Overall, my experience with Adobe Creative Cloud Express has been very positive. Despite its limitations, it gives me access to most of the day-to-day basic tools I need to do my job.

The thing I like most about the software is that it provides easy access to the rest of the Adobe products and services. The Creative Cloud Express makes life a bit easier by avoiding the steep learning curve involved in learning the full Adobe suite.

The app is limited, obviously, compared to the full Adobe Creative Cloud platform. sometimes what you want to achieve just isn't possible with Express.

Frankly, I've quite enjoyed it. I recommend them over their competitor, Canva. Both Express and Canva do virtually the same thing, but Express has a few integrations with other Adobe products that makes it worth using instead of Canva (if you have the CC subscription). Plus, if you don't have the CC subscription, a subscription to Express is cheaper than Canva. Express is a powerful, browser-based image (and I guess video, though that's not it's best feature) editor capable of producing professional-style images for business cards, social media, graphics, and more.

The software is simple, and easy to use. Upon logging in, I was able to go through a bunch of prebuilt templates, establish my brand identity (colors, upload fonts, logos, etc.) and begin creating graphics. I am a huge fan of the interface, and I enjoy the extraordinarily powerful background-remover tool. It is almost always accurate, and causes graphic creation to be quite simple. There's a button called, "Brandify" which will automatically insert your colors, logo, and fonts into the picture you've created (or the template you've grabbed) which makes for very quick creation/editing of graphics. I primarily use CC Express for social media graphics, and I'll say that I personally think that they're better than their competitor, Canva. Both offer nearly the same tools, and Canva is just a little bit simpler, but CC Express is cheaper by a bit ($100 for a year subscription vs. Canva's $120). But the reason I prefer CC Express to Canva is that it integrates with the Adobe suite in small quality of life things that make using this software with other products very easy and compatible.

There's really only two things I dislike about this software. First off, it has video editing capabilities. The video editing is primarily for social media graphics, though you can do some full-blown video editing. The thing is, most people likely have this product through the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. If you do, you might as well use Premiere Rush or Premiere Pro, which are Adobe's video editors. Rush is a more powerful version than the one within Express, yet a simpler version of Pro. I don't see a use for the video editing when it's already in it's other products. The load times can be horrendous. Most of the time I have no issues, but when I do have a loading issue, it can take minutes (the longest I've waited is 10 minutes to log in). This is rare, but it's always extremely inconvenient when it does happen. Also, if you're editing something and then your internet "hiccups" and connection changes for any reason, a popup will occur and tell you to refresh the page. Since the software saves automatically as you make edits, this generally isn't an issue. Though, occasionally, it will lose progress after a refresh, and you'll have to redo some work.

I started using Adobe Spark as an alternative to Canva. But I found the whole experience not as user friendly as what I can create with Canva. My team ended up going back to using Canva for simple graphics.

As a Social Media Director I often need to create quick graphics myself rather than bog down a graphic designer with a simple task. I found Adobe Spark, and it's great for just that, simple graphics. You can choose from a large assortment of stock images because they are attached to Adobe Stock, as well as other free stock images on the web.

I felt it was too hard to make the graphic the exact way I wanted it too. You could change the font only by using a sliding scale, in order to make changes to the text you had to click on the word box and it opens in a new screen. Additionally, the variety and of "shapes" they offer is not as vast as Canva's selection.

I had a traumatic experience with Adobe while I was trying to cancel my subscription. It felt like I was held prisoner. I went through the website and discovered there is no feature that allows users to cancel or pause subscription. So I then opted to go into the chat feature which surprisingly for a tech company, is very primitive and is still in learning mode. So I decided to request for a live chat with an actual person to get me out of my subscription. I went back and forth with three different assistants for most of my day, all three of them claiming to offer me deals that I knew were not deals. I was offered a free month service (which I knew I already had), but they would not address my request to cancel the subscription or even acknowledge it, it was an ordeal for me. When I start demanding for the cancellation and asking that they even email me to confirm the cancellation they suddenly disappear from chat (I can't make this up). By the time I got to the third chat assistant I eventually started threatening him telling him that I had screenshots of our conversation and that I demanded to be 'released from the bondage', he finally succumbed to the pressure. It was the most frustrating experience I have ever had to deal with. My reason for canceling my subscription was that I currently cannot afford to have the service, and the fact that I kept saying it but was ignored is insane! I initially just wanted to pause my subscription if possible, but the way I am so turned off by Adobe service I don't think I could ever get myself into this situation again!