Figma and Canva are taking on Adobe and winning | Hacker News Reader

Figma and Canva are taking on Adobe and winning

kwokchain.com

288 pointssamulipehkonen244 comments

The point most are missing is that, $600/annum maynot be a big deal for a company, but it is a huge deal for an individual designer.

How is that relevant?

Unlike hardcore workplace software - someone below gave example of a $10K PCB layout software - Adobe products are used for personal and hobby projects by designers at home or at schools. When these designers stop using the Adobe software at home and schools and use alternatives, they would insist the same switch at workplace as well. The employers would be more than happy to accommodate that request (who does not like free money).

I'm still rocking 2013 Adobe suite - the last perpetual license - for 'just incase' scenarios. But since last many years have totally switched to the likes of Figma at home computer, and at workplace there was enmass transition to Sketch till couple of years back, and now to Figma.

(Hopefully) Adobe would go the way of Corel Draw, which you only find in old printing shops, where they insist that they convert your Adobe (.psd) files to Corel Draw one before they can send it to printing machines.

I have been moving to the Affinity Suite and never have I missed anything from Adobe. I love to work in it and I don’t have to pay per month.

How does Affinity Photo compare to LightRoom? I've tried everything from Luminar, to CaptureOne and nothing really works quite as well as LightRoom for various reasons.

I love all the Affinity products so far but the RAW part of Affinity Photo is where the suite falls a bit short in my opinion.

Things I miss most when compared to Lightroom are:

- the ability to quickly create circular and gradient masks and apply a set of setting to them

- Edits are not saved into a .xmp file like Lightroom does. Once you developed your image and closed the Raw editor, there is no way to apply the exact same settings again if you want to tweak something later.

I think a Lightroom competitor was on their list (but for a while now, hope it arrives soon!)

Apple used to have Aperture, and until they stopped development, it was miles beyond LR for the core "RAW library" workflow. I hate that Apple killed it.

It has a special workspace for editing RAW and can do most things Lightroom does. However it isn’t a streamlined experience, so I usually use one program to star and sort in directories and Photo to do the final edits. Darktable is what I use for sorting.

I don’t think there is a competitor that matches both editing and DAM capabilities of LR.

I've attempted this transition a few times, and keep failing. It's not so much that the apps are inferior than that my habits with Adobe are so ingrained. It's very hard to force myself to keep using Affinity long enough to get used to it, when I have the corresponding Adobe app right there and I know I can get my task done in a fraction of the time. Logically I know that this is short-term thinking, and the investment in switching would be worth it. But in the moment when I need to get something done, it's tough.

You probably fall in the advanced or expert category, and what I did is simply do a few key elements from things I was able to do easily in PS and practice it in Affinity (for instance certain layer actions or layouts)

A few months in Affinity and you already are saving money, if that’s important to you.

I'm in your camp, but still have paid-for copies of the Affinity Suite because despite once been a total PS and AI - and by extension Adobe itself - fanboy and having used them since the mid-nineties, I now absolutely loathe Adobe and its subscription model.

Unfortunately for me, Illustrator (which along with Firefox is the software open all day long, every day) is too muscle-memoried. I've had it set up to my perfection for a decade or more, and it feels like it'd take about the same again to veer the fuckwit supertanker that is my brain towards Affinityland.

That's odd. I've found the keyboard shortcuts and tools to be similar enough (v and a being the most used) and annoying UX things, like every nudge of the cursor keys adds an undo step, have been done properly instead.

I am in your camp, too. My muscle-memory investment in the Adobe product line, especially Photoshop, Illustrator and After-Effects, is approaching 30 years old — more than half my life — and that really locks me in for professional, get-it-done-now, reasons.

>The point most are missing is that, $600/annum maynot be a big deal for a company, but it is a huge deal for an individual designer.

I seriously thought that the rather easy way to crack Adobe and Autodesk softwares was to lure in indie designers and engineers such that it becomes their go-to tool in their professional jobs.

In addition to price discrimination, this is why productivity app companies often give it at dramatically reduced prices or even free to independent creators (usually dollar revenue limit) and edu.

VMWare Workstation Player 16 + Windows 10 + Cracked Photoshop + Unity Enabled Session. Solves it for most people.

> Unity Enabled Session

Can anyone explain more about this part? I know the rest but this isn't showing up on Google as a phrase.

VMware's Unity mode lets a window in a VM appear as if it's a regular window on the host OS[0]. OP is saying you can run a cracked copy of Photoshop on Windows and have it "seem native" even on MacOS or Linux (though in practice the usual small things will differ: menu, some keyboard shortcuts, save as dialogs, etc).

I haven't used Unity mode for a case like this but back when it supported Linux guests I used it occasionally to "bring" some Linux windows to my Windows host and it was remarkably good. I was sad when they dropped Linux guest support from Unity-mode, but running vcxsrv and using X-forwarding is a good enough replacement, so I suppose it was a sensible move on their part.

0: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Workstation-Pro/16.0/com.v...

> The point most are missing is that, $600/annum maynot be a big deal for a company, but it is a huge deal for an individual designer.

There was a theory, back before the subscription era, that the reason stolen/fake Photoshop license keys would work across multiple versions was that Adobe actually wanted people to be using pirated Photoshop at home. The people pirating Photoshop were theorised to turn into the same people who'd demand it at their workplaces, and Adobe was quite happy to go cash in on the corporate licensing. Easily piratable Photoshop was a free training program for future Adobe customers, who weren't going to pay for a copy to use at home, anyway.

