Canva brings Affinity's pro creative suite to iPad for free, AI features stay paid

Canva brings the full Affinity suite to iPad

Canva has released Affinity for iPad, putting the professional creative tools it acquired along with Serif — vector illustration, photo editing, page layout and sketching — on Apple's tablet at no cost for individual users. According to The Verge, the launch follows last year's relaunch of Affinity as a single all-in-one desktop application, and the iPad edition carries the same professional capabilities in an interface rebuilt around touch and stylus input.

A Sketch Studio aimed at pen-first work

The headline addition is a new Sketch Studio built for freehand drawing. As The Verge reports, it is designed to shorten the path from rough sketch to finished vector, with tools for masking and for automatically converting loose drawings into cleaner geometric shapes.

The app also leans on Apple Pencil Pro hardware features, including pressure sensitivity, tilt, barrel roll, squeeze and hover gestures, giving artists finer control over tools and shortcuts. Affinity's head of product design, Neil Ladkin, said in the announcement that every development decision was made by people who create on the iPad themselves, from how the Apple Pencil responds to where tools are placed, and that the app was built by people who repeatedly rotate the canvas just to get a single line right.

One file across every discipline

Sketches, vector designs, photo edits and layout projects can all live in the same .af file, which reduces the amount of exporting, converting and remaking needed between tasks. The Verge notes that the app also remains compatible with all major design file formats, so it can slot into existing workflows alongside other software.

Canva has folded its AI Studio into the app as well. The features on offer include Generative Expand for extending backgrounds, automatic motion blur and noise reduction, and image resolution scaling.

Free core, subscription AI

Affinity for iPad's core sketch, vector, photo editing and layout tools are entirely free for individuals, though they require a free Canva account. The AI toolset is optional and sits behind a Canva Pro subscription, which The Verge reports starts at $18 per month.

The Serif acquisition, two years on

When Canva bought Affinity's developer Serif in 2024, some users worried the suite would drop its one-time license model, absorb Canva's generative AI technology, and lose much of what distinguished it from rival design software provider Adobe. Canva and Serif pledged at the time not to force anyone into a subscription, and The Verge reports that the pledge still holds — the expansion to iPad keeps the core tools free even as the AI layer carries a price.

Why it matters

The release sharpens the competitive pressure on Adobe, whose professional iPad applications carry subscription costs. A complete vector, raster, layout and sketch toolchain that costs nothing for individuals makes the iPad a more credible standalone platform for professional design work rather than just a companion to a desktop machine.

It is also a test of how far a promise can stretch after an acquisition. Much of Affinity's appeal rested on not being Adobe: perpetual licenses, no forced subscriptions, no AI woven through everything. Canva has kept the letter of that pledge while moving the AI layer into paid territory, and how users react to that split may shape how other acquired creative products handle the same tension.