Affinity Designer is part of the Affinity suite trio, which also includes Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher. Serif Affinity’s programs make great alternatives to Adobe’s three most popular software: Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. However, like the Photoshop features missing in Affinity Photo, there are plenty of Illustrator tools you can’t find in Affinity Designer. That doesn’t make Affinity Designer a bad tool. In fact, it offers a great interface and plenty of helpful tools for digital design. But before you make the jump, you should know what to expect from the tools and what won't be available.

7 Image Trace

You can’t convert raster to vector

Illustrator’s Image Trace tool is one of the most helpful tools in vector creation. If you don’t know what it is, it allows you to turn bitmaps or raster images into scalable vectors, usually in just a few seconds.

Affinity doesn’t offer any type of bitmap or raster tracing tool, meaning that if you want to turn your raster images into vectors, you must hand trace the edges with the Pencil tool. This takes a lot more time and is reliant on your steadiness in drawing with the Pencil tool. Having said this, Affinity Designer 2.5, which was updated in May 2024, does come with an updated Pencil tool for smoother drawing and fewer anchor points needed to achieve great results.

To access automatic image tracing as an Affinity Designer user, you'll need to use a third-party creative tool instead, such as Inkscape or Photopea.

6 Converting shapes into guides

Affinity only has horizontal and vertical guides

There are many uses for guides in your creative software, whether you’re using them for page margins, or to keep spacing consistent across your design, or for any other reason. Most design software — including Illustrator and Affinity Designer — will allow you to implement horizontal and vertical guides throughout your document. These are normally implemented by dragging down from the upper or left-most margins and dropping the guide where you need it on your artboard.

Adobe Illustrator gives you the extra option of creating guides based on vector shape paths you draw yourself. These allow you to implement other types of guides at other angles besides only horizontal and vertical options, and it also lets you place guides that don’t cover your entire artboard.

There’s no such custom guide tool in Affinity Designer. You can only create traditional guides. A small workaround would be drawing shape paths and using the paths themselves as guides, but you must remember to delete them before you finalize your project.

5 Blend tool

Distributing objects evenly along a path

The Blend tool is one of the best tools available in Illustrator. You can use it to distribute objects along a singular path, or create gradients and drop shadows that pull out from a path of graphics (along with the Offset Path tool).

Affinity doesn’t have a native blend mode or a built-in way to distribute items along paths. This means you must manually place objects and items where you want them to go, which is a painstakingly long process, and it is easy to get wrong.

There is a workaround for this, but it won’t be applicable for every use you require it for. If you want to distribute shapes along a path line, you should find a font or typeface that uses shapes instead of letters — such as a Wingdings font. Then draw your path line and select the Artistic Text tool and hover the cursor over the path to reveal the typing on a path option. Then type your shape-letters and you'll be able to customize the tracking and kerning until your shapes are distributed as you’d like them. You can see how long-winded this technique is compared to Illustrator’s Blend tool though, which does it all in seconds and can be applied to any object of choice.

4 Offset Path tool

It’s just easier in Illustrator

Illustrator’s Offset Path tool offers a fun way to outline text or graphics, often allowing you to continue editing them while the Offset Path adheres to new edits. This tool is often used by sticker or logo designers, and anyone wanting to add a border background around an element without drawing it from scratch.

Affinity Designer offers a similar tool with the Contour tool, but it doesn’t work as efficiently as Illustrator’s Offset Path option. Successfully using Affinity’s Contour tool requires duplicating and reorganizing layers and using a multitude of tools to get the job done.

3 Working on elements outside artboards

Affinity only lets you work on the artboard and not outside of it

Maybe this feature can be seen as a way to teach artboard organization and file management. Many vector designers use the extra space around the artboard as a scrapbook of materials they’re working on, variations of models, color swatches, and anything else that helps the project come into itself.

Many professional designers don’t share this messy artboard view, so it’s often a secret held close to our chests, and Affinity Designer’s lack of ability to use the extra area as a pasting board might be enough to curb the habit for most. Or it might annoy designers who like having all their elements nearby, available to customize and compare varieties easily.

2 Vertical Type tool

Affinity Designer only offers horizontal text or typing on a path

Although it’s not very often one needs to type vertically, since it’s hard to read and not that common in design, the option is nice to have. Adobe Illustrator has a dedicated Vertical Type tool nestled among its other text tools, but Affinity Designer doesn’t offer a vertical typing feature at all.

The workaround for this is to type each letter separately, then use the Move tool to reorganize them so they read vertically. This is a long and labor-intensive process, and something that could be easily implemented as a native tool in Designer.

Affinity has plenty of other typographic features, all of which became available as part of a panel tool in the May 2024 update, rather than as previously offered as a floating tool that got in the way across your workspace.

1 Opening documents with multiple artboards

You can only start with one artboard in Affinity

This is a minor issue, since Affinity Designer allows you to add extra artboards inside a new document. But if you already know when creating a new document that you want more than one artboard, there’s no way to open more than one in Affinity.

In Adobe Illustrator, when creating a new document, along with all the other settings for size, color profile, and orientation, there is a box to choose how many artboards will open on your document. The default is 1, but you can add as many as you like with the arrow buttons, before selecting Create to have them all appear in your workspace. From Illustrator’s workspace, you’ll find an Artboard panel with the layers panel, as well as an Artboard tool in the toolbox. From these tools, you can add, resize, move, and delete any artboards.

Affinity Designer only gives you the option to open with or without a single artboard — letting you design directly in the workspace as a faux artboard if you choose not to create an artboard upon document creation. There is a dedicated Artboard tool in Affinity’s toolbox. Using that, you can add a new artboard using your existing artboard dimensions, or you can also choose new artboard dimensions to create a neighboring artboard of a different size. You can resize your artboards by dragging any exterior edges, but they can’t be moved around or reordered.

Affinity Designer is great, but it’s not Illustrator

I love having Affinity Designer as an Illustrator alternative. It offers some great tools for vector design, logos and brand design, and digital illustration — all without a costly Adobe subscription. However, the features missing from Affinity Designer are really features that make Illustrator shine, for me. Illustrator’s easy way to add and move new artboards around your workspace helps keep things organized better, as well as the ability to paste items outside the artboard to keep in view, without being on the final working document. Image Trace and the Blend are two of Illustrator’s most popular tools, and it’s hard to deal with a full Affinity Designer workflow without access to those features.