Serif Reviews 36

As a design professional who started off using .psd when it launched back in the stone ages - if you haven't switched to the Affinity suite yet you are still stuck in the stone ages. Reliable and more than a replacement for the only other competitor who killed my Aldus Freehand off with not so much as a goodbye and who are so untrusworthy they have access to all your personal files even if they say they are trusworthy to do so. Switch now. You will not be sorry.

Affinity Photo is by far the worst software ever made. It should be illegal to charge people for such junk. Never ever will I waste a single cent on software from Serif again. Luckily there is open-source software alternatives out there that are way better and free.

It's a ripp off. I paid 20eu for the program, suddenly it got deleted without any notification. Now I don't get access to the new version or I don't get a refund. Been emailing with the costumer service and they're rude. The method they send don't work and they don't answer your questions. I feel scammed.

The software offered by serif, namely Affinity Photo/Designer, are effectively good products, that have been ruined. This is due to the total arrogance and or laziness of the development team. A couple of examples:

1) Many many people would like a larger UI (Icons, text and so on), but they arrogantly refuse to do it, after all these years of people asking.

2) When you use the export persona in Affinity Photo, it ignores adjustment layers, and you have to apply adjustments (like brightness etc) to each layer individually. There is no good reason why it acts like this, and the devs say that it's "by design" - if that is true then its utterly stupid. Why make adjustment layers apply to child layers in all other areas of the software, but when you want to export many layers, there is no option to keep that functionality? I understand that you may want to bulk export layers without it, just as I understand you may want to do the same things WITH the adjustment layers applied. The solution of applying them to each individual layer is ridiculous, especially if you have 100+ layers.

They say these decisions are made "by design", but I feel that they just say that to shut people up, and for whatever reason, they find these things difficult to implement and don't want to admit it. Either that or its arrogance, but whichever it is, it's pathetic.

I wish I had never used this software, and I suggest you think very carefully about purchasing it.

Delighted to break free from Adobe's subscription-based model, and Corel's increasingly expensive offerings, with products that are equally robust and affordable, while matching my design needs.

Recently, I decided to buy the Affinity V2 Universal Licence which includes Photo 2, Designer 2 and Publisher 2. I took advantage of their 50% discount as I was seeking alternatives to Adobe PS due to the recent controversy surrounding the company.

At first, I was suspicious due to extremely attractive price and a lifetime licence for all platforms but in the end I decided to give them a chance. After using the software for a couple of weeks now, I can definitely say it the best software purchase I have ever made!

As a professional photographer and web designer, I was mostly interested in the Affinity Photo 2, but after thorough testing I can say that the following comments apply to all three products.

Super-intuitive interface that shares lots of similarities with the CC products so you won't spend a lot of time learning the UI and the learning curve will be much flatter.

Preferences include lots of custom settings so you can really tailor the UI and performance to your needs.

Feature parity is very close to the equivalent CC products so you will be able to use most of your favourite features if you are planning to move.

Finally, what absolutely blew my mind are the more advanced additional features in the Affinity Photo 2 such as a Panorama stitcher, Focus and HDR stackers. Before, I was using separate software solutions for each of these but now I can use one solution for all my photo needs. I did lots of testing and compared the results to other specialised software for focus stacking, panorama stitching and HDR processing and the performance and quality was almost identical! What usually took me much more time and required digging into advanced settings using additional software, I can now do with Affinity Photo 2 much faster! Literally, you just drag-drop your HRD brackets, focus stacks or panorama shots and the software does the rest without requiring going through advanced settings.

Really well done and keep up the good work! You got yourself a new and extremely happy customer.

I bought the whole Affinity product set about a year ago and just started using it more seriously and I really like that you can still buy a software that isn't subscription based like many of the larger corporations are doing right now. I like paying once and get the free updates until they release the 3rd version and then I'd probably get that as well as they seem to do a discount if you already own the products.

So far I haven't encountered any major issues and the softwares remind me a lot about the competitors that I've used in the past. Works great for a hobbyist like me.

Affinity suite of apps are extremely capable. And their customer service is top notch. Saying this after 4.5 years of use

If you are a professional whose livelihood depends on bang-on perfect performance, then i am not expert enough to comment, but would suggest you give it a think. If you need depth of features well laid out, and if you do not feel an urge to see a substantial charge each month, endlessly, then this by far, is the absolute best out there

Trouble is we buy new h/w with new architecture and chips, new OS updates fly in and we blame the app. ALL developers face a lag to make generic improvements which even then - sometimes - do not translate perfectly to each combination of HW-SW.

I have exchanged several email with Affinity even over NON-glitches and they ALWAYS reply with personal care. Who does that? Apple Music (previously iTunes) is very capable and gets glitchier every new release. Even their humongous customer service can’t always fix my problems and leave me with “a case ID”

This is my comparison… Excel has an incredible array of features but is not as intuitive as Numbers. I get 99.9% work done on Numbers (with ease) and for that rare 0.1% I open up Excel just to find find it clunk and heavy on my system

Any group of capable geniuses should be lauded and encouraged that they are can so effectively take on giants, and in many ways do better

Its just a poorly formulated, budget photoshop. There is zero help, in order to talk to someone you must email and wait for a response - no number to call or instant chat. They really don't care about the customers, once you've given your money over. I used the affinity photo and affinity design to make a fabric design. Checked the whole thing over - as i'm aware that the software is extremely glitchy - everything looked good. Spent a lot of money having my fabric printed, waited weeks, when it arrived there was errors everywhere. Checked the sent file and zoomed in and in true affinity fashion, glitches had been added just as I had flattened the design and sent it over. Its now lost me a lot of money and the customer care are entirely clueless to any faults the software, clearly, has. They also, really just don't care. I would avoid at all cost. Spend a little more and get photoshop and illustrator. Complete disappointment.

