Adobe’s Creative Cloud is a collection of 20+ desktop and mobile apps and services for photography, design, video, web, UX and more. Explore your creativity with software like Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator. Voted #1 in graphic design software.
Pros:
- Industry-standard and highly recommended by creative experts.
- Complete package with more than 20+ creative apps.
- Free trial available. No credit card needed.
Cons:
- Only available for a monthly or annual subscription.
- Less suitable for beginner or amateur use due to the relatively high cost.
More About Adobe Creative Cloud
Adobe Creative Cloud Reviews
Find out what each expert had to say about Adobe Creative Cloud.
George Kern
✓ Adobe Suite
Adobe’s Creative Cloud (Photoshop, Illustrator etc) (successor to the Creative Suite Master Collection) is the industry standard and is easy to recommend based on the amount of features the collection of software has to offer. New users may be overwhelmed by the number of features each application has but once you used to their software and its interface you get a pretty good feel for how their other software will behave and how to use it because of similar look and feel of the workspaces. A lot of people might be turned off by the recurring monthly subscription costs but for professional usage, it’s just another cost of doing business.
Elizabeth Moosburner
✓ Adobe Creative Cloud
As the design department for a full-service digital marketing agency, our team is responsible for creating the assets used in landing pages, ads, multimedia projects, websites, and branding guides. To handle all of these digital mediums, we rely on the versatile design tools in the Adobe Creative Suite — primarily Illustrator.
Illustrator gives graphic designers the freedom to create, draw, scale, and add dimension to high-resolution vector art. From basic shapes to advanced 3D elements, Illustrator helps our agency create pixel-perfect designs for every marketing campaign.
Jase Rodley
✓ Adobe Suite
Of course, there is going to be no better alternative than the leader of the pack Adobe suite, which offers everything you want, and is the likely the package you would be used in most workplaces.
Although there is little to offer in the way of competition for professional editing, there are some great phone Apps which allow enough of a resource to the more casual editor.
✓ Instrafitter
One of my current favourites being instrafitter, which allows you to put a number of border styles around your photo, given them the perfect vintage feel of a polaroid, and adding an extra pop to your photos when sharing.
Nicholas Boris
I’ve been using Adobe programs such as Photoshop, Lightroom, and Premiere Pro for 7 years now.
✓ Adobe Lightroom
✓ Adobe Photoshop
I started off in Lightroom when I began editing photos for a super car event company. With any of these softwares they can be daunting at first look. However, I quickly found myself navigating through the menu’s and finding a flow that was pushing out hundreds of photos a day.
I attended formal military training on photo, video, design and editing. For these tasks the US Navy provided the Adobe Suite. As I grew as a photographer and videographer I also purchased the Adobe Suite so I could pursue freelancing outside the Navy.
Since I’ve started I have found that Adobe’s cross compatibility has made jumping from program-to-program exceptionally easy. I don’t have personal experience with any other software, however, there are always conversations in my filmmaker group as to which is best. I say Adobe because it’s what I know and I have a work flow where I can push product out in a timely manner. Another artist I know uses Final Cut Pro because it’s what he started on. They both will produce a beautiful end result at the end of the day.
With the Adobe Suite you get a mass collection of softwares that will help you accomplish any project.
Jeremy Lessaris
✓ Adobe Creative Cloud
Adobe dominates the professional graphics software world with Creative Cloud that includes a comprehensive suite of design, video, animation, web, and other media applications. They are platform-agnostic (Mac/PC) and run on nearly every device you can think of. Adobe is the standard for nearly all professional creative projects. However, when it comes to digital design including website, app, and UI design (not development) I would also include Figma which offers the best balance between features, usability, and overall performance.
Honorable mention:
Going beyond software I would also recommend collaboration tools for working on ideation with clients. Our secret sauce here at Designed.co is a Jamboard. We love whiteboards but this is next level collab and allows our teams to be just as effective remote as they are in the office.
Nicole Garcia
I’m a graphic artist and I also handle a creative team that makes the bulk of the graphic designs you see on our site. In Most Craft, we utilize 2 software for our images, and I truly recommend all of them. These are Photoshop and the Canva photo editor.
