I agree that Affinity deserves mention here, since they are another player. Just slightly different than the other two and meeting a need in a variation of the theme. I do some graphic design and photo editing, but not enough to justify the large recurring price of Adobe products, so I went with Affinity and I've loved it. I'm not a profession artist, so I'd only ever really heard of Adobe, but went looking for something else simply because of cost.

EDIT: I think the main reason they don't mention Affinity is because Affinity capitalized on Adobe's price increase; the price increase is mentioned as a positive for Adobe's stock price in the article, though a lot of customers dislike it. It is an interesting case of Figma and Canva having better functionality for certain segments, and Affinity having better price to capabilities ratio for other segments. When Adobe was more of the only game in town, it was fine, but now others are carving into the space and competing on variations, providing better alternatives to different needs or prices.

I agree. Affinity started very strong and just keeps getting better. Adobe's subscription BS is going to hurt them in the long game.

I love affinity products but I wonder about their plan long term. With the current pay once, get updates for free model they will run out of customers at some point. Adobe sold upgrades back in the day, but that is not a possible path for Affinity, at least not if they mainly sell through the Mac App Store.

Something that you sometimes see is developers offering a bundle that includes v1 and v2 of an app where the price is (v1 cost + "upgrade fee"), which is automatically discounted to just the upgrade fee. This definitely works on iOS, so I figure it would also work on macOS.

I saw that done but it definitely feels hacky.

Well i am sure they are already preparing some form of v 2 thats going to be such upgrade.

My bet for features would be 1. Plugins API/scripting 2. Better panel management

I would too. I had never heard of either Figma nor Canva. I'm in the printing industry and if it does not have Pantone support, it's not really that useful. I have the Affinity suite for home use. It's getting better but not quite up to the Adobe standard.

Affinity apps are professional-grade and feature-rich but they don't match Adobe apps feature-by-feature. This is perfectly understandable, and the Affinity team are not trying to make clones of Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. But some users are clamouring for their must-have feature from Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign to make it into the Affinity apps. It will be impossible to satisfy all users and some won't switch.

The one Adobe app that has no rival is After Effects. DaVinci Resolve has motion design tools, but nothing to match the sheer features of After Effects (not to mention the vast ecosystem of plugins and the huge number of tutorials).