Adobe Express vs. Pexels vs. Pixabay

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.

1. Small businesses with small or non-existent budgets still need assets to create content 2. Individual content makers or freelancers who need stock assets 3. Corporate eLearning wants to modernize and replace all old-fashioned, outdated, brightly lit studio photos with more realistic and relevant imagery that will resonate with modern audiences and learners.

Incentivized

This is perfect for any individual or organization that's working on a budget. You'll get stock photos that, while there's a more limited selection than the usual paid sites (Getty, iStock, etc.), are often just as high-quality. For smaller businesses and nonprofits where every dollar counts, I've found myself leaning on Pixabay quite a bit for stock images and, from time to time, will end up buying one of the linked commercial images when Pixabay doesn't have what I need. However, if you have a large budget for stock images, Pixabay will likely not be your best choice, as the paid services offer generous discounts for bulk credit purchases.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• High-resolution images – Pexels is full of images that are high enough in resolution to look beautiful on their own, but also high quality enough to be combined with other images without distracting pixelization
• Stock videos – other free stock sites are often limited to just images, but Pexels has a wide range of videos available as well, which we use to plus up decks
• Good search functions – while not as robust as some paid sites, Pexels' search functions make it pretty easy to track down what you need
• Licensing – it's very straightforward to know what you can and can't do with a Pexels photo, which protects my company and our clients

Incentivized

• Separate photos, illustrations, and vectors—Many competitors have these images all lumped together with a limited ability to sort through them, while Pixabay has a robust library of all of these, making it easy to find what you're looking for.
• Free, high-quality images and easy-to-understand licensing rules—Often a new client will have bad image usage habits, freely snagging any image off of google. Pixabay is an excellent resource to give clients a huge range of photos without the fear of getting into copyright trouble.
• Sound effects—Free, good-quality sound effects are surprisingly difficult to find amongst competitors, but Pixabay has them in their lineup as well.

• It could have a search bar which searches through other Adobe products (esp for Stock images, videos, audio) from within Adobe Express.
• It could make it so switching between Adobe products from within Adobe Express almost like a tab function is smooth.
• It could partner with other companies to allow for company specific events in exchange for valuable products or programs.

Incentivized

• I do think that the library should grow. For example, I was looking for an image of a living room with a fireplace and there were only a few options
• I get tricked sometimes because I see images I want to use but they are from some other company and they are paid
• Improve search understanding for multi-word searches

Incentivized

• One thing that kind of sticks out is that with so much to choose from, you can feel overwhelmed.
• Some of the photos I sometimes can find separately by googling. In the music business, it seems like many photos rotate on the web so there isn't as much to pick from.
• I didn't see an option for more vertical videos for use in Instagram or TikTok.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Pexels is extremely easy to use. Because it integrates with Canva, it makes our workflow smoother. This also saves us a significant amount of time running our business. The interface is also clean and easy to understand and follow, leading to an increase in productivity and much greater efficiency. Overall, this saves us time and money

Incentivized

A lot of times, it can be difficult to find things on a website. Pixabay search works extremely well. This way we don’t have to search and keep searching. The results along with the recommendations are very tailored and work well

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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!

Incentivized

Pexels has a few unique features that stand out, the most important being a 1-click download from the search results. No need to navigate to another page to find a "download" button. This reduces the time required to find and download an appropriate image. The search results load fast, with lazy loading, so there's no annoying pagination at the bottom. I often travel as I work, and at times my internet connection can be slow or unstable. This kind of feature may seem minor to some users, but when on a slower connection, it makes a big difference. If a search term is too broad, it can recommend related keywords to search for - this helps to find the right image faster.

Pixabay has given me the free vectors I need for my whiteboard animation videos, which aren't available on the other sites, in addition to the video and audio clips. They've been around for a long time and have stayed consistent, valuable, and easy to use throughout the years. They were my first site for free downloads and remain my favorite image download site to this day.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Positive: Time and working for a nonprofit with minimal staff this is essential.
• Negative: There are certain features that I need to find in other Adobe products like layer masking.
• Positive: It makes content creation less intimidating for our newer staff.

Incentivized

• Social media campaigns created with photos from Pexels achieves 40% higher engagement vs others.
• Thanks to faster and easier content sourcing provided by Pexels, our campaign generation period has dropped to an average of 4 hours, instead of 2 days.
• Their stock images adorn our offices.... and it's a much lore cheerful space for that reason. Staff are happier, and stay in the office longer.

Incentivized

• We don't lose any money trying to buy images
• Our videos get more views if we put the good quality images we find in Pixaby
• The posts we make with their images always get a professional aspect, and get more engagement from a diverse social media users.

Incentivized