Adobe Acrobat vs. Adobe Express

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Adobe Acrobat
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Adobe Acrobat DC is the current version of the well-established document / PDF management solution, part of the Adobe Document Cloud (the other part being Adobe's eSign services based on technology acquired with EchoSign in 2011).
$29.99
per month per seat
Adobe Express
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
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
Pricing
Adobe AcrobatAdobe Express
Editions & Modules
Acrobat Pro for Individuals
$19.99
per month
Acrobat Pro for Teams
$23.99
per month per user
Acrobat Studio for Individuals
$24.99
per month
Free
$0.00
Premium
$9.99 / $99.99
per month
Teams
$9.99
per month per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe AcrobatAdobe Express
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional DetailsContact Adobe directly for Enterprise pricing plan details.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Adobe AcrobatAdobe Express
Considered Both Products
Adobe Acrobat
Chose Adobe Acrobat
Adobe Cloud gives you access to EVERY program!!! I use it for work and for creating videos for my YouTube channel
Chose Adobe Acrobat
Adobe Acrobat DC is what all our users are very comfortable using. We would need to provide training if we implemented something new.
Chose Adobe Acrobat
10+. There is no other application I would use if given the choice. In one of my other consultations, one of the businesses had to merge multiple-single PDFs into one document. Not only did I suggest Adobe Acrobat Pro DC but another user asked the same thing. The business did …
Adobe Express
Chose Adobe Express
Adobe Creative Cloud Express is easier to use than iMovie or Adobe Premiere Pro. I was struggling with both and one of my colleagues at another university recommended Adobe Creative Cloud Express. I was glad I tried it, and really happy with the results. The ease of use, time …
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Adobe AcrobatAdobe Express
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Score 9.6 out of 10
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Medium-sized Companies
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Score 9.4 out of 10
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Score 10.0 out of 10
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User Ratings
Adobe AcrobatAdobe Express
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(481 ratings)
8.8
(33 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.7
(26 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.3
(237 ratings)
9.4
(10 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.2
(8 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.8
(56 ratings)
7.9
(10 ratings)
Online Training
9.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.5
(9 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
8.5
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
6.0
(3 ratings)
9.5
(6 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.0
(8 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
10.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Professional Services
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
4.0
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
5.5
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Adobe AcrobatAdobe Express
Likelihood to Recommend
Adobe
When given a very creative mind, Adobe has solutions that are tailored for you, and it has spent a great deal of time in end-user focus groups and surveys to consistently improve its products. In other words, someone is thinking at Corporate! Continue to make the quality of the product a major focus, as well as SMB pricing.
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Adobe
Express is a great product for anyone that is more of a design novice than a seasoned designer. The tools can help you do lots of complex things that used to take lots of work very quickly. For example the 'Remove Object' and 'Remove background' tools work very well amazingly fast. You don't need to painstakingly trace around objects or worry about accidentally including something you didn't want.
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Pros
Adobe
  • For the business account, the Adobe Acrobat rep assigned to your account will actively look for ways to save you money.
  • We have found that our rep from Adobe Acrobat Business Account reviews our usage and related apps and has offered helpful tips on better ways to complete tasks we historically undertake with their software. They have saved us a great deal of time and money. They make us efficient.
  • The apps they offer that combine with the primary program are relevant to the tasks our business performs, and they function at a high level and never fail. It's really quite remarkable.
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Adobe
  • Out-of-the-box templates save a lot of time and effort for designers and new users.
  • Collaboration to share resources and monitor task status centrally.
  • Great design elements bring a wow factor to digital content.
  • Single design tool for all types of content design.
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Cons
Adobe
  • Fonts can default (but not always) if the designer doesn't perform due diligence before generating PDFs.
  • The one area Adobe Acrobat is not good at: generating PDFs straight from a website. The results are touch-and-go.
  • The basic nav controls take a little getting used to. What I initially expected to be in one spot could only be found elsewhere.
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Adobe
  • Canva has a better interface, in my opinion... I like that this one is friendly to Adobe users, but I would likely recommend Canva to someone who's never used design software for a complete beginner.
  • Removing the background from images doesn't always work well. I almost always need to switch to Photoshop for this.
  • The touch screen interface could be better; graphics on mobile apps are tough in general but specifically, the iPad interface could use some improvement.
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Likelihood to Renew
Adobe
Adobe Acrobat works seamlessly with the other Adobe products we use that are industry-standard. We will certainly continue to use Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator, meaning it will always be convenient to work seamlessly with Adobe Acrobat for our organization. We are happy with the performance of Acrobat and it's meets our expectations.
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Adobe
I use it daily for almost all my marketing needs. So far it is the program that has the most and best to offer for what I need and is the easiest to use
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Usability
Adobe
