[Mobius01]

Serif’s Affinity suíte of products is by far the most credible competition and suitable replacement for Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. Anyone dissatisfied with Adobe (you should be) ought to consider these alternatives. They’re polished, well supported, have received a constant stream of quality feature enhancements, and are traditionally licensed.

They won’t work for everybody, but there is a large cohort of Adobe users out there that could instantly substitute their software with minimal effort and get out this absurd predicament.

[modernerd]

The challenge with the alternatives is that they don’t always open Adobe files. (Last time I checked Affinity Publisher opened PDFs but not InDesign files, for example.)

This means that:

1. You can’t always open your existing work and may have to recreate it.

2. If you work with other agencies or freelancers who use Adobe products you then have to explain that you can’t open their “industry standard” files.

These are very real problems for those in industry making regular tweaks to files and sharing them with other agencies, printers, and freelancers. I spent 2 years as a graphic designer and the studio managers would not switch to alternatives I showed them even though they complained bitterly every time they had to add a new seat to their Adobe subscription.

It would be great if more people used a wider range of Adobe alternatives, though, because it would help to cement the idea that Adobe is not some open standard; it is only embedded in industry by inertia.

[EricE]

Agreed - recently bought them on sale just to support them.