#layout-software — Public Fediverse posts

Adobe InDesign vs. Affinity Layout: I Built a Real Ebook in Both, and Only One Made Me Swear

For an increasing number of graphic designers among you, the question of whether Affinity is a genuine alternative to Adobe InDesign is no longer merely hypothetical. It actually became a budget question. When I laid out “The Ultimate Creative Business Playbook,” my own ebook, I swapped my usual InDesign workflow for Affinity’s Studio “Layout” for the entire project, start to finish, and paid attention to every place it made me stop and think.

Adobe InDesign has been my default layout tool for longer than I’d like to admit. It’s the app I reach for without thinking, the one where my hands already know where the panels live. So, for me, testing Affinity wasn’t a casual glance at a competitor. It was a deliberate attempt to break a habit and see what actually happens when the habit disappears. And of course, I also really enjoy trying out new software and learning new things.

So, Can Affinity’s Layout Persona Really Replace InDesign for a Real Book Project?

Short answer: for a text-and-image ebook without complex data automation, yes, mostly. Longer answer: it depends entirely on what kind of publisher you are and how much friction you’re willing to tolerate in exchange for not paying a monthly fee.

I built my playbook across dozens of pages, with chapter dividers, pull quotes, a table of contents, footnotes, and a fair number of custom graphics pulled straight from Affinity’s own vector and pixel tools. Not a magazine with forty contributors and a print deadline at 6 a.m. But a real, structured, professionally formatted document that needed to look like something a reader would pay for.

And it did look like that. That’s the part that surprised me most.

The Two Systems in Plain Terms

InDesign is a dedicated layout application. It does one job and has done it since 1999, refining paragraph composition, typography, and print production with a level of obsession that only comes from decades of professional feedback loops.

Affinity, since its relaunch under Canva in late 2025, isn’t three apps anymore. It’s one free application with three “personas”: Pixel (what used to be Affinity Photo), Vector (what used to be Affinity Designer), and Layout (what used to be Affinity Publisher). You switch between them inside the same document with a click: no exporting, no relinking files, and no juggling three separate programs.

That single-file structure changed my workflow more than any individual feature did. When I needed to touch up an image or adjust a vector icon mid-layout, I didn’t leave the document. I just switched personas and kept working.

Where Affinity’s Layout Persona Genuinely Holds Its Own

Let’s give credit where it’s due, because a lot of comparisons skip straight to complaining.

Master pages work well. Paragraph and character styles work well. Table of contents generation is solid and updates automatically as you edit. Basic threading of text frames across pages behaves exactly how you’d expect. None of this felt like a downgrade.

For a standard nonfiction ebook, a portfolio PDF, a lookbook, a report, or a single-author book with a linear structure, the Layout persona covers essentially everything you need. I didn’t hit a wall building chapter templates, applying consistent heading hierarchies, or setting up bleed and margins for print export. The tool simply did its job.

And here’s something most comparisons get backwards: Affinity’s EPUB support is actually stronger than InDesign’s in one specific area. Fixed-layout EPUB, the format that preserves a print-style design in ebook form, has barely been touched by Adobe in years. Affinity built proper reading-order controls into it, separate from layer order, which makes accessible ebook production noticeably less painful.

What’s Missing in Affinity

No GREP, No Data Merge, No Scripting Ecosystem

This is where things got frustrating. InDesign’s GREP find-and-replace lets you run regex-style pattern searches across an entire document in seconds. I use it constantly for cleaning up quote marks, fixing spacing errors, and batch-formatting repeated elements. Affinity has nothing equivalent yet.

Data Merge, InDesign’s tool for pulling structured data (think spreadsheets of names, prices, or product specs) directly into a layout, also doesn’t exist in Affinity. If your work involves catalogs, variable business cards, or any kind of templated bulk production, this alone might decide the question for you.

Scripting is the other gap. InDesign has a mature ExtendScript and UXP scripting ecosystem built over two decades. Affinity’s automation options are thin by comparison. If your studio runs custom automation scripts to speed up repetitive layout tasks, you’ll feel that absence immediately.

