Affinity Designer vs Figma

Affinity Designer is a professional vector and raster design application originally built by Serif, a UK software company that Canva acquired in 2024. It is used for illustration, logos and brand identity, icons, UI mockups and print layouts, and has long been the most credible alternative to Adobe Illustrator for designers who refuse to pay a monthly subscription. The new unified Affinity app runs natively on macOS and Windows, with an iPad version announced to follow; the earlier Affinity Designer 2 also has a full iPad edition.

The core strength is the persona system: a Designer persona for precise vector work (pen, node, boolean and shape tools, symbols, artboards, constraints) and a Pixel persona for raster retouching and texture inside the same document. Performance is fast even with complex files, and it imports and exports PSD, PDF, SVG and EPS, with partial support for AI files. In late 2025 Canva merged Designer, Photo and Publisher into a single Affinity app and made it free to download, while generative AI features are tied to a Canva Pro subscription.

Affinity fits freelance designers, illustrators, small studios and students who want professional output without Adobe Creative Cloud costs. It is weaker for real-time collaboration and shared design systems, where Figma is the standard, and agencies whose clients send native Illustrator files may still hit compatibility issues. Compared with Illustrator it has a smaller plugin and tutorial ecosystem; compared with Inkscape, which is also free, it is faster and more polished, especially for print work.

Figma is the dominant tool for interface and product design, made by Figma, Inc. of San Francisco, founded in 2012 by Dylan Field and Evan Wallace. It runs in the browser and as a desktop app with real-time multiplayer editing, so designers, developers and product managers work in the same file. Adobe's planned acquisition was abandoned in late 2023 under regulatory pressure, and Figma went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2025.

The design editor offers components and variants, auto layout, variables and modes for theming, interactive prototyping with conditional logic, and shared libraries for design systems. Dev Mode gives developers measurements, code snippets and ready-for-dev status, FigJam handles whiteboarding and workshops, and newer products include Figma Slides, Figma Sites for publishing websites, Figma Make for AI prompt-to-app prototypes and Figma Draw for illustration. Pricing is per seat by type (full, dev, collab), with a free Starter plan, then Professional, Organization and Enterprise.

Figma suits almost any product team, from freelancers to large enterprises with mature design systems, and most plugins, UI kits and hiring pipelines assume it. Prices have risen, seat types require planning, and very large files can slow down. Penpot is the open-source alternative, Sketch remains a Mac-native option, and Framer or Webflow are better for building production websites than Figma Sites.