Carlos NZ

I've been using affinity publisher since September 2020, I am really enjoying all 3 apps, I have used indesing for over 20 years and I've found the software migration smooth, however their layer management system is quite messy to say the least. Pages/artboards and layer don't go well together.

I second that. I used CC on a brand new Windows machine at a former workplace a year ago and Adobe is crash-prone. Everything in the machine was up to snuff, plenty of memory, latest OS, etc., and the biggest culprit was Illustrator. Photoshop and InDesign were slightly better but updates were all about the waiting game (sometimes months until an issue was addressed/fixed). Affinity is light years ahead of Adobe on many fronts and at this stage in their software versions, they beat Adobe hands down. They don't have to "catch up" anything. I dare you to show me a designer or artist who uses every facet of Photoshop (or any of the other Adobe programs). I can achieve everything that I was doing in CC with the Affinity programs, and thanks to their integration, much quicker with less headaches. I freelance, and time is money but I don't "speed" through projects and that's never been a factor. I've never missed a deadline so I'm not sure where these "seconds and minutes" of speed are some sort of alluring feature. I remember the days of having to walk away from the computer while Photoshop took forever and a day to render. I do think Affinity kicked Adobe in the ass to finally make their software more efficient (would they have done that had competition not reared it's head?). I also keep an old version of Adobe CS 5.5 around for one main reason: Everything I did using InDesign is part of my archive. I can convert those files to IDML and open them in Publisher. I bridged from InDesign to QuarkXpress to Publisher. Call me what you will and argue until you're blue in the face about the bonuses of paying one monthly fee for "oodles" of programs, but I don't (any many others don't) need 90% of the CC programs, many of which are lackluster. 
To be clear, if Affinity had one-time fees for major upgrades, I'd still stay with them over Adobe. Adobe is ingrained much the same way as Microsoft in many corporations and universities. Retraining entire staffs and integrating new software on such a large scale is something most administrators and IT departments do NOT want to face. Thus, the cycle continues. That doesn't make Adobe better. In fact, many balk at the cost of subscriptions (Think thousands of licenses for Acrobat and the monthly cash haul Adobe makes from that alone). Think also of having the same essential features and functionality with Affinity programs at a fraction of the cost, and how attractive that is to the accounting departments.
Finally, as an example of how much Adobe cares about it's customers, go read the EOL forum on Adobe's site (if they left it up), and how it CRUSHED thousands of web designers and their businesses. Eliminating a program with no direct replacement and no way of salvaging YEARS of work is arrogance, pure and simple.

I do use it for a living, and I'm currently about £900 better off due to switching to Affinity, and as evey month passes that increases.
Sure, some people's needs aren't met by this software, but for me it works so I don't see why I'd want to give away my hard earned cash to a billion dollar corporate who have leveraged their near monopoly to be able to extract as much cash from their customers as possible.

Well, if you use the software for living, it's a crap argument. If you're a carpenter, you will also buy a premium hammer instead of a cheap one, it will last longer, will do better job for you. The quality of the tools simply speaks for itself. Actually - one single job you do with the Adobe Suite will easily pay the whole year of subscription (if you know how to sell your work and pick a proper project that will bright you profit, this is a major difference between professionals and amateurs,) and the rest of the year you're in positive numbers.
Also - when you go to the holidays etc., you can always pause/cancel your subscription and pay when you get back to work. You don't have to pay when you don't use the software. Also, constant upgrades (feature and bugfix wise) are so fast and common it's not stopping you from doing your work without constant necessity to use of dozens of workarounds to get even a simple job done...
 
+
Indeed, indeed...
 
Sadly, the fact is that Serif sells thousands of copies of software that only few percents of buyers actually use. That is the sad truth, I'm speaking from experience here.
It's so cheap they can give up/sacrifice the amount and forget all about the purchase. They might even be waiting for the update that will addres their issues, silently, since not everyone wants to be vocal or part of the forums/community.
 
Truth. Sadly, Affinity doesn't develop much. At least we're getting basic features like Select by... for Designer, a feature that should have been in version 1.0.
Or PDF passthrough. What professional can work or be without it? And now that we have it, it still doesn't display correctly, so it's not WYSIWYG at all. Wicked!
You will love the new neural filters of Photoshop if you try to use them, especially if you're into old photo restorations, colorization and so on.
 
This is sadly not truth. Affinity isn't aimed to creative professionals, despite its aspiration. You sadly cannot rely on it, you have to constantly check every output multiple times, on each export, since there are weird glitches. Also, to this day, we don't have usable Boolean operations. After 6 years... Stuff like default greyscale swatches being actually RGB and dozens of other quirks... Ie, the batch conversion to this day doesn't support drag and drop. You have to select files manually from an system open dialog. Time is money, you know.
The only advantage is its ability to work with CMYK natively. However, you cannot disable colour profiles, so the colours get converted anyway. Wicked.
No support for 1bit images in Photo. Screen printing is a profession. Serif ignores this niche of graphic design completely.
Global layers - an industry standard. Even Corel Draw supports them. Affinity decide to rename Objects to layers for its own convenience, and honestly, layer/object management in Affinity is pure hell thanks to this omission. You have to micro-manage the whole design work you're up to, instead of focusing on the design itself. After few hours of designing, you find yourself managing layers because it's nearly impossible to find stuff in the object/layer hierarchy.
And don't let me started on layers vs. Layers (yes, Affinnity does have 2 types of layers, one without and one with capitalized L). Confusing? They say it's by design...
Vector brushes? They're pure bitmaps. Why are they confusingly named Vector Brushes? Crazy...
Designer - why we still can't see the content of the bleed area when using multiple artboarts? It's part of the design and omitting it from display is just an ignorant approach.
 