The Typographic Ceiling

I want to name this one directly, because it’s real and it’s specific: Affinity hits what I’ll call a Typographic Ceiling. This is the point where a layout tool’s text engine simply can’t reach the same level of polish, no matter how much time you throw at it.

Adobe InDesign’s paragraph composer looks at an entire paragraph at once when deciding line breaks, which produces noticeably more even spacing across a text block. Its optical margin alignment and OpenType feature handling, things like contextual alternates and fine-tuned kerning pairs, are still ahead of what Affinity offers. For body-heavy long-form books, that difference shows up in subtle rag patterns and spacing that a trained eye will catch, even if a casual reader won’t.

Pantone and Prepress Extras

Adobe pulled the built-in Pantone color libraries from InDesign years ago over licensing costs, so this isn’t purely an Affinity weakness anymore. Both tools now require workarounds for accurate spot color matching. Affinity supports CMYK and ICC profiles well, but if your printer demands exact Pantone-numbered swatches, expect to hunt for current values manually in either app.

What InDesign Still Does Better

Beyond the Typographic Ceiling and the automation gap, InDesign wins on ecosystem maturity. Templates, plugins, print-shop familiarity, and a twenty-five-year library of tutorials and community troubleshooting all favor Adobe. If you send a file to a commercial printer, they know InDesign’s PDF/X export settings intimately. Sending them an Affinity-produced PDF works fine technically, but you’re occasionally the first person asking a specific prepress question.

Adobe also just pushed its Firefly AI Assistant into InDesign in a public beta this past June, letting it apply brand updates, styling, and print-readiness checks across a document automatically. It’s early, and it’s a beta, but it signals where Adobe wants InDesign to go next: less manual formatting and more automated brand governance.

The Workflow Comparison: Building the Same Ebook Twice, Mentally

Here’s the part that actually matters for your decision. I’ll call the friction of moving between different modes inside a project the Persona Switch Cost. In InDesign, editing a photo means leaving the app entirely, opening Photoshop, editing, saving, and relinking. In Affinity, it means clicking the Pixel persona, editing in place, and clicking back to Layout. That cost dropped close to zero.

But there’s a second cost I hadn’t fully appreciated until I hit it: the Workaround Tax. Every time InDesign has a built-in feature that Affinity lacks, you pay in manual hours instead. No GREP meant I hand-corrected spacing inconsistencies that would have taken one regex pattern in InDesign. No Data Merge meant nothing, because my ebook didn’t need it, but if it had, I’d have paid dearly.

Net result for my specific project? Affinity’s Persona Switch Cost savings roughly offset InDesign’s typographic refinement advantage. It was close. For a project with heavier automation needs, the math tips hard toward InDesign.

What Changed Since I Built My Ebook

I finished the playbook in late 2025, right around when Affinity’s unified free app first launched. Since then, Affinity shipped meaningful updates. Version 3.1, released in March 2026, added Light UI, a faster raster-to-vector “Convert to Curves” tool, an updated raw engine, and document tab improvements. A June 2026 bug-fix release specifically patched EPUB export issues, including accessibility validation warnings that were tripping up DAISY compliance checks.

None of these updates closed the GREP or Data Merge gap. But the pace of releases tells me Serif’s team (now operating as Affinity by Canva) is iterating fast, faster than InDesign’s release cadence historically has moved. If you tested Affinity a year ago and walked away unimpressed, it’s worth another look now.

My Verdict: The Layout Sufficiency Threshold

I’m introducing one more term here because I think it’s the actual decision-making tool readers need: the Layout Sufficiency Threshold. This is the point where a tool’s feature set covers one hundred percent of a specific project’s requirements without forcing a manual workaround.

For single-author ebooks, portfolios, reports, and most self-published nonfiction, Affinity’s Layout persona clears that threshold. For catalog production, data-driven templated documents, or heavy regex-based text cleanup across long manuscripts, it doesn’t, not yet.

