A couple of weeks ago, Canva purchased the Adobe-like image editing suite Affinity for an undisclosed amount of money.
Canva, a free photo and video editing platform has made itself an office room staple for social media content creators and marketing firms over the past ten years, while Affinity has earned its reputation as being a fully loaded photo editing alternative to Adobe’s Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator and InDesign. Combined, the two platforms provide a comparable offering to Adobe albeit a little less integrated now, but significantly cheaper overall.
While Canva has fashioned itself as the plug-in-play templated designer tool to quickly belt our website demos, social media posts, marketing videos, or any other type of sharable content online, Affinity has focused primarily on the seasoned graphics editor crowd as it seeks feature parity with Adobe-like offerings.
However, with this new merger, Canva looks to provide a full stack offering of editing tools for designers of every level, and depending on the pricing structure and platform integration, the company could pose a very real threat to the industry dominant Adobe.
Since launching Canva in 2013, we’ve been on a mission to empower the whole world to design. As visual communication becomes table stakes in workplaces across the globe, we’re proud to now be empowering more than 175 million people to achieve their goals – but as we often say, with a mission this big, we’re still just 1% of the way there.
Today, we’re incredibly excited to welcome Affinity to the Canva team as we set our sights on empowering every kind of designer. Trusted by more than three million creative professionals across the globe, Affinity’s award-winning suite of professional design software has become a sought-after solution for everything from photo editing to complex graphic and vector design. Together, we’re setting our sights on empowering every kind of team and organization to achieve their goals.
Cliff Obrecht Co-Founder and COO at Canva
Over the past few years, Adobe shifted its relatively expensive suite of apps from a one-time surcharge price to a monthly subscription with flexible options that include creativity bundles, single app, and all app plans ranging from $9.99 to $59.99USD. Across the software divide, Affinity has recently upgraded its platform to version 2 but has held fast to only charging a one-time fee of $164.99 for its stable of three designer apps across desktops or $69.99 for a single app, and $18.49 for a single app designed for use on the iPad.
Meanwhile Canva offers Canva Free which includes the base set of designer features to get beginners up and going and then ratches up the price to $120USD a year for an individual license at the Canva Pro plan. There is also a Canva for Teams plan that takes the Pro pricing but requires a minimum of 2 licenses at $240USD a year and customers will need to contact the company directly to explore their Canva Enterprise plan that entails a minimum of one hundred licenses.
Aside from a bump to 1TB of cloud storage, 24/7 customer support and AI Admin controls, Canva’s Free plan affords most people what they need to run a small to medium sized businesses (SMB) marketing and social media profile.
Without any current modifications, most people could pair a Canva Free plan with the one-time purchase of a $164.99Affinity license and save themselves $76 the first year on an Adobe Photography plan that only includes Lightroom and Photoshop. Extrapolating the plans, in year two, the Canva + Affinity customer is now saving $240 a year on comparable editing software when paired against Adobe’s unending monthly subscription plan.
While the Affinity + Canva acquisition does level of the skill levels for editing options along the flow of photo editing, vector graphics, and publishing software, it still lacks the critical video editing component that Adobe has become synonymous for with Premiere Pro.
As someone who has recently weaned themselves off Adobe, I introduce DaVinci Resolve.
I have no personal knowledge of any plans for DaVinci Resolve to merger with any companies now and its pricing plan may be enough to keep it self-sustaining for now, but with Canva’s title as the world’s most valuable start up and an evaluation of $25.5 billion last year, it could probably add the industry renowned video editing suite to its platform easily.
With DaVinci resolve being the clear-cut alternative to Adobe Premiere for cross-platform video editors (sorry Final Cut fans), Canva could close the loop on its parallel suite of editing tools to fully compete with Adobe and if their ‘perpetual licenses pledge’, the company could have real hit on their hands.
Right now, DaVinci Resolve charges a one-time $295 for its fully loaded Resolve Studio that includes everything under the kitchen sink in terms of video editing such as color correction, professional audio postproduction, over 100 GPU accelerated FXs, third party plug-in support, multiuser collaboration support, quick export to popular social media sites, and more. The free version of Resolve hosts most of the same features as well.
A future where content creators can unburden themselves from the absorbent Adobe monthly fees but maintain professional level editing software for one-time perpetual licenses may be closer than we all think, and Canva could be that liberator.
