Adobe Fights Off Canva by Making its Alternative Impossible to Ignore

Adobe

Adobe has announced a new business suite of tools called Adobe Express for Enterprise which is being bundled with its Creative Cloud for Enterprise subscription, effectively forcing businesses to at least consider moving away from Canva.

Adobe Express for Enterprise is described as a universal creative tool that lets anyone at a business — at any skill level — jump in and start creating content like multimedia assets and social media posts. Adobe already offers a similar platform originally called Creative Cloud Express and today rebranded to just Adobe Express, but the company is tailoring that experience to fit more cleanly into its enterprise offerings very likely so that it is a more viable competitor to Canva.

This “new” offering is designed for businesses and Adobe says that it will slip into even the most decentralized organizations.

“Integrated with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Assets, Adobe Express for Enterprise will streamline end-to-end content development workflows, enabling brands to meet ever-increasing demands for customer engagement across channels,” the company says.

To sweeten the pot, Adobe is integrating its new text-to-image generative artificial intelligence (AI) software Firefly into Adobe Express for Enterprise, which will make it even easier for creators at all skill levels to generate on-brand imagery and text effects that are “safe for commercial use” and “will bring even more precision, power, speed and ease directly into Adobe Express workflows.”

This strategy is very much the “Microsoft Teams” approach, where the tool isn’t necessarily what a team of users wants to jump to use (Slack, in this comparison) but is impossible to ignore because it’s bundled with another subscription that leadership gets a hefty discount on. The tools basically do the same thing, but teams are heavily encouraged to use the one that costs a business less money. Additionally, tool integration is hugely beneficial to business teams and Adobe is making that one of the primary benefits of Adobe Express for Enterprise.

Canva is easily Adobe’s largest threat in the business space. The company passed 100 million monthly active users last year, which is nearly four times as many as Adobe has Creative Cloud subscribers. While not all of those are paid since Canva does have free tiers, it does show the popularity of the platform.

Canva also launched an AI text-to-image generator last fall, which at the time separated it from Adobe further. But today, in one fell swoop, Adobe has turned the tables by making its offering more cost-effective, better integrated, and more feature rich.


Update 3/21: Adobe has clarified that Creative Cloud Express was today rebranded as Adobe Express.


Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.

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