My prediction: within the next twelve to eighteen months, Affinity closes the scripting gap, at least partially, given how aggressively Canva has been layering AI automation into the app already. Data Merge is the harder problem, because it touches enterprise print workflows Adobe has owned for two decades. I don’t expect that gap to close before 2028.

Quick Comparison Table

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Affinity’s Layout persona good enough to replace InDesign for an ebook?

For a single-author, text-and-image ebook without data-driven templates, yes. I built a full ebook with it and shipped it without needing Adobe InDesign at any point.

What is the biggest missing feature in Affinity compared to InDesign?

GREP find-and-replace and Data Merge. Neither exists in Affinity yet, and both are heavily used in professional InDesign workflows for text cleanup and templated bulk production.

Does Affinity support EPUB export?

Yes, both reflowable and fixed-layout EPUB, and its fixed-layout support is currently more actively developed than InDesign’s, which hasn’t seen major updates to that format in years.

Is Affinity really free?

The core app is free with no subscription. Only the Canva-powered AI features, like generative fill and background removal, require a paid Canva Pro account.

Should print professionals switch from InDesign to Affinity?

Not entirely, not yet. If your work depends on Pantone-precise prepress workflows, scripting automation, or Data Merge, InDesign’s ecosystem is still more mature and more universally trusted by commercial printers.

Will Affinity catch up to InDesign’s typography engine?

It’s closing the gap steadily. Based on the release pace since the 2025 relaunch, I’d expect meaningful typographic improvements within the next year, though InDesign’s paragraph composer will likely stay ahead for text-dense, long-form work a while longer.

Browse WE AND THE COLOR’s Technology and Graphic Design sections for more.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Adobe InDesign vs. Affinity Layout: I Built a Real Ebook in Both, and Only One Made Me Swear

For an increasing number of graphic designers among you, the question of whether Affinity is a genuine alternative to Adobe InDesign is no longer merely hypothetical. It actually became a budget question. When I laid out “The Ultimate Creative Business Playbook,” my own ebook, I swapped my usual InDesign workflow for Affinity’s Studio “Layout” for the entire project, start to finish, and paid attention to every place it made me stop and think.

Adobe InDesign has been my default layout tool for longer than I’d like to admit. It’s the app I reach for without thinking, the one where my hands already know where the panels live. So, for me, testing Affinity wasn’t a casual glance at a competitor. It was a deliberate attempt to break a habit and see what actually happens when the habit disappears. And of course, I also really enjoy trying out new software and learning new things.

So, Can Affinity’s Layout Persona Really Replace InDesign for a Real Book Project?

Short answer: for a text-and-image ebook without complex data automation, yes, mostly. Longer answer: it depends entirely on what kind of publisher you are and how much friction you’re willing to tolerate in exchange for not paying a monthly fee.

I built my playbook across dozens of pages, with chapter dividers, pull quotes, a table of contents, footnotes, and a fair number of custom graphics pulled straight from Affinity’s own vector and pixel tools. Not a magazine with forty contributors and a print deadline at 6 a.m. But a real, structured, professionally formatted document that needed to look like something a reader would pay for.

And it did look like that. That’s the part that surprised me most.

The Two Systems in Plain Terms

InDesign is a dedicated layout application. It does one job and has done it since 1999, refining paragraph composition, typography, and print production with a level of obsession that only comes from decades of professional feedback loops.

Affinity, since its relaunch under Canva in late 2025, isn’t three apps anymore. It’s one free application with three “personas”: Pixel (what used to be Affinity Photo), Vector (what used to be Affinity Designer), and Layout (what used to be Affinity Publisher). You switch between them inside the same document with a click: no exporting, no relinking files, and no juggling three separate programs.

That single-file structure changed my workflow more than any individual feature did. When I needed to touch up an image or adjust a vector icon mid-layout, I didn’t leave the document. I just switched personas and kept working.

Where Affinity’s Layout Persona Genuinely Holds Its Own

Let’s give credit where it’s due, because a lot of comparisons skip straight to complaining.

