Affinity Designer vs Magnific (formerly Freepik)

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.

Magnific is the new name of Freepik, the stock asset marketplace founded in Málaga, Spain, in 2010. EQT took a majority stake in 2020, and in May 2024 the company bought Magnific AI, the upscaling startup whose name it adopted for the whole platform on April 28, 2026. It reports more than one million paying subscribers. It now offers two things: a library of 250M+ photos, vectors, PSDs, icons, videos and templates, and an AI studio that puts many third-party and in-house models behind one subscription.

The AI suite covers image generation (Google's Nano Banana and the in-house Magnific One), video generation with Kling, Seedance, Veo and others, the Magnific image and video upscalers, music, voice and sound effects, and Spaces, a shared canvas for workflows. All paid plans use annual credit pools that do not reset monthly, include a commercial AI license and promise no model training on your data. Premium starts at $20 a month, Premium+ adds unlimited generations on selected models and music rights, and Pro Starter sells larger credit pools for production teams.

It suits designers, marketers and agencies who want stock assets and many AI models in one bill. Krea and Leonardo AI offer similar multi-model studios but no stock library, and Midjourney gives a more distinctive look but fewer tools. Credit math is complex and video burns credits fast.

Buying tip: freepik.com and the old magnific.ai upscaler address both redirect to magnific.com now, and existing accounts carried over. Compare per-model credit costs before choosing between Premium+ and Pro Starter.