The features on the desktop version are all toolbar based, which makes it a little more cumbersome on a smaller device (and much simpler on a large screen). The web forms adjust well to different screen size so work well on mobile, tablet and computer
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Adobe
The overall usability of the software was strong. The application, especially relative to other Adobe services like Photoshop that can demand a lot of knowledge and skill, was highly easy to use. At the same time, that also speaks to the somewhat limited amount of customization opportunities that allow content designers to truly create content that is dynamic, engaging, and different than the standard stuff that floods our vision every day.
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Reliability and Availability
Adobe
We have not had availability issues with Adobe Acrobat, or at least none that I am personally aware of. Some may encounter crashes of the software during outages of electricity in their city or neighborhood, which no one can plan for, but with generators in our organization, we have been lucky not to have outages
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Adobe
No answers on this topic
Performance
Adobe
One of the best features of Adobe Acrobat is its speed and stability. When dealing with massive multi-page files, having to reload a crashed program over and over again would slow down progress unnecessarily. And expanding on that, having the table of contents generated allows me to skip to different pages with ease, a necessary feature with exceptionally long files. word searches are even more helpful with text recognition.
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Adobe
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Adobe
For a while, Acrobat DC crashed pretty frequently. I contacted Adobe Acrobat support about the problem. At first support was unable to provide a solution. After about a month Adobe's software engineers provided a fix. I just wish it had taken less than a month to solve the problem.
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Adobe
Because adobe is so widespread the community support is amazing. I have never actually used adobe support short of their website, but I go to youtube a lot to get my questions answered. You can google any problem you have and not have any issues finding an answer. In my opinion, community support is much more meaningful and helpful than support directly from the company
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Online Training
Adobe
Easy to follow and understand
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Adobe
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Adobe
I was not involved with the implementation process, so I cannot answer this question. However, when it was installed on my computer system, they did so virtually. I just sat there while they took control of my computer over the network and watch them install it, lickety split
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Adobe
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Adobe
Adobe Acrobat integrated fully into our human resources processes and effectively helped consolidate multiple variations of employment documents which helped decrease HR costs and simplified recruitment. We can track the status of documents which means greater security and with the ability to sign HR documents electronically, anywhere and on any device, it gives us the speed and efficiency to process everything more quickly.
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Adobe
The Adobe Express Creative Cloud (premium) version is all you need. But even the free version is so much easier to edit than in Canva. Canva is cool for certain projects that don't need too much editing (editing in Canva can cause migraines). But, almost no matter what I think up to create, I will almost always open up AE rather than struggling through the learning curve in Canva.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Adobe
The only thing I can think of that may be helpful would be a more flexible tiered pricing options based on usage or document volume.
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Adobe
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
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Scalability
Adobe
I find that many users aren't aware of many features of the software they use, nor may they be comfortable with learning multiple-step processes. For the simplest of PDF purposes (scanning, downloading, exporting), it gets a thumbs-up. For anything involving electronic signatures, meh--causes eyes to glaze over, or forgetting what all is involved.
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Adobe
No answers on this topic
Professional Services
Adobe
No answers on this topic
Adobe
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
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Return on Investment
Adobe
  • reduction of redundant tasks can be handled through Adobe Acrobat
  • esignatures save a significant amount of time when finalizing contracts versus printing, signing and faxing documents to clients or other parties
  • increased efficiencies by reviewing external document sources or images that require further analysis or repurposing.
  • improved security and compliance with the ability to redact documents and limit sharing to segmented users
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Adobe
  • It has allowed us to complete more demos and projects in less time by being so flexible.
  • It has positively impacted our efficiency in delivering creatives such as YouTube thumbnails, event poster designs, Instagram story posts, etc to clients in a timely manner no matter where work takes us.
  • I would say the ROI has been seeing more projects completed and invoiced per month. I would estimate overall a 20% increase in volume on deliverables.
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ScreenShots

Adobe Acrobat Screenshots

Screenshot of where to create, edit, convert, and share PDF files all from within Microsoft Teams – as part of Acrobat integrations with Microsoft 365 apps.Screenshot of Liquid Mode in Adobe Acrobat Reader mobile app, where users can read PDFs on phones and tablets without having to pinch and zoom. Navigate lengthy documents with intelligent outline and search tools, while maximizing readability and comfort with font size and line spacing that are adjustable.Screenshot of where to fill and sign PDF forms from anywhere and on any device. Here, users can collect signatures, digitally track progress, and automatically archive the signed document.Screenshot of the Adobe Scan mobile app, used to capture and convert documents into high-quality, interactive PDF documents that can be filled out, signed, and shared. This eliminates the hassle of finding a printer, filling a form by hand, and scanning it again.

Adobe Express Screenshots

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