Master pages work well. Paragraph and character styles work well. Table of contents generation is solid and updates automatically as you edit. Basic threading of text frames across pages behaves exactly how you’d expect. None of this felt like a downgrade.

For a standard nonfiction ebook, a portfolio PDF, a lookbook, a report, or a single-author book with a linear structure, the Layout persona covers essentially everything you need. I didn’t hit a wall building chapter templates, applying consistent heading hierarchies, or setting up bleed and margins for print export. The tool simply did its job.

And here’s something most comparisons get backwards: Affinity’s EPUB support is actually stronger than InDesign’s in one specific area. Fixed-layout EPUB, the format that preserves a print-style design in ebook form, has barely been touched by Adobe in years. Affinity built proper reading-order controls into it, separate from layer order, which makes accessible ebook production noticeably less painful.

What’s Missing in Affinity

No GREP, No Data Merge, No Scripting Ecosystem

This is where things got frustrating. InDesign’s GREP find-and-replace lets you run regex-style pattern searches across an entire document in seconds. I use it constantly for cleaning up quote marks, fixing spacing errors, and batch-formatting repeated elements. Affinity has nothing equivalent yet.

Data Merge, InDesign’s tool for pulling structured data (think spreadsheets of names, prices, or product specs) directly into a layout, also doesn’t exist in Affinity. If your work involves catalogs, variable business cards, or any kind of templated bulk production, this alone might decide the question for you.

Scripting is the other gap. InDesign has a mature ExtendScript and UXP scripting ecosystem built over two decades. Affinity’s automation options are thin by comparison. If your studio runs custom automation scripts to speed up repetitive layout tasks, you’ll feel that absence immediately.

The Typographic Ceiling

I want to name this one directly, because it’s real and it’s specific: Affinity hits what I’ll call a Typographic Ceiling. This is the point where a layout tool’s text engine simply can’t reach the same level of polish, no matter how much time you throw at it.

Adobe InDesign’s paragraph composer looks at an entire paragraph at once when deciding line breaks, which produces noticeably more even spacing across a text block. Its optical margin alignment and OpenType feature handling, things like contextual alternates and fine-tuned kerning pairs, are still ahead of what Affinity offers. For body-heavy long-form books, that difference shows up in subtle rag patterns and spacing that a trained eye will catch, even if a casual reader won’t.

Pantone and Prepress Extras

Adobe pulled the built-in Pantone color libraries from InDesign years ago over licensing costs, so this isn’t purely an Affinity weakness anymore. Both tools now require workarounds for accurate spot color matching. Affinity supports CMYK and ICC profiles well, but if your printer demands exact Pantone-numbered swatches, expect to hunt for current values manually in either app.

What InDesign Still Does Better

Beyond the Typographic Ceiling and the automation gap, InDesign wins on ecosystem maturity. Templates, plugins, print-shop familiarity, and a twenty-five-year library of tutorials and community troubleshooting all favor Adobe. If you send a file to a commercial printer, they know InDesign’s PDF/X export settings intimately. Sending them an Affinity-produced PDF works fine technically, but you’re occasionally the first person asking a specific prepress question.

Adobe also just pushed its Firefly AI Assistant into InDesign in a public beta this past June, letting it apply brand updates, styling, and print-readiness checks across a document automatically. It’s early, and it’s a beta, but it signals where Adobe wants InDesign to go next: less manual formatting and more automated brand governance.

The Workflow Comparison: Building the Same Ebook Twice, Mentally

Here’s the part that actually matters for your decision. I’ll call the friction of moving between different modes inside a project the Persona Switch Cost. In InDesign, editing a photo means leaving the app entirely, opening Photoshop, editing, saving, and relinking. In Affinity, it means clicking the Pixel persona, editing in place, and clicking back to Layout. That cost dropped close to zero.

