How Affinity & Cavalry Are Eating Adobe's Lunch

For decades, Adobe was design. Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign — these weren't just tools, they were the industry standard, the lingua franca of creative professionals worldwide. If you were a serious designer, you paid the Adobe tax. There was no real alternative. Adobe knew it, and priced accordingly.

That era is ending. Slowly, then all at once, a growing number of designers — from freelancers to studio professionals to entire agencies — are abandoning Creative Cloud in favor of leaner, faster, and in many cases entirely free alternatives. At the forefront of this shift are two names: Affinity by Serif, and Cavalry. Together, they represent not just a cheaper option, but a genuinely better experience for a large and growing segment of the design community.

Affinity's suite — Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo, and Affinity Publisher — covers the core creative workflow that most designers live in: vector illustration, photo editing, and page layout. The apps are fast, stable, and genuinely powerful. They handle complex files with a snappiness that Adobe users who've suffered through laggy Illustrator sessions will immediately notice and appreciate.

In 2024, Canva (which acquired Affinity in 2022) made the entire Affinity V2 suite completely free. No subscription, no trial, no hidden fees. This was a seismic move. Overnight, the core barrier that had kept designers locked into Adobe — switching cost plus the sunk-cost psychology of a subscription already paid — evaporated. A student, a freelancer in a developing market, or a small studio owner could now access professional-grade tools at zero cost. The implications for Adobe's subscriber base were immediate and serious.

While Affinity targets the static design workflow, Cavalry is making waves in motion design — a space long dominated by Adobe After Effects. Cavalry is a procedural motion design application built from the ground up with a modern, node-based approach to animation. Instead of wrestling with After Effects' notoriously steep learning curve and archaic timeline interface, Cavalry lets designers build dynamic, data-driven animations with a logic that actually makes sense to visual thinkers.

Motion designers who've made the switch to Cavalry frequently describe the experience as liberating. Complex animations that would require convoluted expressions and nested comps in After Effects can be built procedurally in Cavalry with a clarity that makes the work easier to iterate on and maintain. Add in Cavalry's free tier for indie creators and its significantly lower paid tiers compared to After Effects, and you have a tool that's genuinely disrupting Adobe's motion design monopoly from the ground up.

Adobe's decline in designer affection isn't happening in a vacuum — it's the direct result of a string of decisions that have steadily eroded goodwill. The subscription model, introduced in 2013, was the original sin. Adobe forced its entire userbase from perpetual licenses to a recurring monthly fee with no option to own the software outright. For designers in lower-income countries, this pricing is simply prohibitive. For freelancers with variable income, it's a source of constant financial anxiety. The resentment never fully healed.

Then came the price increases. Adobe has raised Creative Cloud prices repeatedly over the years, often with minimal notice and without commensurate feature improvements. Designers who felt they were already overpaying watched their bills climb higher while the software they depended on remained bloated, slow, and largely unchanged in its fundamental architecture. The value equation — already strained — began to break.

Nothing damaged Adobe's reputation with the design community more than the attempted $20 billion acquisition of Figma in 2022. Figma had become the beloved heart of collaborative UI/UX design — an independent, designer-first tool that felt like the antithesis of everything Adobe represented. When Adobe announced it was buying Figma, the reaction from the design community was visceral and immediate: fear, anger, and a widespread assumption that Adobe would absorb and eventually kill or compromise the tool they loved.

The acquisition was ultimately blocked by European and UK regulators in late 2023 on competition grounds. But the damage was done. The attempt itself revealed Adobe's strategy — not to innovate, but to acquire. Designers who had remained ambivalent about Adobe's direction now had a concrete case study in why the company couldn't be trusted as a steward of the tools they depended on. Figma emerged from the episode more independent and more beloved than ever, while Adobe emerged looking predatory and creatively bankrupt.

Adobe's software has a well-earned reputation for being slow to launch, hungry for RAM, and prone to crashes at the worst possible moments. Every major update seems to introduce as many new bugs as it fixes. Designers working on tight deadlines have learned to dread Creative Cloud update notifications — not with excitement, but with dread. This death-by-a-thousand-papercuts reliability problem has made the switching cost argument less and less persuasive over time.

Adobe's foray into generative AI with Firefly has also been met with deep ambivalence. While technically impressive, Adobe's terms of service updates around AI — particularly the 2024 controversy over language suggesting Adobe could train on user content — triggered a furious backlash. Designers with commercial clients became suddenly uncertain about whether their work was legally safe inside Adobe's ecosystem. Adobe clarified and walked back the language, but the trust damage was significant. In a community that already felt nickel-and-dimed, this felt like one step too far.

We are not yet in a post-Adobe world, but we are clearly in a post-Adobe-monopoly world. The company still has enormous market share, deep enterprise contracts, and tools like Premiere Pro and After Effects that still lack fully equivalent alternatives for professional video and broadcast work. For now, many designers maintain a hybrid approach — Affinity for print and illustration, Figma for UI, Cavalry for motion, and Adobe only where there's no good substitute.

But the trend lines are undeniable. Every year, a new cohort of design students graduates having learned on Affinity instead of Illustrator. Every year, more motion designers discover Cavalry and quietly cancel their After Effects subscriptions. Every year, Adobe raises prices on a shrinking pool of loyal users who feel increasingly trapped rather than genuinely satisfied. The tools that win the next generation of designers will be the ones that treat them as creative partners, not subscription revenue lines — and right now, Affinity and Cavalry are doing exactly that.