Adobe InDesign vs. Pixabay vs. Scribus

Adobe InDesign is very well-suited to creating professional-looking page designs. If you want a newspaper or magazine to have attractive pages that go beyond simple templates, InDesign is the best option out there, to my knowledge. It's less suited to scenarios where people without page design skills are responsible for creating pages, as it requires some training and skills to use effectively.

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

• Customization - With Adobe InDesign, as well as many other applications in the Adobe Creative Suite, I can fully customize my workspaces and save different workspaces. This makes it easy to navigate through my project and have the panels and tools I need easily accessible and configured based on my project needs.
• Styles - Adobe InDesign has character styles, object styles, and tables styles. This speeds up my workflows and allows me to easily apply the same format across multiple elements. This is super helpful, especially when working with length documents.
• File compatibility - I can easily export my files into so many different file types.
• The Book feature - This feature is really helpful when creating books or very long documents with multiple sections.

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.

• Not naturally a WYSIWYG display (this is an option, and doesn't always work as intended)
• Moving images and photos around while holding an additional key
• Layers or objects are not easily clickable behind other objects.
• Adobe InDesign does require some fair system resources to work smoothly

• 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've had great experiences with the product and plan to continue to use it. It has been my go-to product for designing and creating materials. I have had great luck with it and have been able to create all of the needed marketing materials that have been requested for our company.

Incentivized

If you know what you are doing it is an amazingly granular and powerful application. You can control pretty much any aspect of the design and layout of your documents and make changes globally and rapidly. But, if you don't know what you are doing...you will be staring at your screen in bewilderment for a long time. You can learn it, but be ready for a hefty time investment.

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

I've needed Adobe InDesign team very little which is a bonus in and of itself.

One of the advantages of Adobe InDesign is it is faster and less glitchy than Microsoft Word.

Adobe support is ok but not great. Chat support often doesn't initially understand the question at-hand and it takes awhile to get to the right agent. Phone support has long wait times, and though I've had more luck there, it does take quite a time investment if you are looking for help. However, Adobe does have some online learning solutions available as well as a knowledgebase for frequently asked questions. If you're looking to learn how to use the platform, there are lots of resources which can typically be found in a few Google searches. If you have a technical issue with the system, that's going to be a bit more of a time investment as far as getting a tech's assistance to resolve the problem.

Incentivized

Attending Adobe MAX each year is extremely valuable.

Incentivized

The online training works well and is not wholly necessary as it is user-friendly and you can learn by doing.

Implementation was smooth and easy.

Microsoft products do not match the aesthetic tools that [Adobe] InDesign offers, cannot support the customizable options available for export, and do not produce documents with as high a degree of accessibility. That said, they do have their place in collaboration in a team- I'd consider Office to be the first step and [Adobe] InDesign to be the final product.

Incentivized

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

Working in a cloud environment makes it easy to scale and share resources.

• A great ROI for time in my small architectural practice, [especially] when a design has been updated and a report needs to be submitted. We can be submitting many reports that all look similar, clean and beautiful. We just save as the file and replace the images with more updated images. This way the client finds it easy to navigate updated reports, as many as they can be.

• 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