But there’s a second cost I hadn’t fully appreciated until I hit it: the Workaround Tax. Every time InDesign has a built-in feature that Affinity lacks, you pay in manual hours instead. No GREP meant I hand-corrected spacing inconsistencies that would have taken one regex pattern in InDesign. No Data Merge meant nothing, because my ebook didn’t need it, but if it had, I’d have paid dearly.

Net result for my specific project? Affinity’s Persona Switch Cost savings roughly offset InDesign’s typographic refinement advantage. It was close. For a project with heavier automation needs, the math tips hard toward InDesign.

What Changed Since I Built My Ebook

I finished the playbook in late 2025, right around when Affinity’s unified free app first launched. Since then, Affinity shipped meaningful updates. Version 3.1, released in March 2026, added Light UI, a faster raster-to-vector “Convert to Curves” tool, an updated raw engine, and document tab improvements. A June 2026 bug-fix release specifically patched EPUB export issues, including accessibility validation warnings that were tripping up DAISY compliance checks.

None of these updates closed the GREP or Data Merge gap. But the pace of releases tells me Serif’s team (now operating as Affinity by Canva) is iterating fast, faster than InDesign’s release cadence historically has moved. If you tested Affinity a year ago and walked away unimpressed, it’s worth another look now.

My Verdict: The Layout Sufficiency Threshold

I’m introducing one more term here because I think it’s the actual decision-making tool readers need: the Layout Sufficiency Threshold. This is the point where a tool’s feature set covers one hundred percent of a specific project’s requirements without forcing a manual workaround.

For single-author ebooks, portfolios, reports, and most self-published nonfiction, Affinity’s Layout persona clears that threshold. For catalog production, data-driven templated documents, or heavy regex-based text cleanup across long manuscripts, it doesn’t, not yet.

My prediction: within the next twelve to eighteen months, Affinity closes the scripting gap, at least partially, given how aggressively Canva has been layering AI automation into the app already. Data Merge is the harder problem, because it touches enterprise print workflows Adobe has owned for two decades. I don’t expect that gap to close before 2028.

Quick Comparison Table

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Affinity’s Layout persona good enough to replace InDesign for an ebook?

For a single-author, text-and-image ebook without data-driven templates, yes. I built a full ebook with it and shipped it without needing Adobe InDesign at any point.

What is the biggest missing feature in Affinity compared to InDesign?

GREP find-and-replace and Data Merge. Neither exists in Affinity yet, and both are heavily used in professional InDesign workflows for text cleanup and templated bulk production.

Does Affinity support EPUB export?

Yes, both reflowable and fixed-layout EPUB, and its fixed-layout support is currently more actively developed than InDesign’s, which hasn’t seen major updates to that format in years.

Is Affinity really free?

The core app is free with no subscription. Only the Canva-powered AI features, like generative fill and background removal, require a paid Canva Pro account.

Should print professionals switch from InDesign to Affinity?

Not entirely, not yet. If your work depends on Pantone-precise prepress workflows, scripting automation, or Data Merge, InDesign’s ecosystem is still more mature and more universally trusted by commercial printers.

Will Affinity catch up to InDesign’s typography engine?

It’s closing the gap steadily. Based on the release pace since the 2025 relaunch, I’d expect meaningful typographic improvements within the next year, though InDesign’s paragraph composer will likely stay ahead for text-dense, long-form work a while longer.

Browse WE AND THE COLOR’s Technology and Graphic Design sections for more.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Adobe InDesign vs. Affinity Layout: I Built a Real Ebook in Both, and Only One Made Me Swear

For an increasing number of graphic designers among you, the question of whether Affinity is a genuine alternative to Adobe InDesign is no longer merely hypothetical. It actually became a budget question. When I laid out “The Ultimate Creative Business Playbook,” my own ebook, I swapped my usual InDesign workflow for Affinity’s Studio “Layout” for the entire project, start to finish, and paid attention to every place it made me stop and think.

