Affinity Designer vs Zeplin

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.

Zeplin is a design delivery platform founded in Istanbul by a Turkish team and now headquartered in San Francisco. It pioneered design hand-off: designers publish finalized screens from Figma, Sketch or Adobe XD, and developers get a stable, organized source of truth that is separate from the messy working files where designs keep changing.

Published screens come with measurements, colors, typography, exportable assets, code snippets and design tokens, and they can be grouped into sections, connected into user flows and annotated with notes. Version history shows what changed between iterations, and workflow statuses mark screens as ready for development. Styleguides document colors, text styles, spacing and components, and integrations with Storybook, Jira, Slack and Connected Components link design elements to real code. Pricing starts with a free plan for one project, a Basic plan priced per project with unlimited users, an Advanced plan priced per seat with 50 projects, and Enterprise for security and support needs.

Zeplin fits product teams that want a curated, approved layer between design and engineering, agencies handing designs to client developers, and organizations using several design tools. Figma's Dev Mode now covers much of the same ground inside Figma, so teams fully on Figma often do not need a separate tool. Supernova and zeroheight are stronger for full design system documentation, while Storybook remains the reference for coded components.