Adobe Express Review: An Accessible and Potent Set of Creative Tools

The free version of Adobe Express provides limited access to Adobe fonts, AI generation features, and stock content, along with standard editing tools and a ton of templates. Just keep in mind that your projects will show a watermark if you use any premium content. This tier offers 5GB of cloud storage, 10 days' worth of version history, and the ability to schedule one social post at a time.

If you like the free version, the Premium plan ($9.99 per month or $99.99 per year) is worth the upgrade. A 30-day trial of this tier is available. This level gets you access to significantly more fonts, stock content, and templates, along with brand management features. Account limits increase to three scheduled posts, 30 days' worth of version history, and 100GB of storage. Finally, you get an allocation of 250 AI credits per month—we explain how these work a bit later. Teams accounts ($7.99 per person per month or $79.99 per person per year) unlock 24/7 tech support and even higher storage and usage allocations.

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. 

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Both Canva and Microsoft Designer have free versions; the former's no-cost account is more generous with resources than that of Express. Canva Pro costs $15 per month or $120 per year. Microsoft Designer is available with most Microsoft 365 subscriptions (starting at $99.99 per year) or in a bundle with Copilot Pro ($20 per month), which unlocks more AI credits. A 30-day trial is available for premium versions of Canva and Microsoft Designer.

Adobe's generative AI tool, Firefly, now underpins Express. It makes it simple for you to perform complex tasks with little effort. With just a text prompt, for example, you can call on Firefly to generate impressive images, layouts, text effects, and now even videos. AI features also let you insert, replace, or remove people and objects in images. Still other AI features, such as Animate from Audio and Caption Videos, turn complex processes into one-click Quick Actions. 

Like many generative AI tools, Adobe requires you to spend credits for most tasks. The free version of Express comes with a very limited number of credits (Adobe doesn't specify an exact number), while a paid subscription comes with 250 credits per month. If you pay for Adobe Creative Cloud Pro ($69.99 per month), you get 4,000 credits per month. Generating an image costs 20 credits, and 720p24 video costs 50 credits per second. Creating a template costs just one credit. If you need to generate a lot of content, Adobe offers a Firefly Premium account ($299.99 per month), which gets you 50,000 credits per month.

Firefly is far from alone in its ability to generate AI content. Microsoft Designer can create stills, while Canva can do both images and videos. And that's not even to mention all the AI chatbots with image and video generation features.

Ultimately, AI art generators allow you to create more screen-based multimedia and social graphics faster, regardless of your experience. But (from the perspective of a seasoned design professional) more and faster don't necessarily go with extraordinary and inventive when it comes to design. Of course, you likely won't rely on Express to create profoundly innovative graphics—and that’s not its purpose. Express isn’t as much about creating meaningful, crafted designs as it is about making easy but catchy, ephemeral communications with cool photos, expressive type styling, illustrations, and on-trend graphics.

To use Adobe Express, you need to sign in to an Adobe account (either free or paid). The app is available on mobile (Android and iOS) devices and all major web browsers. For a more desktop-app-like experience, you can install Express as a PWA (progressive web app). It's available as such on the Microsoft Store. The PWA version runs on ChromeOS, macOS, and Windows.

The Adobe Express website has ample demos and tutorials, along with a well-organized guide to help you get started. Unfortunately, the main help icon is accessible only from the home page. At least you get a light bulb icon that leads to tutorials on editing screens.

The best way to get to know the software is to try creating a little project. As such, we created a quick poster for a fundraiser to save California redwoods. We started with a blank poster, chose a background color, and added a rustic folded paper overlay. Then, we added some type. We thought it would be fun to use the AI type styling to create letters that looked like redwood trees. The app rendered several choices (above) with options to see even more, which was great.

Next, using the AI prompt box, 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:

The result was 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. The second attempt was better:

I added an outline shape to the image and finished setting the type. It looks pretty good, considering how little time it took:

This kind of image generation has improved with Adobe's Firefly Image 3 model. Adobe offers an even newer model, Firefly Image 4, but only in the Firefly app; it wasn't available in Express with any plan at the time of testing. Firefly Image 4 (in the Firefly web app) delivered a less satisfying result for the test, however, likely because its strength lies in the generation of photorealistic images.

Interestingly, you also now have a choice of non-Adobe image models, including Black Forest Labs Flux, Google Imagen 3, and OpenAI. You don't need accounts for these services because you pay with the same Adobe AI credits.

Express is a marvelous learning tool for entry-level creatives because it provides nearly fail-safe guardrails for experimenting with professional-minded components. For example, you can't mangle type in Express by distorting or stretching it disproportionately. You do get some control over typographic finessing, including the ability to make line breaks using a soft return (Shift-Enter). It's also possible to fuss with leading and kerning (letter spacing) parameters. You can also upload fonts in OpenType and TrueType formats if the wealth of available Adobe fonts doesn't satisfy your needs. If you are a veteran typophile, you might lament the lack of some OpenType features, such as micro kerning or smart punctuation (think curly quotation marks). But then again, this app isn't meant for that level of manipulation.