Adobe InDesign has been my default layout tool for longer than I’d like to admit. It’s the app I reach for without thinking, the one where my hands already know where the panels live. So, for me, testing Affinity wasn’t a casual glance at a competitor. It was a deliberate attempt to break a habit and see what actually happens when the habit disappears. And of course, I also really enjoy trying out new software and learning new things.

So, Can Affinity’s Layout Persona Really Replace InDesign for a Real Book Project?

Short answer: for a text-and-image ebook without complex data automation, yes, mostly. Longer answer: it depends entirely on what kind of publisher you are and how much friction you’re willing to tolerate in exchange for not paying a monthly fee.

I built my playbook across dozens of pages, with chapter dividers, pull quotes, a table of contents, footnotes, and a fair number of custom graphics pulled straight from Affinity’s own vector and pixel tools. Not a magazine with forty contributors and a print deadline at 6 a.m. But a real, structured, professionally formatted document that needed to look like something a reader would pay for.

And it did look like that. That’s the part that surprised me most.

The Two Systems in Plain Terms

InDesign is a dedicated layout application. It does one job and has done it since 1999, refining paragraph composition, typography, and print production with a level of obsession that only comes from decades of professional feedback loops.

Affinity, since its relaunch under Canva in late 2025, isn’t three apps anymore. It’s one free application with three “personas”: Pixel (what used to be Affinity Photo), Vector (what used to be Affinity Designer), and Layout (what used to be Affinity Publisher). You switch between them inside the same document with a click: no exporting, no relinking files, and no juggling three separate programs.

That single-file structure changed my workflow more than any individual feature did. When I needed to touch up an image or adjust a vector icon mid-layout, I didn’t leave the document. I just switched personas and kept working.

Where Affinity’s Layout Persona Genuinely Holds Its Own

Let’s give credit where it’s due, because a lot of comparisons skip straight to complaining.

Master pages work well. Paragraph and character styles work well. Table of contents generation is solid and updates automatically as you edit. Basic threading of text frames across pages behaves exactly how you’d expect. None of this felt like a downgrade.

For a standard nonfiction ebook, a portfolio PDF, a lookbook, a report, or a single-author book with a linear structure, the Layout persona covers essentially everything you need. I didn’t hit a wall building chapter templates, applying consistent heading hierarchies, or setting up bleed and margins for print export. The tool simply did its job.

And here’s something most comparisons get backwards: Affinity’s EPUB support is actually stronger than InDesign’s in one specific area. Fixed-layout EPUB, the format that preserves a print-style design in ebook form, has barely been touched by Adobe in years. Affinity built proper reading-order controls into it, separate from layer order, which makes accessible ebook production noticeably less painful.

What’s Missing in Affinity

No GREP, No Data Merge, No Scripting Ecosystem

This is where things got frustrating. InDesign’s GREP find-and-replace lets you run regex-style pattern searches across an entire document in seconds. I use it constantly for cleaning up quote marks, fixing spacing errors, and batch-formatting repeated elements. Affinity has nothing equivalent yet.

Data Merge, InDesign’s tool for pulling structured data (think spreadsheets of names, prices, or product specs) directly into a layout, also doesn’t exist in Affinity. If your work involves catalogs, variable business cards, or any kind of templated bulk production, this alone might decide the question for you.

Scripting is the other gap. InDesign has a mature ExtendScript and UXP scripting ecosystem built over two decades. Affinity’s automation options are thin by comparison. If your studio runs custom automation scripts to speed up repetitive layout tasks, you’ll feel that absence immediately.

The Typographic Ceiling

I want to name this one directly, because it’s real and it’s specific: Affinity hits what I’ll call a Typographic Ceiling. This is the point where a layout tool’s text engine simply can’t reach the same level of polish, no matter how much time you throw at it.

Adobe InDesign’s paragraph composer looks at an entire paragraph at once when deciding line breaks, which produces noticeably more even spacing across a text block. Its optical margin alignment and OpenType feature handling, things like contextual alternates and fine-tuned kerning pairs, are still ahead of what Affinity offers. For body-heavy long-form books, that difference shows up in subtle rag patterns and spacing that a trained eye will catch, even if a casual reader won’t.

