Adobe Express is a web-based and mobile graphics arts and design app designed to help anyone create a variety of visual content quickly and easily. The app can also be a central repository for maintaining brand consistency, and we think it's especially good for helping you make social posts from templates. Express is accessible to users with little or no design experience, but it also has useful tools for professionals. That said, we recommend Canva more highly as our Editors' Choice winner for non-designers who need to make professional-looking visual content. Canva is even easier to use than Express if you have no training in design whatsoever.
How Much Does Adobe Express Cost?
Adobe Express has a freemium model. You can use it for free, but you get more features and content when you pay the $9.99-per-month or $99.99-per-year subscription fee. A 30-day free trial is available.
If you love the free version, the paid subscription is worth the upgrade because of all the added benefits. They include access to more templates, images, videos, music and sound effects, backgrounds, illustrations, brushes, textures, frames, icons, shapes, and the premium version of the Photoshop Express mobile app (which recently absorbed the sunsetted-but-fantastic Photoshop Camera). In addition, you get more AI credits—explained in our review of Firefly—access to Creative Cloud Libraries, 100GB of online storage, all premium templates, stock photos, fonts, branding tools, and more.
Express competes with other simplified, template-based (and now AI-driven) tools such as Canva and Microsoft Designer. A key benefit of Express, however, is having access to your Creative Cloud libraries and the suite’s collaboration and sharing features.
Similar Products
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Fresco
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe InDesign
Canva
Procreate
Serif Affinity Designer 2
CorelDraw Graphics Suite
Corel PaintShop Pro
Both Canva and Microsoft Designer have free versions. Canva Pro costs $15 per month or $120 per year. Microsoft Designer has a free version and is available with most Microsoft 365 subscriptions (starting at $69.99 per year) or as a paid stand-alone, which comes with Copilot Pro, an AI booster ($20 per month). Both are available for a free 30-day trial. Though Express is priced marginally higher than some of its competition, it boasts such a feature-rich environment that it's still a very good value.
How Do You Get Adobe Express?
Adobe Express is available as a mobile app for Apple and Android, and as a web app. You need iOS 16 or later for iPhone and iPad, and Android 10 or later for Android devices. For the web app, you need just an internet connection and a current web browser.
In April, Adobe launched an all-new, AI-driven Express app for mobile devices. Although iPhones and Android devices can use it right now, iPad users have to stick with the old app for a little longer.
Adobe's website has ample tutorials and demos, along with a well-organized user guide.
Firefly AI
Adobe Express now comes with Adobe Firefly generative AI under the hood, making it simple for anyone at any skill level to perform complex tasks more quickly and with ease. From just a text prompt, AI features let creators generate impressive images and layouts and insert, remove, or replace people and objects. Other AI features like Animate from Audio and Caption Videos automate complex processes into one-click Quick Actions.
Microsoft Designer was the first generative AI-powered graphics app we reviewed, and since then, the ability to create images from a text prompt that you write is no longer new. You can find it in tools such as Dall-E, Midjourney, OpenArt, and others. The widespread use of AI art generators further allows even non-designers to create more screen-based multimedia and social graphics faster and, more importantly, better.
As a seasoned design professional, I don’t believe that more and faster necessarily go with extraordinary and inventive when it comes to design. That said, most folks aren't creating profoundly innovative graphics with Express—and that’s the point. Express isn’t as much about creating meaningful, crafted designs as it is about making easy but catchy, ephemeral communications with on-trend graphics, cool photos, illustrations, and expressive type styling.
Hands On With Adobe Express
The best way to get to know the software is to have a little project. I created a quick poster for a fundraiser to save California redwoods.
I started with a blank poster, chose a background color, and added a rustic folded paper overlay. I added some type and thought it would be fun to use the AI type-styling to create letters that looked like redwood trees. The app rendered several choices with options to see even more, which was great.
Next, using the prompt, I asked for a happy California bear drinking a glass of red wine with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. Below is what I got on the first go.
Far from what I had in mind and a little scary, I tried again—this time adjusting the parameters to have a more rustic, less cartoony look, and it was pretty good.
I added an outline shape to the image and finished setting the type. It looks pretty good, considering how little time it took.
Sophisticated Training Wheels and Guardrails
I want to emphasize that Express is a marvelous learning tool for entry-level creatives because the app provides nearly fail-safe guardrails for experimenting with professionally built components. For example, you cannot mangle type in Express by stretching or distorting it disproportionately. The novice is way ahead of the game because of these safety features.
You do get some control over typographic finessing, including the ability to make line breaks using a soft return (Shift-Enter) and leading and kerning (letter spacing) parameters you can fuss with. But OpenType features or smart punctuation aren’t part of it. In this case, knowing the key configuration for a curled apostrophe on Mac or Windows is good.
