Affinity

Like so many others, I came to Affinity after becoming disillusioned with Adobe's subscription pricing. I might have come for the value, but I have stayed for the software. It is fabulous — a real joy to use.

I use all three apps — Photo, Designer, and Publisher. I have Photo and Designer on both my Mac and iPad, and can't wait until the long-promised Publisher iPad version comes out.

All the apps can be interlinked to share functionality. They have a common interface so once you've learned to use one, you are a long way towards using them all.

Functionally, they do everything I need and more. I would say I am an enthusiastic amateur rather than a professional user, but I do push the programs beyond just simple functionality. They are all highly performant. So much so that I was even able to use them satisfactorily on an ageing 11-year-old laptop when my main machine was unavailable for a month. I have not found anything I did in Adobe's equivalents that I cannot do in the Affinity apps.

The support team are also very helpful. There's an active user forum, and having posted there a few times I've received good support from the developers, who even went to the trouble of analysing my files and diagnosing a problem. It turned out to be a bug and within a couple of days they had fixed it and made a beta available publicly. I never got that kind of support from Adobe.

To bring it back round to where I started, you get all of this performance, functionality and support for a very reasonable one-off price. I almost feel guilty for not giving them more money when they come out with major new features!

Highly recommended.