I am interested in hearing from users who have moved from InDesign to Affinity Publisher. I need to learn InDesign for work because that is what they use. InDesign is out of my budget. If I learn Affinity Publisher how transferable is it to InDesign? Are the interface and functions similar enough that I can do my learning on Affinity? I would love to stay with Affinity as what I have read it looks great for the price but my job will require me to use InDesign.
I’ve used InDesign since it was in beta release. About a year ago, I began switching back and forth on various projects between InDesign and Affinity Publisher.
That puts me in a different situation from you given that I needed learn Affinity Publisher based on my already very comfortable knowledge of InDesign. So from that perspective, there were enough differences between the two to require a learning curve, but I didn’t find it too steep or difficult. Some things were more different than others, but many things were much the same. InDesign is arguably more complicated because it has more features.
Your situation is not knowing either, so there will be a much steeper learning curve. You’ll barely know the ins and outs of Publisher then be expected to quickly pick up InDesign, which just might be a little confusing — maybe. Then again, maybe not. I don’t know. Starting out with Publisher will give you lots of the conceptual basic that are mostly the same in both applications — it’s the details where the confusion might arise
Adobe used to have a fully functional 30-day trial period, but they’ve reduced it to 7 days. Even so, you might want to practice on Publisher then, once you become fairly familiar with it, download the 7-day InDesign trial and really give it a workout during that week.
If you’re working on a laptop at work, would they let you bring it home to practice?
If you contact Adobe and explain that you need a longer trial for a training period - they might accommodate you.
Where Publisher is very good - it lacks a lot of controls that InDesign has for long documents.
They are similar in a way - but like anything they do their own thing in different ways.
If you need to learn InDesign - you can login and install the software on as many computers as you like.
As long as you don’t use both at the same time (in fact you cannot).
So go ahead and get the login from your IT for the Creative Cloud - install it on the computer at home.
You’ll be prompted to logout from other computers if it detects you’re running the same account on two different computers.
No need to buy it if your company has it.
The InDesign seat license subscription your employer buys (and the Adobe ID that goes with it), allows you to install and use a copy on your personal computer; just can’t run them both at the same time.
That has changed - as per my post above 
You can install creative cloud on as many devices as you like.
You can only use your login on one computer at a time.
Has anyone tried to run an Adobe license on two computers at the same time?
I wonder what would happen if I left my home computer on and Adobe open, then went to work…?
There must have been nights I’ve done that. Maybe those are the days when it feels like there is an Adobe minion on the other end of my subscription pushing random buttons to make things not work.
I can also visualize an instance where you might have a need to run two computers simultaneously, because I used to run Quark doing two (or more) projects on two computers side by side back in the late 90s. The second computer wasn’t networked, because back then Quark would ping the network and would deny the second machine even though both were mine.
It just asks you do you want to logout of the other computer.
There’s a thing that runs in the background to check the license and if it’s being used anywhere else. If it is it just logs you out in the background on the computer not being in use at the time.
If two computers are running it locks one out.
It’s not superstrict but once the bots catch up it’s pretty difficult to have it running on two computers at the same time.
That’s probably the best suggestion for the OP, if the company will allow it. At a previous job several years ago, the company allowed this if we brought our home computers into work and let the IT people install it there from their discs.
At the university where I worked recently, they had some sort of group license from Adobe that didn’t permit the same installation on multiple computers not being used simultaneously, as the individually purchased software licenses do. I suspect this had to do with a negotiated Adobe contract covering many thousands of installation instances, which might not be especially common.