The short answer to this question could be that Adobe is raising the price of Creative Suite, but I have been considering this move for quite awhile, even before Adobe announced its price increase.
I’ve never been happy with Adobe’s subscription pricing model. Granted, it’s a good deal if you use all that Creative Suite has to offer, but who can really use it all? I primarily use InDesign and Photoshop, with a little bit of Illustrator. I mostly publish two little magazines and do publicity for my university department using Adobe. For a long time, they were the only thing powerful enough to do what I needed, but now Affinity has come out with a very strong competition, and they charge a single fee for a license. Yes, I may need to pay to upgrade in the future, but I won’t pay every year, and Affinity’s one-time price is much less that an annual subscription for Creative Suite.
I finally broke down and bought it this summer, when they had a half-price sale on the educational price. It was affordable enough that I could justify paying for it so I could really test it out (more than I could do when I had a one-week free trial). And I could recommend it to my students because they can get what they need for one low price. I needed to own it if I was going to ask them to use it, since I knew there would be some issues to work out.
But I’ve been very happy with using Affinity Publisher and Affinity Photo so far. (I haven’t dug into Affinity Design much yet because, as I said, I don’t really use Illustrator very much, but I’m glad that I can use if it I need to create vector graphics.)
I’ve learned the most about Affinity Publisher, and though it is a little wonky (so is InDesign, but I’m familiar with its wonkiness), I’ve found it to be pretty intuitive. I have to get used to some things that are different, but some of those things are actually better for my purposes. I just learned about how to format a table of contents and have Affinity Publisher generate it. That works very well, and though I still end up ‘fixing’ a few things in the output for the TOC, I don’t have to edit it as much as I did in InDesign.
Page numbers and styles also operate a little differently than they do in InDesign, but they are close enough, and as I learn more about how to use them, I’m starting to forget how I did things in InDesign and am happy with Affinity. I have learned about a few bugs in Publisher, but there is a good user support forum for Affinity products that has been very helpful.
One thing that has made my transition easier is that importing files into Affinity has been fairly simple. For InDesign files, you do need to export the file in IDML format. Once I do that, I can then import it into Publisher and most things are carried over, including my page setup, margins, master pages, and my paragraph and character styles. And importing Photoshop and Illustrator files are even easier, since you can just open them in Affinity Photo or Affinity Designer. This means all I really need to do is to save my InDesign files as IDML formatted files before I cancel my Creative Suite subscription. That will be easy enough to do, and from tehre, I can create new documents in Publisher.
Kendall Dunkelberg 