Affinity by Canva: Complete Guide to the Unified Design App

Affinity by Canva is a free, unified design app that replaced what used to be three separate paid applications — Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo, and Affinity Publisher. Canva acquired Affinity and relaunched everything as one program in late 2025, organized into three switchable "Studios" instead of three separate installs. This covers what the app actually is, what each Studio does, what's genuinely free versus gated behind Canva Pro, and where to go for maker-specific depth.

What Actually Changed

If you used the old Affinity apps before, the core tools are the same — Canva didn't gut the software, they merged it. What changed:

• One app instead of three — Designer, Photo, and Publisher are now "Studios" inside a single program, switched via icons in the toolbar rather than separate applications
• Free instead of paid — the old apps were one-time purchases (~$70 each); the unified app is free, full stop, for the core professional toolset
• A Canva account is required to sign in, but no subscription is needed for the design tools themselves — only optional AI features (generative fill, generative expand, AI image/vector generation) sit behind Canva Pro
• Legacy iPad apps still exist separately (Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher for iPad) but can only open the old file format, not the new unified format — a single unified iPad app is in development with no announced release date

The Three Studios

StudioWas FormerlyWhat It's For Vector StudioAffinity DesignerScalable, node-based design — logos, illustrations, laser/CNC cut-ready files, anything that needs to scale cleanly Pixel StudioAffinity PhotoRaster/photo editing — retouching, compositing, RAW photo processing, image prep for photo engraving Layout StudioAffinity PublisherMulti-page documents and print layout — instruction sheets, packaging inserts, catalogs, anything combining text and images across pages

Switching Studios happens within the same document — you can build a vector illustration in Vector Studio, then switch to Pixel Studio to add photo-realistic shading, all in one file, which is the actual point of unifying them rather than just a cost-saving move.

What's Genuinely Free vs. What Needs Canva Pro

• Free: all three Studios in full — vector tools, boolean operations, RAW photo editing, compositing, multi-page layout, non-destructive editing, export to essentially every common format (SVG, PDF, PNG, DXF, TIFF, and more)
• Needs Canva Pro: generative AI features specifically — Generative Fill, Generative Expand, AI-generated images/vectors. If you're not using AI generation, there's genuinely nothing to pay for.

This is worth being explicit about since "free app owned by a company with a subscription product" understandably makes people suspicious of a bait-and-switch — but the professional toolset itself is the free part, and the paywall is specifically the newer AI-generation features, not core functionality.

System Requirements and Platforms

• Windows and macOS — the unified desktop app, downloaded directly from Affinity's site
• iPad — currently the legacy separate apps only (old file format); a unified iPad app is planned but not yet released
• No Linux support — same as the old Affinity apps, this hasn't changed

Getting Started

1. Download the app from Affinity's official site and sign in with a Canva account (free to create if you don't already have one)
2. On first launch, take a moment to look at the top toolbar's Studio switcher — this is the main thing that's different from the old separate-apps model
3. File → New to start a document; you'll pick a Studio to start in, but you're not locked to it — switch anytime from within the same document
4. The Layers panel, History, and most keyboard shortcuts carry over directly from the old individual apps if you're already familiar with them

Where to Go Deeper

This overview covers the app as a whole — for actual hands-on maker workflows, see:

• Affinity Designer (Vector Studio) for Laser Cutting — cut-ready vector prep, boolean operations, export settings for laser/CNC software
• Affinity Photo (Pixel Studio) for Laser Engraving — grayscale conversion, contrast, and dithering prep for photo engraving
• Affinity by Canva: Real Maker Project Scenarios — worked examples combining Studios for actual projects, including Layout Studio use cases neither guide above touches on

The short version: if you used to avoid Affinity because of the per-app cost, or you've been meaning to try it as a free Illustrator/Photoshop alternative, there's no better time — the full toolset is genuinely free now, unified into one app that covers most of what a maker actually needs for design work.