Is Affinity Designer an Alternative to Indesign, or is there something better?

Question

I am looking for a package to replace Indesign and Illustrator. Here are some of my needs:

• high quality multi-page design
• useful for web, print, animation, video overlays, UV maps
• uses ICC profiles
• has full support for cmyk
• integrates a font manager
• exports perfect X-3 PDFs
• GPU acceleration

I am not interested in using headless libreoffice, markdown, LaTeX, prerendering CSS in phantomjs and exporting to pdf, using gimp, or anything associated with the Microsoft or Adobe brands. Quark Express is out. I am also not interested in cloud services because I require my data to remain on-site, so lucidpress is out as is designbold.

Can someone confirm that Affinity Designer works as well or better than InDesign? If not, what are your experiences? (I am in no way affiliated with Affinity.)

Answer 1

I am not an Affinity Designer user.

However I can tell you that it's not meant to be a DTP production tool and then cannot be considered as a viable alternative to Adobe Indesign.

It's a vector graphic editor, like Adobe Illustrator, and can be an alternative to it, but definitely not to Indesign.

Answer 2

DTP software Indesign excels when one wants to build (=define the layout, visual appearance and structure) a book, magazine or other multipage document using linked content. Affinity Designer do not support such long documents, but it can be useful to make the content as drawings. Of course, short documents can be built with AffinityDesigner => see it as a tool which is useful in many of the same tasks as Illustrator. Affinity D's sister Affinity Photo covers a subset of the functionality of Photoshop.

Serif, the producer of the Affinity series has still for sale their older DTP package PagePlus X9 which covers better long documents. Check it.