Affinity Designer

Pros

It allows you to do all the advanced stuff you need to do. Of course, there are some industry-standards out there this software will be compared to. Affinity Designer will for sure save you money after you spend some time in the initial adaptation translating all your knowledge from other tools to it. It sounds scary but it isn't. Things are just called differently and some others just have a different shortcut, but all what you know should still apply. A very cool thing I saw is that the developers are always interacting with users and they do listen to the requests! It's very, very lightweight (v. 1.8.5 is less than 500mb). Updates happen frequently but it's up to you to install them. Also it's equally lightweight in terms of resources used when running. The industry standards require everytime more and more ram and cpu while Affinity Designer runs very smoothly on all low-mid range pcs.

Cons

The documentation isn't always super super clear. As it's an evolving sofware and features are being added or changed, this is really important. A couple of times i had to rely on youtubers to find how to do certain things.

Pros

This is a fantastic alternative to Adobe's Illustrator, especially at Affinity's pricepoint. To be fair, we're not a design agency first, we make websites and do marketing primarily. However, when we do want to work with vector graphics, Affinity Designer matches up almost 1:1 with Adobe Illustrator. The real pro is the one-time fee of $50 instead of a full adobe suite subscription. This allows our small team to effectively open, edit, and export vector graphics, without having a several hundred dollars per month bill to foot. For small teams, this is a huge win. I'd imagine some experienced designers will scoff that a few of their old shortcuts don't work, but all in all, the interface and function almost mirrors Adobe's for a fraction of the cost. We also use their photo editing software too, which replaces Photoshop.

Cons

Some of the terminology and keyboard shortcuts made the onboarding slightly more difficult for our long-time Adobe Illustrator users, but they've adopted nicely over time. There's always growing pains when you switch tools, but there are many more features that do match up 1:1 that this was a no brainer for our company.

Pros

It's cheap, although it still remains less powerful that some free apps

Cons

Development seems to have ground to a halt on this app. Investing time and energy learning could be a waste of time as it may not be around in the future.

Pros

The best thing about Affinity Designer is not that it is feature rich, but that it has all the essential features for designing/illustration. This software can be bought for a low price (one-time) unlike Adoble Illustrator which demands you pay monthly license fee. The software is easy and intutive to use and I was able to learn the essentials within a week or so. You get basic photo editing features like selection tools for cropping, blending modes, etc.

Cons

Certain useful features like gradient map, 3D, mockups, etc. that are available in Illustrator may not be available with Affinity Designer. But I am OK with this - too many features make us forget essential ones. Besides, the magic wand tool available in Affinity Photo is not available in Affinity Designer - for precise cropping of people, etc. I wish Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo were a single software.

Pros

I love that the Affinity Designer software is a one time purchase and has not become a subscription product like many others have. The product has all the features you need for advanced design work any is a great value for the price that you pay. There is a full range of features and instruction on using the various tools is more and more widely available.

Cons

Sometimes I find that the tools in Affinity are not quite as intuitive as some other design software programs but generally a quick internet search will provide the instructions I need to get over the hurdle.