Affinity = 6 years, indeed. But Serif = nearly 30 years in the market. They should have some sort of insight already about what features are necessary, what can be omitted and how to build the roadmap.
The only difference is that Affinity was conceived as a Mac product, and addition of Windows support (obviously due to the marketing dept. that seems to have major role in what we're discussing here is the main deciding factor in Serif offices, not designer or coders). This is what started to slow the development down. Next hit was the iOS versions. It must be hell to maintain all this, and I'm not even talking about adding new features. Programmers must in my opinion be quite demotivated over there.
Even a single-man operation can make a good progress when there is a will and power to change things. Look at VectorStyler. They haven't released v 1.0 but they do have my money guaranteed already.
 
This is nonsense. Every professional uses tools that make their lives easier, whenever they can. Otherwise we would still be doing our work the old way, we wouldn't use CTP, but be stuck with CTF. Hell, we would be using old Printing Presses, Manual Typesetting etc. Setting up a single book would take years. Or we would maybe be Scribers, manually rewriting copies of the books...
 
Maybe for presentation purposes, however the tools are usable however one wants. Replace Sky ie., Neural Colorization... What features are you talking about, could you explain, please?
Overall, it's a pain working with Affinity. Faulty UX, weird UI (try to use keyboard to switch the input fields ie.), weird glitches all over the whole suite, often faulty output, weird crashes and lack of basic functionality makes it hard for any professional to use Affinity.
On the other hand: I'm loving Photo's inpainting tool. It's way better than Adobe's implementation and it's the last and single reason why I'm still using Affinity for some light retouching. Some filters are also quite nice. I'm not hating Affinity. I'm sad and disappointed how it didn't evolve after the years.
Bought Designer back in 2014/2015 from the App Store, later bought each single app for both platforms when the apps got released, just to support Serif reaching their goal. I'm using Adobe Suite again since I can't afford to test the software and pull my hair off all the time. Every new version introduces new bugs, plenty of bugs remain unfixed for years, version after version.
I'm losing hope, that's all.

Makes sense to hide things outside of the artboards, but you should absolutely have an option to show objects outside of them. AD layer system is a bit weird actually, and the idea to have pages and layers under the same panel seems wrong to me.  

I've been using affinity for couple months now, even though I still have an Adobe subscription because I use after effects, premier and animate a lot. What I can say is that affinity does the job, there are few missing features that I would like them to have. Adobe has lots of feature that I as a professional designer never use. One example is illustrator and photoshop 3D features, what a bunch of crap, it is very hard to use and the final result is just horrible. If I want work with 3D I go with Cinema 4D so I can achieve something that I will be happy with. Other example is the healing brush tool, it works when it is a easy fix otherwise it destroys the image. There are lots of features in adobe that are just not needed. 

I've been using affinity for couple months now, even though I still have an Adobe subscription because I use after effects, premier and animate a lot. What I can say is that affinity does the job, there are few missing features that I would like them to have. Adobe has lots of feature that I as a professional designer never use. One example is illustrator and photoshop 3D features, what a bunch of crap, it is very hard to use and the final result is just horrible. If I want work with 3D I go with Cinema 4D so I can achieve something that I will be happy with. Other example is the healing brush tool, it works when it is a easy fix otherwise it destroys the image. There are lots of features in adobe that are just not needed. 

I've been using affinity for couple months now, even though I still have an Adobe subscription because I use after effects, premier and animate a lot. What I can say is that affinity does the job, there are few missing features that I would like them to have. Adobe has lots of feature that I as a professional designer never use. One example is illustrator and photoshop 3D features, what a bunch of crap, it is very hard to use and the final result is just horrible. If I want work with 3D I go with Cinema 4D so I can achieve something that I will be happy with. Other example is the healing brush tool, it works when it is a easy fix otherwise it destroys the image. There are lots of features in adobe that are just not needed. 

I would like to vote for this feature as well!

Makes sense to hide things outside of the artboards, but you should absolutely have an option to show objects outside of them. AD layer system is a bit weird actually, and the idea to have pages and layers under the same panel seems wrong to me.  

I've tired that and woks just fine. But would be a lot easier to have a key shortcut that you could press and show objects outside of the drawing area without having to move layers outside of the artboards in the layer panel.

I also would like to vote for this feature, it is time saver and very useful.

The layer system in affinity designer and affinity publisher are a bit messy and cumbersome to use, this must be improved. Don't get me wrong I've been using these two products for a month and I am really enjoying working   with them, but the layers are cumbersome to use and having the pages in the same area of the layer is really confusing.

I am new to Affinity Creative Suit, but I am really impressed! I've been using adobe for at least 20 years, I've been paying for their subscription with no meaningful updates to justify the price tag simply because I had no other option. There are  lots of features that Affinity doesn't have yet, however they have innovated in so many ways. There are lots of things that are a lot easier to do on Affinity than in adobe.  So well done Affinity team!