When comparing Affinity Publisher vs Calibre, the Slant community recommends Calibre for most people. In the question“What are the best tools for creating EPUB books?” Calibre is ranked 1st while Affinity Publisher is ranked 2nd. The most important reason people chose Calibre is:
Features include metadata editing and downloading, coverpage downloading., book tagging and categorization, webpage-to-ebook converter for popular websites, etc. Lots of plugins available to extend functionality.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro One-off reasonable price, with no upgrades or monthly subs
Pro Very comprehensive set of features
Pro Has become sufficiently popular over the past year that there is an excellent knowledge base
You can quickly find solutions, tutorials, etc. online when you need help. Contrast this to Scribus, which despite its rich feature set, is often unintuitive and awkward to use, and help from other users sometimes difficult to find.
Pro Lots of Resources to Learn
Serif's forums, videos and other sites offer good resources to learn this tool, which has a very intuitive interface.
Pro Most intuitive interface
Pro Powerful book management software, very customizable and scriptable
Features include metadata editing and downloading, coverpage downloading., book tagging and categorization, webpage-to-ebook converter for popular websites, etc. Lots of plugins available to extend functionality.
Pro Cross-platform
Calibre is available for Linux, OS X, and Windows, 32-bit or 64-bit.
Pro Open Source
Pro Portable
Calibre has an optional portable build that can be stored on external media along with the users library. It can then be opened from the external media on any windows device.
Cons
Con No EPub options (yet?)
Con No Linux version available
Unfortunately, there is no Linux version available in 2021, despite of numerous requests of the users.
Con Average, non-power users might find the interface somewhat daunting
The interface, while functional is not the most attractive or intuitive which may put some people off and discourage their use.