Free, open-source alternatives to Affinity

Affinity, from Canva, brings together what used to be three separate apps: Affinity Photo for raster editing, Affinity Designer for vector illustration and Affinity Publisher for page layout. It now ships as a single app in which you switch between pixel, vector and layout studios while working on the same document. The open-source apps below each cover one of those studios.

GIMP handles the pixel side, with layers, masks, selections and retouching tools for editing photos and raster artwork. Inkscape covers vector illustration, logos and diagrams, with SVG as its native format. Scribus does the layout work, arranging text frames and images into brochures, magazines and print-ready PDFs. None of them merges all three jobs into one document, so a project that mixes them means moving files between apps.