Pantone and Prepress Extras

Adobe pulled the built-in Pantone color libraries from InDesign years ago over licensing costs, so this isn’t purely an Affinity weakness anymore. Both tools now require workarounds for accurate spot color matching. Affinity supports CMYK and ICC profiles well, but if your printer demands exact Pantone-numbered swatches, expect to hunt for current values manually in either app.

What InDesign Still Does Better

Beyond the Typographic Ceiling and the automation gap, InDesign wins on ecosystem maturity. Templates, plugins, print-shop familiarity, and a twenty-five-year library of tutorials and community troubleshooting all favor Adobe. If you send a file to a commercial printer, they know InDesign’s PDF/X export settings intimately. Sending them an Affinity-produced PDF works fine technically, but you’re occasionally the first person asking a specific prepress question.

Adobe also just pushed its Firefly AI Assistant into InDesign in a public beta this past June, letting it apply brand updates, styling, and print-readiness checks across a document automatically. It’s early, and it’s a beta, but it signals where Adobe wants InDesign to go next: less manual formatting and more automated brand governance.

The Workflow Comparison: Building the Same Ebook Twice, Mentally

Here’s the part that actually matters for your decision. I’ll call the friction of moving between different modes inside a project the Persona Switch Cost. In InDesign, editing a photo means leaving the app entirely, opening Photoshop, editing, saving, and relinking. In Affinity, it means clicking the Pixel persona, editing in place, and clicking back to Layout. That cost dropped close to zero.

But there’s a second cost I hadn’t fully appreciated until I hit it: the Workaround Tax. Every time InDesign has a built-in feature that Affinity lacks, you pay in manual hours instead. No GREP meant I hand-corrected spacing inconsistencies that would have taken one regex pattern in InDesign. No Data Merge meant nothing, because my ebook didn’t need it, but if it had, I’d have paid dearly.

Net result for my specific project? Affinity’s Persona Switch Cost savings roughly offset InDesign’s typographic refinement advantage. It was close. For a project with heavier automation needs, the math tips hard toward InDesign.

What Changed Since I Built My Ebook

I finished the playbook in late 2025, right around when Affinity’s unified free app first launched. Since then, Affinity shipped meaningful updates. Version 3.1, released in March 2026, added Light UI, a faster raster-to-vector “Convert to Curves” tool, an updated raw engine, and document tab improvements. A June 2026 bug-fix release specifically patched EPUB export issues, including accessibility validation warnings that were tripping up DAISY compliance checks.

None of these updates closed the GREP or Data Merge gap. But the pace of releases tells me Serif’s team (now operating as Affinity by Canva) is iterating fast, faster than InDesign’s release cadence historically has moved. If you tested Affinity a year ago and walked away unimpressed, it’s worth another look now.

My Verdict: The Layout Sufficiency Threshold

I’m introducing one more term here because I think it’s the actual decision-making tool readers need: the Layout Sufficiency Threshold. This is the point where a tool’s feature set covers one hundred percent of a specific project’s requirements without forcing a manual workaround.

For single-author ebooks, portfolios, reports, and most self-published nonfiction, Affinity’s Layout persona clears that threshold. For catalog production, data-driven templated documents, or heavy regex-based text cleanup across long manuscripts, it doesn’t, not yet.

My prediction: within the next twelve to eighteen months, Affinity closes the scripting gap, at least partially, given how aggressively Canva has been layering AI automation into the app already. Data Merge is the harder problem, because it touches enterprise print workflows Adobe has owned for two decades. I don’t expect that gap to close before 2028.

Quick Comparison Table

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Affinity’s Layout persona good enough to replace InDesign for an ebook?

For a single-author, text-and-image ebook without data-driven templates, yes. I built a full ebook with it and shipped it without needing Adobe InDesign at any point.

What is the biggest missing feature in Affinity compared to InDesign?

