Adobe Creative Cloud Express (formerly Adobe Spark) is a task-based, web and mobile product used to create and share rich multimedia content – from social media posts and stories to invitations to marketing materials like logos, flyers and banners.
$0
Affinity Photo
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Affinity Photo is a software solution for photography and creative professionals, a fully-loaded photo editor integrated across macOS, Windows and iOS, from Serif Ltd.
$21.99
one-time fee
Pricing
Adobe Express
Affinity Photo
Editions & Modules
Free
$0.00
Premium
$9.99 / $99.99
per month
Teams
$9.99
per month per user
iPad Edition
$21.99
one-time fee
Mac Edition
$54.99
one-time fee
Windows Edition
$54.99
one-time fee
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe Express
Affinity Photo
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Contact Adobe directly for Enterprise pricing plan details.
Adobe Express is a mighty little program. To be clear, it won't do everything you can do in Illustrator or Premiere, but it will do about 75% of it, which is plenty about 75% of the time. It's not going to replace the Creative Cloud programs for pro users, but it will allow pro …
Basically, I truly find that Adobe Express is pretty much great for all professional scenarios because it offers many creative options and comes with an extremely robust collection of assets (stock photos, videos, music, and graphics) all of which can be edited and enhanced within Adobe Express if needed. One project that it was quite helpful with utilizing was creating a logo for one of our clients. I was able to create the prototype and then offer several iterations of said logo to help the client quickly decide on its official branding. By having all of my assets neatly stored right on my Adobe Express project folder it was very easy for me to remain organized when creating various outputs.
For single-person teams or very small teams, I think Affinity Photo is great as it has a one-off cost and no ongoing subscriptions. If people are familiar with the Adobe products it might take a period of adjusting to Affinity Photo. It might also be overkill for some people's needs. But it does offer everything and room to grow. So weighing up what you need to do with photos and seeing if it fits is important.
Almost all of Adobe Photoshop's features for a fraction of the cost. It was an easy decision for our organization.
The interface and most of the features are an almost mirror image of Photoshop. Flat fees instead of high yearly fees are much more desirable for our small team.
They have a great support forum for the little one-offs that aren't quite like the Photoshop app, or don't have the same exact name as Photoshop. The forum really helps when this happens. The YouTube support from the company and other users has been very helpful as well.
I use Sketch as my primary vector design tool. Affinity allows me to take a .ai, .eps, or other proprietary format and convert it to .svg for use/manipulation with Sketch and back. I can't say enough for this feature. It has helped me stay less pigeon-holed into Adobe products, which have lacked innovation for a long time in my opinion.
I foresee Adobe Express becoming the "go-to" platform for everyone except professional, high-level designers. It is a relatively easy-to-use tool that allows users to create a wide variety of visuals quickly. Because it is a template-driven tool, the in-house design team has the ability to make brand kit available to keep visuals on point
The user interface is pretty straightforward to use. It has easy to navigate navigations, and the canvas UX is also pretty good. One thing i would like to add it to use shortcuts to add elements on canvas. Like if I am on canvas and I press 'T' on my keyboard the text box should be added automatically
For a regular user of Photoshop, Affinity is a very easy transition. It has all the same features and once you adapt to it, and it provides a quick return on investment.
Overall, the Adobe Creative Cloud Express is worth a try and may be a good fit for many organizations and businesses. At a monthly rate, the cost is not prohibitive, but the tools are somewhat limited and not necessarily worthwhile when compared to standard applications and software that are often available free or through a package of services commonly found on workplace computers.
I don't have direct experience with a member of Affinity's support, but their forum and YouTube videos that other users have made make it relatively easy to find similar features in Affinity that are available in Photoshop or Illustrator. The differences are negligible for our small, yet experienced team.
I think Adobe Express is a bit behind Canva, but as an Adobe Community Expert, I try to provide as much feedback as I can to help improve Adobe Express. ADobe Express does a better job than InShot and a few other apps, but isn't quite there against Canva, I'm sorry to say!
I think Affinity Photo is on par with Adobe PhotoShop. They are very similar products with both bringing many features users need. The main reason I picked Affinity Photo was its pricing of it. I didn't require Adobe products all the time. And felt they weren't offering me as much value.
Adobe Creative Cloud Express is included with an Adobe Creative Cloud account. Our company has a corporate team membership so it is nice to have a professional and powerful tool that anyone on our team can use for free. The pricing structure of giving the tool away for free will be fundamental to users utilizing the tool. Similar tools, such as Canva, cost significantly more but do not offer the same features
The professional services for Adobe Creative Cloud Express is top notch and should be highly commended. I am thoroughly impressed with how far Adobe has come. In the past, I had several issues with how something were handled, but in the past few years things have been better than ever and they get no complaints from me
