[misswaterfairy]

Canva have promised that Affinity will be 'free forever' so make of that what you will, unless you want cloud AI functionality which requires a subscription. The Affinity software itself is free.

I have been very happy with Affinity Designer (equivalent to Adobe Illustrator) which I purchased some time ago before the acquisition.

I haven't used Affinity Publisher much, and found a few minor things frustrating (paragraph formatting specifically in the older V2 version), but other than that Photo, Designer and Publisher have been solid.

I still have the V2 apps, from before the Canva acquisition; I'm finding new 'unibody' Affinity app nice as I slowly migrate to it.

One also can't argue with free, even if it isn't open source. Designer does work better in some aspects than Inkscape, as some downstream software I use extensively doesn't like exported SVGs from Inkscape for some reason, but I like Inkscape's open-ness.

It is also not Adobe software, which has plenty of upsides in my book.