If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen me ranting about all of my subscriptions. I’ve been going through and checking what all I have and what I should cut out. My biggest cut was the Adobe Creative Cloud Subscription. Which, mind you, took me a long time to adapt to, I was using CS6 included in my college tuition for years. Then I finally caved, but I have been debating canceling my subscription for a couple of months. Now it’s just not worth it to me, especially when their updates aren’t anything more than small tweaks. This is mainly due to the fact that Adobe is very, very, very slow with catching up to mobile devices. They were basically 1 year late on delivering Photoshop for iPad. This was waaay before the Pandemic, so that’s not even an excuse for them. When they did release it, it wasn’t and still isn’t a fully functioning Photoshop. Since the deal breaker was the mobility of their programs, I’m going to focus on replacements based on the best mobile Apps that replaced Adobe products for me, however many of these Apps have desktop versions as well.

A lot of creatives are moving to a more mobile workflow, considering iPads are so powerful now. The fact that Adobe has not released any of their other programs as Apps that aren’t watered down is a huge turn off for me right now and not worth the money. I rarely use my MacBook Pro these days, so if and when Adobe decides to give us full functioning iPad Apps for their programs then maybe I will reconsider getting the subscription again.

There are just way to many very powerful Apps in the marketplace that do just what the Adobe programs do and they usually only cost a one time fee. Other companies adapted the mobile lifestyle much quicker than Adobe is moving. Below is a list of Apps I switched to from Adobe programs now.

I switched Lightroom for Pixelmator Photo. This is an iPad only App that has a one time fee of $9.99, right now its only $7.99. If you need more flexibility they have a Pro version for the Mac which is only a one time fee of $27.99 (they offer a 15 day free trial). So even if you don’t have an iPad, this is way cheaper than spending the minimum $10 a month to the get Lightroom. They also have a bundle. If you want to do a bit more advanced editing and get more creative from your iPad, I would check out Affinity Photo it’s a one time fee of $19.99.

I switched Premier Pro for LumaFusion. This is an iPad only App, but, let me tell you! This App is shocking at what it can do. It lets you edit like a pro, All of my recent videos have been edited on it. The price, just a one time fee of $29.99. Adobe has an App called Premier Rush, but I’m not a fan, it’s just okay. I would only recommend it to someone that doesn’t have an iPad or someone that needs to do very minor edits. Side note, Premier has been getting worse and many people online feel the same.

I switched Spark Post & Spark Video for Canva. You can use Canva on your browser or download their App to your mobile devices. Canva can be free, but I recommend the Pro version since you get access to many more features, such as music that your are free to use under your Pro license, the ability to upload your logo and save your brand colors, access to better images and templates, one click resizing for different platforms etc. The Canva Pro is $12.95 monthly or $9.95 if you pay for a full year in advance. I’m okay with their subscription motto since you do get a lot of features with the Pro version. Plus their App is a fully functioning App.

I switched Photoshop for… I haven’t fully decided which I will stick to, but there are three options I would recommend at different price points, again they’re all one time fees. For $4.99, you can get Pixelmator, for $9.99 you can get Procreate, and at $19.99 you can get Affinity Designer or Affinity Photo. Affinity Photo is most like Photoshop whereas Designer is more like Illustrator. Affinity also has desktop versions of their programs which are typically the one time fee of $49.99, that includes Designer and Photo. Oh and Affinity has the ability to open PSD files.

Those are pretty much all of the programs I used with Adobe and really haven’t used them very much this year, since I got my iPad Pro in January. I was really paying full price to use 5 programs and some fonts because of the way their tiers are setup. I hope this helps you guys save some money every month and have a better workflow 😊.