I purchased a copy of Affinity Designer, but after a year later I had to move from Windows to Mac, but my licence was for Windows. It would be an easy job to reissue a new licence to me for mac, but no, they force you to purchase a new licence for mac when you have already purchased the product. Poor service and desperate money grabbing attitude.

Outstanding customer service. Gareth was responsive and dedicated to solving my issue, which was quite a head scratcher. This company is nothing but brilliant. Amazing software for such an unbelievably low price in today's greedy world. I used Adobe for years until I tried Affinity suite. I have never looked back. I am yet to come across a problem that this software can not solve. The interface is intuitive and passing between iPad Pro and Windows is seamless. The old school pricing model is such a breath of fresh air. I can not recommend Serif highly enough.

Very aloof customer service. The software feels unfinished and underpowered even after 7 years of development. The communication from this company is very poor as well leaving users to fend for themselves when it comes to troubleshooting or even finding release notes for updates.

Their online store does not work. Your pay for the app, then you get an error, and it cancels your purchase (but your bank does the transfer). It's been over a week and they haven't yet paid me back. After multiple attempts, they keep blaming it on me and my bank.

Forums are full of people complaining about problems like this, but customer support is really bad, and slow.

Overall: shady. Fingers crossed to get my money back. Just use Inkscape instead, it's free.

I just purchased Photo and Designer in September, and without warning, in early November they released a version 2. I came from Adobe Cloud on their promise of pay only once, but in less than 2 months of barely using it, the software I bough will never be updated again. Meaning if Apple breaks it with an OS update I'm left with nothing.

I paid a total of SGD147.42, not even managing to use both of the coupons they sent me after my trial finished. Now they want $119.96 to upgrade after what they call a "big" discount. This big discount only rewards newcomers, somehow I'm punished for being early 2 months.

On social media people were saying that people who bought within 90 days were getting a free upgrade. I wrote them and was given instead a 20% off coupon. This is off the discounted price, not the original price, so it's just a further reduction of $24. So I'm still looking at $95.96 for continued support.

Serif fails to grasp that there is a huge shortcoming with their software: it’s not the industry standard. Already I have to grapple with still needing to work with and share files in Adobe formats. Given this experience, I’m not giving a cent more to them and returning to Adobe.

Affinity have updated their products - Publisher etc. - and using the space bar now crashes all files. Tried to follow their forum's tech advice by clearing preferences, etc and now the program crashes when it even tries to open any document. So buggy now, it doesn't even class as shareware. Not impressed.

Excellent help and support.
Not being very skilled in IT technology, I had to pluck up courage to contact Affinity Photo for help: I was expecting a slow (or diverting) response. To my delight, the reply came the same day and everything I needed was sorted within 48 hours. A huge thank you to Steven for his advice, help and speedy support.

I started with Affinity Photo and now have the full suite.

The software for me has 3x distinct advantages over the competition.

1. It is more intuitive and simple to use, while retaining all of the power and features of competitors software
2. The pricing model is SO much nicer than the daylight robbery of subscription services. It is priced so it is affordable for small start-ups and home users. I did previously pay for the subscription service from the main competitor, but have happily cancelled it now!
3. The documentation is clear and easy to understand, and there are a LOT of independent online resources and youtube videos really focus on the products (rather than the presenter)

I really don't consider myself very artistic, yet the affinity suite really helps me get the idea from my head to canvas(screen). The results look REALLY professional, even though I am quite an amateur!

Missing vital basic functions that even most free software have. User interface looks nice but incredibly impractical, unintuitive and difficult to use. Worst of all pretty much every action something goes wrong not as designed, and not even consistently, (the same action will have multiple different outcomes), things won't print as on screen and the shear volume of errors and glitches makes it insanely time consuming and painful to produce anything and the quality at the end is awful. And then the support for when these things go wrong is basically non existent, with things being promised imminently that still nothing is done about many years later.

Affinity Suite is brilliant.

Lots of features, updated regularly and the iPad Affinity Designer and Photo apps are superb.

I can draw in Affinity Designer and animate in procreate, callipeg, or animation pro.

Excellent User Interface too.

Highly recommended. Serif is simply a lifesaver. I used Adobe for 12 years plus and am so happy to have finally scraped them off my shoe. Affinity’s trinity (3 applications) more than compensate for Adobe's overpriced garbage. Don't let others tell you – ‘You need to learn on Adobe,’ this is simply not true. Back in the early noughties it was Quark or nothing and along came InDesign. We all know how that one turned out. As this triplicity software grows it defunds Adobe and edges itself into the go to workspace. I laughed at a few reviews on here complaining about Serif customer care. Firstly, these are mostly within the ‘Corona lockdown period’ so many were working from home. Secondly, have these same people ever tried calling Adobe customer care. Yeah right - like these guys are better! If you have a few hours to spare try calling Dwaine in Kolkata and watch the proverbial wheel on the wall go around a few times - good luck with that. Finally, the cost of these is a no brainer, amazing value and you are OK to install on more than 1 PC / Mac (providing it’s your computer). How cool is that!