GREP find-and-replace and Data Merge. Neither exists in Affinity yet, and both are heavily used in professional InDesign workflows for text cleanup and templated bulk production.

Does Affinity support EPUB export?

Yes, both reflowable and fixed-layout EPUB, and its fixed-layout support is currently more actively developed than InDesign’s, which hasn’t seen major updates to that format in years.

Is Affinity really free?

The core app is free with no subscription. Only the Canva-powered AI features, like generative fill and background removal, require a paid Canva Pro account.

Should print professionals switch from InDesign to Affinity?

Not entirely, not yet. If your work depends on Pantone-precise prepress workflows, scripting automation, or Data Merge, InDesign’s ecosystem is still more mature and more universally trusted by commercial printers.

Will Affinity catch up to InDesign’s typography engine?

It’s closing the gap steadily. Based on the release pace since the 2025 relaunch, I’d expect meaningful typographic improvements within the next year, though InDesign’s paragraph composer will likely stay ahead for text-dense, long-form work a while longer.

Browse WE AND THE COLOR’s Technology and Graphic Design sections for more.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

I've been producing a twice-yearly newsletter for the Dartmoor Tinworking Research Group since 2015. I started with Windows Publisher and continued out of reluctance to learn to use anything else (i.e. laziness!). Now support for Publisher is being withdrawn (just like that) and I need to find an alternative. I've had a go at Scribus but does anyone know of any freeware more similar to Publisher?

#DTP #LayoutSoftware #Freeware #Shareware #OpenSource #Scribus

I've been producing a twice-yearly newsletter for the Dartmoor Tinworking Research Group since 2015. I started with Windows Publisher and continued out of reluctance to learn to use anything else (i.e. laziness!). Now support for Publisher is being withdrawn (just like that) and I need to find an alternative. I've had a go at Scribus but does anyone know of any freeware more similar to Publisher?

#DTP #LayoutSoftware #Freeware #Shareware #OpenSource #Scribus

I've been producing a twice-yearly newsletter for the Dartmoor Tinworking Research Group since 2015. I started with Windows Publisher and continued out of reluctance to learn to use anything else (i.e. laziness!). Now support for Publisher is being withdrawn (just like that) and I need to find an alternative. I've had a go at Scribus but does anyone know of any freeware more similar to Publisher?

#DTP #LayoutSoftware #Freeware #Shareware #OpenSource #Scribus

I've been producing a twice-yearly newsletter for the Dartmoor Tinworking Research Group since 2015. I started with Windows Publisher and continued out of reluctance to learn to use anything else (i.e. laziness!). Now support for Publisher is being withdrawn (just like that) and I need to find an alternative. I've had a go at Scribus but does anyone know of any freeware more similar to Publisher?

#DTP #LayoutSoftware #Freeware #Shareware #OpenSource #Scribus

I've been producing a twice-yearly newsletter for the Dartmoor Tinworking Research Group since 2015. I started with Windows Publisher and continued out of reluctance to learn to use anything else (i.e. laziness!). Now support for Publisher is being withdrawn (just like that) and I need to find an alternative. I've had a go at Scribus but does anyone know of any freeware more similar to Publisher?

#DTP #LayoutSoftware #Freeware #Shareware #OpenSource #Scribus

They started to enshittify Affinity Publisher. I bought this some years ago in order to avoid the rent for Adobe #Indesign and it did work very much to my satisfaction until now. It seems the new owner Canvas is pulling the same stunt as Adobe did back then. It's "free" but account is mandatory and you "may opt in(to)" a premium rental plan. Any recommendations for other #DTP software out there?

#enshittyfication #dtpsoftware #layoutsoftware

They started to enshittify Affinity Publisher. I bought this some years ago in order to avoid the rent for Adobe #Indesign and it did work very much to my satisfaction until now. It seems the new owner Canvas is pulling the same stunt as Adobe did back then. It's "free" but account is mandatory and you "may opt in(to)" a premium rental plan. Any recommendations for other #DTP software out there?

#enshittyfication #dtpsoftware #layoutsoftware