Express's Text animation features resemble those in PowerPoint and Keynote. In Express, the animations are simple and exciting. You access them from the Animation button on the right side of the window. Styles include Color Shuffle, Dynamic, Fade, Flicker, Slide, and Typewriter. Each option has two or three sub-options.

The app’s image and photo enhancement features—which adjust contrast, brightness, highlights, saturation, shadow, warmth, and sharpness—are surprisingly robust. Other tools and filters control blur, color, and grayscale. Additionally, you get basic masking capabilities and blending modes (limited to normal, multiply, and screen). A new Quick Action lets you easily convert an image to the SVG format.

We appreciate that, unlike some web-based apps, the keyboard commands in your muscle memory work seamlessly in Adobe Express. The nudge keys (arrow keys) are as indispensable as the undo and duplicate (hold down the Option key on a Mac) keyboard shortcuts. If you're an experienced designer, you'll be happy to find those and other hotkeys in Express. 

Adobe Express's AI video generation and Clip Maker features are the highlights of its growing video capabilities. The latter promises to cut your long video down into meme-sized chunks. Otherwise, you get conventional tools for adjusting video color, lighting, sharpness, and speed.

Video Generation

When we first tried the AI video generation (which doesn't offer a choice of AI models), we ran into an issue. We switched up the image prompt from above to "A bear rampaging along the beach with the Statue of Liberty in the background." This kicked an error saying that one or more words violate Firefly user guidelines. It seems the Statue of Liberty is trademarked, since the result didn't include it. The same thing happened when we tried the Eiffel Tower. Apparently, Firefly doesn't like proper nouns for videos. After changing the background request to "skyscrapers," we finally got a decent result (after spending 300 AI credits, mind you). Granted, the bear is more just walking than rampaging, but otherwise, the video is convincing.

You can also generate a video clip using a starting image. When we tried to get Express to use a still photo of friends to generate a video of them crossing the street, we got the same error message. Pictures of people are apparently not fair game, either. Next, we tried with a shot of Crater Lake, asking it to add hawks flying by. The result was unconvincing.

When you generate a video, you have quite a few options for controlling its look. You can choose camera animations and movements such as moving, tilting, and zooming. You can also choose the shot distance, with options such as close-up, medium shot, or long shot. You can pick the camera angle, too, including aerial shot, eye-level shot, and low- or high-angle shot.

Clip Maker

This feature should appeal if you frequently produce social posts. It aims to identify the interesting sections from a longer video and spit out several short clips suitable for Instagram Reels and the like. For it to work, your clip must include speech in English (until Adobe adds more language support). One nifty thing about Clip Maker is that it also overlays stylized captions in display fonts. You get several font choices, which you can further customize in the editor.

We tested the feature by uploading a five-minute video of someone talking about tax preparation software (if ever there were a topic in need of spicing up). Clip Maker didn't work instantaneously, taking several minutes for the test project. Unfortunately, the results of the test were spotty. It left a pause of a few seconds, followed by a repetition of the sentence in one clip. I tried with a skateboarding video with minimal speech and got just one clip.

The tool produces only contiguous excerpts, rather than joining different parts of the source video to produce a pithy summary of the entire thing. It also works exclusively from the home page (not the editing page), and you can't apply Clip Maker to videos you already uploaded to cloud storage.

From the Express home page, you can choose Webpage from the More Ways to Start tiles. The app offers a decent selection of web page designs, categorizing them into groups such as Business, Education, Event, Personal, and Portfolio. The sites look attractive and professional. Once you customize the design to your needs, just tap the Share button and choose Publish to Web. At this step, you get choices for the design credit, page name, along with the option for password protection. You can also publish a social media post linking to your web page via the Share panel.

You get a functional URL after publishing a web page at the new.express.adobe.com domain; Adobe's documentation doesn't offer details on web limitations, but the feature seems appropriate only for small announcement web pages. You can't add commerce options or other integrations to your page. Look to full website builders for those capabilities.

The mobile version of Adobe Express offers brand kit capabilities, drag-and-drop video creation, expanded content (including thousands of multipage templates), single-click Quick Actions, and syncing with the web app.

The app also joins the web version in embracing Firefly AI. You get generative fill, live generative text styling, text-to-image generation, and text-to-template creation. The expanded content scheduler is a great way to plan, preview, schedule, and publish to most social platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok. Oddly, there's no option for exporting to YouTube, despite the app's decent video editing capabilities and YouTube templates.

It's possible to use Adobe Express directly from ChatGPT. Within ChatGPT, look to set up GPTs and then choose Adobe Express. Then, you can leverage Adobe's software to make creative visual content.

We still have to see how TikTok’s US-China legal quagmire pans out, but in the meantime, you can delight in TikTok’s Creative Assistant within Adobe Express. It's an AI presence that helps with ad analysis, creative research, and hashtag insight. 

Add-ons in Adobe Express are sub-apps that augment functionality. Some, for instance, allow you to make animated titles, custom gradients, interactive flip-books, generative patterns, maps, QR and barcodes, and stickers. You also get helpful goodies, such as an accessibility checker, an AI music generator, and a translator. 

Finally, Adobe Express now has improved business-ready templates—charts, infographics, invoices, graphs (you can't build these with live data), multipage documents, organizers, presentations (you can import a PowerPoint file), resumes, and worksheets.