Affinity is free now. Is it the right Publisher replacement for your office?

“Affinity is free now” has been doing the rounds in offices looking for a Publisher replacement. It is true, but it is worth being precise about what is free, because the detail changes whether it suits you.

What is actually free

In October 2025, Canva — which bought Affinity’s maker, Serif — released a new, single application simply called Affinity. It merges what used to be three separate programs (Photo, Designer and Publisher) into one app with three “studios”: Pixel, Vector and Layout. The Layout studio is the part that does what Publisher did.

Canva’s announcement calls it “a fully reimagined professional design app that combines photo editing, vector design, and page layout tools in one fast, responsive platform, now completely free for everyone.” The FAQ is equally direct: “Yes, Affinity really is free. You can use every tool in the Pixel, Vector, and Layout studios, plus all of the customization and export features, as much as you want, with no restrictions or payment needed.”

Three qualifications that matter for an office:

You need a Canva account. “To download Affinity, sign in with your Canva account (or create one for free).” A free account is enough. You need to be online once, to download and activate; after that Affinity says there is no requirement to be online.

One thing is behind a paid plan, and it is the AI. Canva’s AI tools appear inside Affinity only for people on a Canva premium plan. The FAQ is explicit that the design tools themselves are not: “No. You can access all of Affinity’s vector, layout, and pixel tools for free with just a free Canva account.”

“Affinity Publisher 2” is a different thing. The old v2 apps are a separate, paid product. Existing v2 licences stay valid and Serif is keeping the activation servers running, but those apps “won’t receive future updates.” So do not go looking for a free Affinity Publisher 2 — the free thing is the new combined app.

One compatibility note worth knowing before you commit: the new Affinity opens files made in v1 and v2, but v1 and v2 cannot open files saved by the new app. If some machines in your office are on the old version, move everyone or nobody.

It runs on Windows and macOS. iPad is listed as coming.

How it compares for a small office

Against Word. Word is already on your computer, your volunteers already know it, and for a text-heavy bulletin it is genuinely adequate. Where it struggles is precision: Word wants text to flow, and the moment you need a caption pinned to an exact spot next to an image that must not move, you are wrestling it.

Affinity is the opposite. You place an object on the page and it stays there. That is the Publisher way of working, which is why the Methodist Church’s guidance for churches calls Affinity “the closest direct replacement for Microsoft Publisher.” If your documents are laid out rather than typed — an order of service with two columns and a hymn number hanging in the margin — that difference is the whole argument.

Against Canva. Canva is faster for anything template-shaped and needs no installation. For a poster advertising the autumn fair, it will beat both of the others on time spent. It is weaker when you need exact control, precise print output, or a document that someone else has to edit next year without a Canva login. The Methodist guidance suggests most churches end up using both: Canva “for the quick, templated work and Affinity for the longer, more traditional documents.” That matches what we see.

Against staying put. If you are on a perpetual Office 2021 licence, Publisher keeps opening after October 2026 — it just stops getting fixes. That is a reprieve, not a plan.

The learning curve is real

This is where we would push back on the enthusiasm.

Affinity is a professional layout tool, and it is laid out like one. It has master pages, text frames, a proper colour picker, and a preferences panel with more in it than most people will ever need. Nothing about that is user-hostile, but it is not the ten-minute pick-up that Word is, and the person who has to learn it is often a volunteer doing this on a Tuesday evening.

Budget an afternoon to get comfortable, and be honest about who is doing it. A tool that only one person in the building understands is a risk of a different kind — the one where they move away and the bulletin stops.

The mitigation is to not start from a blank page. Open something already laid out, change the words, and learn the program gradually by poking at a document that already works.

One genuinely useful feature if you are leaving Publisher

Affinity opens PDFs, and can keep the text editable.

That matters because saving every .pub file as a PDF is the first thing you should do anyway, while Publisher still runs. Those archives are not necessarily dead ends. Affinity’s help explains the condition: “if text and vectors were kept editable on export, they remain editable in Affinity; if the PDF was flattened or rasterized, the content arrives as images.” Its import dialog offers Favor editable text over fidelity, which is exactly the trade-off named honestly, and it warns that missing fonts will be substituted.

So a PDF of last year’s carol service can often be reopened and edited rather than rebuilt. Test it on one file before you rely on it.

So: is it right for you?

Yes, if your documents are laid out rather than typed, you have someone willing to spend an afternoon learning, and you want the closest thing to how Publisher worked.

No, if the bulletin is made by a rota of volunteers with varying confidence, or it is mostly text in a fixed shape. Word will annoy you less.

Both, quite likely. Word or Canva for the quick things, Affinity for the document that matters.

If you would rather not start from an empty page in either, our template pack ships every design as a Word template and as an Affinity file, in US Letter and A4, so you can decide later without redoing the work. There is a free bulletin template if you want to try the Word side first, and a walkthrough of what to do before Publisher goes.