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
Ion, by Rock Content
Score 8.0 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Ion is an enterprise-grade content experience platform that empowers modern marketers and designers to create no-code interactive content experiences integrated with their CRM or marketing automation tools. Ion helps enterprises to build brand awareness and increase conversions and lead generation enriching their contact database with declared, high intent data. Ion helps brands launch quizzes, ROI calculators, assessments, interactive infographics, and other interactive formats in…
N/A
Pricing
Adobe Express
Ion, by Rock Content
Editions & Modules
Free
$0.00
Premium
$9.99 / $99.99
per month
Teams
$9.99
per month per user
Managed Services + SaaS
Custom
per year
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe Express
Ion, by Rock Content
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
$5,500 per customer
Additional Details
Contact Adobe directly for Enterprise pricing plan details.
ion’s Build Anything SaaS platform provides organizations with an entirely new and agile interactive content marketing capability. It enables non-technical marketers and designers to create, test and measure an unlimited number of all types of interactive content marketing experiences. It includes unlimited seats, experiences, tests, customization, phone and email support, analytics and more.
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.
If you want to choose a quick start template and fill in the fields with your content, Ion will be fantastic for you. We've done this with whitepapers and quizzes and it's been great and extremely easy to use. If you have an exact idea of what you want, and a background in web development, you may get frustrated. Ion has some quirks that make it tricky to fully customize - everyone once in a while I really just want to go into the HTML and make some changes, but can't. If you are looking to reuse a piece of content for specific targeting (industry or account-specific), Ion is great. The dynamic substitutions are great and very helpful.
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.
Ion University, while stacked with a wealth of information, is difficult to navigate from a troubleshooting perspective. The tutorial videos are all very helpful, but they are also very long. Sometimes I would want to search for how to address a particular issue I was struggling with and it would be a two-minute segment buried in a 45-minute video.
Again, getting back the self-guidance side of things. I think a lot of the tutorials are set up in a way that makes sense to Ion, but not as much to the end user.
I think the controls admins use when creating new users could be a bit more straightforward.
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
We use it for every landing page and we plan on only doing more dynamic content creation. We dont see that option coming in-house any time ever in the future. ION has a very robust platform for us to work with that really allows us to do more for our customers in regards to having the one-to-one conversation.
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.
Usability is straightforward, with extensive documentation and tutorials provided to ensure landing pages are built to specifications and can be optimized for performance. Built-in platform funnels give insight into customer dropoff, success/failures, and conversions (at a glance). Setting up a landing page can be done quickly and easily, with numerous integrations (CRMs like SalesForce, for instance) supported
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
The ION support team is amazing. There has not been a single issue they they could not solve for me. If there is a feature or request that they do not have, they have even, on occasion, created custom scripts for our team. *Update 6/5/17 - ION has continued to delight on multiple occasions. I appreciate their attention to detail and ability to solve whatever issue I have. After 3+ years of use and support, ION still has my full endorsement.
They offer a great amount of online training, videos, articles, etc. There is usually an answer available if you run into an issue. I would recommend taking advantage of the online training they offer. I wish I would have done it sooner.
There were a lot of things we learned about the tool once we really got in and got our hands dirty. Being hands-on was essential for our team to be able to utilize ION in the most effective manner.
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.
I was not the decision maker to choose this over Uberflip, but the UI is much more appealing to me. It's incredibly easy to use, clean, and from a backend standpoint, it requires little to no tech savvy'ness. Our team has really enjoyed using it and has required no training what-so-ever.
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
Separate client portfolios enable scalability, however, some elements are still grouped for all accounts so it's difficult to scale for an ad agency with multiple clients. Would prefer totally separate sections of the platform for all clients with each element housed separately.
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
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.
Though we have not had the service long enough to see any measurable outcomes, we've been able to create interactive web content faster than ever before
The speed with which we can build interactive pages and re-use assets has been critical as projects we've done with Ion have made their way around and more and more internal clients have said "me too" for their own projects
It is very pricey at $28K for the base annual subscription (dropping to $24k after the first year), so depending on your budgetary situation, that may make no sense for your team--but we had contract money set aside for a company to build us a microsite for around the amount, so we just used it for Ion instead and will now be building the microsite ourselves using it