Veteran typophiles may be troubled by the lack of OpenType features, micro kerning, or smart punctuation. They need to remember this app was not made for them. Text animation features, however, somewhat resemble those in PowerPoint and Keynote. In Express, they're simple and exciting. You get to them from under the Animation button to the right of the window. Styles include Typewriter, Dynamic, Flicker, Color Shuffle, Fade, and Slide, and each option has two or three sub-options.
The app’s image and photo enhancement features—which adjust contrast, brightness, saturation, highlights, shadow, warmth, and sharpness—are surprisingly robust. Other tools and filters control blur, color, and grayscale. Additionally, you get blending modes (limited to normal, multiply, and screen) and basic masking capabilities. A new Quick Action lets you easily convert an image to SVG format.
You may be relieved to know that, unlike some web-based apps, the keyboard commands in your muscle memory translate seamlessly to Adobe Express. For me, the nudge keys (arrow keys) are as indispensable as the undo keyboard shortcut and holding the option key to duplicate. If you're an experienced designer, you'll be happy to find those and other hotkeys in Express.
Where Is the Web Page Option?
After much searching, I’m happy to give you directions to find the option to create a web page, though it'd be better if Adobe had kept the selection more easily available. To find it:
Go to the Express dashboard
Click on the + in the purple circle at the top left
Look under Suggested Sizes; you may see a Webpage option here, but if not:
Click View All
Scroll down to the Marketing section
Go to the bottom and click Blog and Website
Go all the way to the bottom and click Webpage
Two new updates when making web pages are options to include GIFs and a Short Cover, a design element that lets you put a title and image at the top and which takes up roughly one-third of the visible page on a standard layout.
What’s New in Adobe Express for Web and Mobile?
We’re All on Artificial Turf Now
While the Adobe Express web app has sported the AI boost of Firefly for a while, the mobile version just got its wings in April. Having access to AI tools is now par for the course among all the top graphics arts and design app producers (Canva, Apple, Affinity, Figma, to name just a few). They all now leverage AI and machine learning for image editing, object recognition, content generation, and overall enhancement of user experience and workflow efficiency.
An All-New Mobile App
The new mobile version of Adobe Express brings new drag-and-drop video creation, expanded content including thousands of multipage templates, brand kit capabilities, new single-click Quick Actions, and ability to work across desktop and mobile.
The most arousing addition is the generative AI. You get text-to-image generation, text-to-template creation, generative fill, and the intoxicating live generative text styling. The expanded content scheduler is a great way to plan, preview, schedule, and publish to most social platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and TikTok.
TikTok and Chat
Though we’ll have to see how TikTok’s US-China legal quagmire pans out, in the meantime, a lot of content creators will delight in the new integration of TikTok’s Creative Assistant in Adobe Express. It's an AI presence that helps with the likes of creative research, ad analysis, and hashtag insight.
Express’ other new union, available to ChatGPT Plus, Teams, and Enterprise subscribers, is Adobe Express GPT. From within ChatGPT, you can choose to explore GPTs and look for Adobe Express. When enabled, you can use it to leverage Adobe Express within ChatGPT to make creative visual content.
Exciting New Add-ons
Add-ons are sub-apps that augment functionality. Just a few available for users' productivity and fun are add-ons that make stickers, maps, interactive flipbooks, custom gradients, generative patterns, QR and barcodes, and animated titles. You’ll also find helpful goodies like a translator, an accessibility checker, and an AI music generator.
Wishes Granted
Adobe did grant me some wishes from my wish list when I first reviewed Express in 2022. The app now has improved animation features and some business-based templates geared for non-social media visuals—charts, graphs (though not numerically live), worksheets, invoices, resumes, multipage documents, organizers, presentations (you can import a PowerPoint file), and infographics.
Express Yourself
Express is certainly of high value to those who simply need to create and produce a visual message quickly and effectively but who don't need or care about precise control over every aspect of their design. Professional designers who are accustomed to pro apps that give you unlimited options for building your vision (Adobe Illustrator and InDesign or those from Affinity and Corel, all of which are Editors' Choice winners) may find Express lacking and, at times, frustrating. If you're considering Adobe Express, we recommend looking at Editors' Choice winner Canva, too, because it's a little easier for non-professionals to use.
Geared for non-designers, Adobe Express is a capable and welcoming template-based tool for creating attractive online content quickly.
Like What You're Reading?
This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time.
Thanks for signing up!
Your subscription has been confirmed. Keep an eye on your inbox!
Sign up for other newsletters
About Shelby Putnam Tupper
Contributor
