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
Painter
Score 9.9 out of 10
N/A
Painter is a digital art and painting application, from Corel Corporation.
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Pricing
Adobe Express
Corel Painter
Editions & Modules
Free
$0.00
Premium
$9.99 / $99.99
per month
Teams
$9.99
per month per user
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe Express
Painter
Free Trial
Yes
No
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.
Every team I work with gets the Express welcome and walkthrough and becomes a permanent Adobe Express user. I have my own workflow when creating content for social, and it is great when others I am working with can hop on and follow the same workflow. We can collaborate on projects, schedule posts, and manage brand assets easily from our own devices. As long as we have access to the same files, we can build campaigns faster and more easily, onboard new designers, and scale our impact on social media.
Corel Painter does have a lot of great brushes, and they do emulate real art supplies very well. Especially the thick paint is well done. But unfortunately there are so many functional and UX bugs that overall it is just horrible to work with. When contacting customer support about it, they really seem clueless about the seriousness of the situation, and clueless about what proper UX is in general. They have tried to make it work a bit like Photoshop, which is a good move but then some things are absolutely not intuitive at all and they are definitely missing the mark horribly with so many issues. I would highly recommend using Photoshop instead, though you'll have to download them separately; it also offers a lot of great brushes nowadays and works much much smoother without all those aggravating bugs of Painter. The price of Corel Painter is just not at all worth all these horrible bugs.
I have used Adobe Express to help maintain my creative catalogs and files, brand management by saving my color scheme palettes, to have full access to its free assets and huge template library.
The main business issue is brand consistency and accessibility, and Adobe Express helps greatly with both of those by providing an option to create brand libraries for various projects, and it has a huge Adobe font catalog to accommodate basically every brand and project scope.
I like how I am able to create a project folder for storing various iterations of a graphic or logo, and being able to view thumbnails of each iteration below the current graphic that I am working on. Plus, it also allows for easy thumbnail rearrangement for exporting selected images in the order of my choice. And it has many editing tools such as a generative AI tool using prompts to help create original art, and both the Effects and Animation tools have many options for colorations and animations. Plus other awesome and easy to use tools such as the Quick Action tool that easily removes backgrounds, and other tools like the Resizing, Quick Replace, Translate, Bulk Create.
Another feature of Adobe Express that I like is its ability for video creation and editing which is available via a mobile device or desktop computer. The footage editing process is very easy and allows for only one track for both video and audio.
Adobe Express allows for the project assets to be either imported via ones on file systems or straight from the Adobe Royalty-Free assets which includes; videos, audio/music, graphics, photos and even a voice overs capability using a "Text-to-Voice" option. And after the video has been created Adobe offers its very easy "Download" option, where you can select what file type that you want the project to export as.
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
If it wasn't quite clear yet, I'll state it again: the usability of Corel Painter is, simply put, horrid. And I am not talking about rendering, lagging, etc., it is not even all that bad there. I am talking about the weird issues like being unable to move a brush into a custom brush palette when you work on a second screen, like being unable to move the software onto the second screen in the first place unless you separate all the palettes and the windows (and if nobody tells you upfront there is no way of knowing because the manual doesn't state this at all), and then having to drag all your separate windows and palettes over one by one every time your computer wakes up again, and they won't really want to move to the other screen but only through a tiny corner of your screen, and the fact that you have to scroll through lists and lists of fonts but can't search and when you apply this font, add another piece of text the font jumps back to the default font of all the text already applied even when you haven't selected any of the text. Just to name a very small few.
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.
It was really hard to get them to understand what I was having problems with. It was hard to get the message through that Painter has an unacceptable amount of functional and UX bugs. When I finally talked to someone who was easier to communicate with, he was very stoic about the situation, like they didn't really care about the awful amount of bugs.
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!
Corel Painter has support to multiple OS and across all the devices. Coloring and multi layer imaging works very well. The new enhanced brush settings and the redesigned brush libraries.
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
