks. You can't imbed multimedia files like in InDesign.
InDesign formats can't be opened directly except when the converter called IDMarkz is used.

The workflow is very similar to that of Affinity Designer and Photo and has many common features, easy to layout pages and design documents and the associated file formats needed to import from external sources and then manipulate within the program

Nothing really, mostly it just works, there are a few quirks when it comes to layout where you need to be careful.

If you have no experience with InDesign, then this is easier to get started with, but if you have Indesign already, this is pretty similar, and give it some months and you will like it also.

The advanced features from InDesign is still missing, but most people never use those functions anyway.

Ease of use and to getting the first project completed. I use this for KDP book covers and interiors. Being able to publish book interiors and have no errors on upload to KDP is a major plus.

De-selecting the previous tool by selecting outside the work area should default to the arrow or move icon. Constantly having to select away from a text or other tool just to be able to move font or photo windows would be a help by making this change.

The Affinity Plublisher software is very easy to use and allows you to edit text and more on the touch screen.

No drawbacks noticed on this software, everything pleases me, I recommend

in complementarity with affinity photo this software helps you to integrate text into your image design

I did not find any problem with this software

The feature set nearly matches InDesign, but at a fraction of a cost. StudioLink to other Affinity apps make a particularly smooth experience that makes moving away from Creative Cloud feasible for cash-strapped amateurs or SMBs

There is very little to dislike, but if I had to find something, I would say that the three levels of menu bars, are a little unusual, and the spacing of the middle menu bar looks off.

Affinity Publisher is a great alternative to Adobe Illustrator.There is no monthly subscription needed, just pay once and the software is to be used for life!

There is no cloud functionality like Creative Cloud.