✓ Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is a mammoth image editing software that everyone is familiar with. In our company, we use this to retouch, make complex edits, and make new images out of the old ones. Depending on your skill level, anything is possible with this software. However, it can be challenging if you’re working with dozens of images on a tight schedule. That’s why utilizing the other tool is a great big thing.
✓ Canva
We use the Canva photo editor for efficiency. The broad template collection you can easily access is a lifesaver. It saves you time and effort because the design template and stock images are easily available for you to tweak. Whether it be for a social media post or banner for your site, creating one in Canva is a breeze.
Orsolya Kis
✓ Adobe Photoshop
For photo editing and any kind of photo manipulation, I would highly recommend Adobe Photoshop. The Adobe Cloud has a few more photography-related apps, but I strongly believe that Photoshop is the most important one.
I love the fact that Adobe keeps improving the app! I have been using it for 18 years now, and Photoshop has come a long way over the years, constantly updating. It’s very useful for both graphic designers and photographers. Basically, Photoshop allows creatives to do anything you can imagine. You can turn very simple photos into masterpieces, you can do realistic collages, so it is an absolute must for designers. Also, there are lots of online tutorials, so it’s easy to learn, even for beginners.
Madhsudhan Khemchandani
For over two years, I have been using Photoshop and Canva for eye-catching images.
✓ Adobe Photoshop
Photoshop allows me creating new images, editing screenshots and exporting as a web which compress the images without losing the quality. The reduced size is essential in the web world. The only downside of Photoshop is that it’s not free, and you also need a good computer to perform some tasks.
✓ Canva
I use Canva to create amazing thumbnails for my YouTube videos. The tool allows creating images which users want to click on. Canva is a free tool, but it offers a paid version which comes with many great backgrounds, elements, and images to work without finding the images on Google.
✓ Snapseed
In terms of mobile, I use Snapseed as it offers some of the great tools such as auto-enhance, dual exposure, curves etc. If an image is taken on my mobile, I edit and compress the image in Snapseed and upload to my website straight away.
Nicholas Allen
✓ Adobe Suite
For graphic design, no one beats out Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop. They’ve been doing graphic design since the beginning. That said, both are pretty hefty pieces of software with steep learning curves and can be rather expensive. Adobe’s creative suite is a great option for getting the best and keeping it cheap.
✓ Canva
As a professional, I find myself also using Canva pretty consistently as well. Their tool is fast and browser-based with a nice mobile app too. I use them for most of my social media and website graphics that aren’t fully custom or when I’m short on time. Canva is also great when you need to create a large number of graphics in a single sitting. I’ll make a month’s worth of graphics for a client’s social media calendar in about an hour for instance. Oh, let’s not forget the library of stock images from Canva with image templates and the ability to post directly to your social media.
Roxanne Brown
✓ Adobe Creative Cloud
For a solution that covers most broad-based graphic design needs, most industry professionals including us, would recommend Adobe’s offerings. Adobe has become the standardized format for the industry, pushing giants like QuarkXpress and others to the wayside. Unfortunately, like many companies, Adobe has moved to a SaaS (Software As A Service) model that a lot of graphic artists/designers grumble about. Gone are the days where you can just buy software in a box and update when you wanted or needed to. With the new model (which isn’t exactly new because they rolled out the Creative Suite SaaS model back in 2012), you’re forced to pay a monthly fee for a subscription to their family of applications.
There are plenty of good alternatives to Adobe products, but they’re not conveniently all under one roof – or company. If you don’t mind using apps from various companies, there are even quite a few free options out there. These programs may be compatible and open certain files but may cause problems when you want to save to a specific proprietary file format.
Adobe Creative Cloud FAQ
What is Adobe Creative Cloud?
Adobe’s Creative Cloud is a collection of 20+ desktop and mobile apps and services for photography, design, video, web, UX and more.
Is Adobe Creative Cloud any good?
We asked 53 creative experts on most have recommended to use Adobe Creative Cloud. It’s by far the most popular solution for graphic designers.
Is Creative Cloud free to use?
Adobe Creative Cloud doesn’t have a free plan. You can either sign up for a monthly or an annual plan.
What’s included in Creative Cloud?
Adobe Creative Cloud includes 20+ apps like Photoshop, InDesign and Premiere Rush. You only get access to Adobe Fonts, Adobe Portfolio, Creative Cloud Libraries and cloud storage space.