Who knows if there's any truth to that, but it doesn't work in the subscription era, which definitely opens up some space for competition.

It also allowed Adobe to wipe out competition that was targeted towards the home market (why would you pay $99 for Paint Shop Pro when you could pirate Photoshop for free?)

Even when it comes to open source. There's been many people I've recommended gimp to who insisted on pirating Photoshop instead.

These are people who would balk at the idea of downloading a song illegally or pirating most software, but somehow Photoshop was different.

Not professionals or people who needed advanced unavailable features or anything, people doing tasks easily accomplishable with gimp. Simple image editing and stuff.

Gimp was really really horrible in UX though

Because GIMP was and is a pile of garbage in terms of UI and UX.

The same fate of entirely too much open source software. If it looks like trash and is difficult to learn, people are going to give up on it.

Gimp is getting better tho.

It is true that miracles never cease.

But it works

>These are people who would balk at the idea of downloading a song illegally or pirating most software, but somehow Photoshop was different.

Because the moral compass suggest Adobe is big, evil greedy for profit company so stealing from them makes you feel less guilty. And since everyone is doing it and it becomes a norm then why not do it?

One early Adobe exec explicitly spoke of pirates as building product mindshare and as sales funnel. Couldn’t find those quotes, but did see the concepts have been researched and codified:

> Based on research conducted by Microsoft, Adobe and Disney … 83 percent of all pirates in mature markets are opportunistic and legally-inclined and will pay for software.

https://www.cleverbridge.com/corporate/software-pirates-your...

> The employers would be more than happy to accommodate that request (who does not like free money).

Not sure where your optimism is coming from...

At least for the time being, it will bring mixed environment which is far more costlier than just running Adobe for everyone.

And then when it comes to making the switch entirely, you will drop the efficiency of the senior designers who had decade(s) of experience on Adobe platform who are actually making money for the company and even after that, there will be shops doing business with your company still sticking to Adobe passing PSD files around and you have to give them good excuse that you don't accept PSD anymore.

That's why Adobe is being so arrogant with its pricing and their pitifully performing software never gets any better.

But I agree, Adobe needs to get out of everyone's way for the better future of design business.

It’s not surprising at all. Adobe, as most of us predicted they would completely just give up and real innovation or advancement once they went subscription. Why spend a huge amounts of money on progress when every designer, photographer, artist, editor, game developer, VFX artist in the world is forced to pay for $50 a month.

They’ve dropped a small handful of extra features over the past 8 years but also during that time their software has stagnated and rotted. They didn’t move with technology so most of it is all single core constrained and barely uses the GPU so doesn’t feel any faster today than it did 8 years ago and in some cases parts of it actually feel slower as bitrot has set in.

After Effects went from a program that felt almost like magic to something that can’t even play it’s image sequence preview and sound without dropping out rendering it a complete frustration to use, again this all worked great on a Core Duo 2 iMac 10 years ago.

Every single part of Adobes business is there for the taking and with only small amounts of effort you can provide something that will take them years to catch up to if they ever manage at all, look at XD they started that when sketch was eating their lunch so they started making XD and they move so slowly that by the time it was even remotely viable it was already leapfrogged by Figma and now Adobe will never be relevant in that space again.

I think Adobe is getting beat on a number of fronts, not just what Figma and Canva are addressing. There is a slow but steady rise in the number of people moving away from Adobe Premiere to DaVinci Resolve for example.

Adobe have been short-sighted with their very expensive subscription model which has resulted in people seeking out alternatives. Sure it was very profitable for them in the short-term but at what long-term cost?

It has done nothing but foster resentment in even its most loyal user base.

Personally I can't wait for mature Adobe After Effects alternative, and then I'm gone for good.

$600 a year isn't expensive for software for a US professional worker.

I understand that there's lots of people that don't fit that description. That they would also like to use Adobe's tools is perhaps not entirely a sign of decline.

Agreed, it seemed outrageous to me 10 years ago but I believe now that Adobe simply focused on a certain segment. I wasn't in it. But that's just it; I had very little money, and I was mad that they'd excluded me. But of course they'd exclude me, haha.

You were never their target. But there were people thinking about you.

The cracked adobe products from 10 years ago provide most of the functionality the new subscription does at a big discount.

In a way those warez (sp) crackers cared about you more than adobe ever did.

But that's a ton of cost for something you don't use often or if you're just starting out. That price tag eliminates the low end on-ramp into the products. They moved away from perpetual licenses and raised prices, which ensured there was room for competitors with a lower initial price and "good enough" quality.

I respectfully disagree. $600 USD per worker, per year is a massive expense for a small to medium firm, and those rates will only rise in the future. In my country at today’s exchange it's more like $830 per user per year! I much preferred the model of paying once and owning a copy of the software.

Sure you get updates now, Adobe was very bad at even basic patching before the CC era, they offer features that no one I know is requesting. It's like a fishmonger backing up the van and dumping a bunch of fish you don't need then billing you every month.

So bring on the competitors. I'm a big fan of Sketch on the Mac.

Massive? Oh come on, $600 is the cost of a moderately expensive chair.

Chairs are not replaced every year, plus that capital expenditure, not opex.

For a design house, licensing is not an insignificant cost of business. Its justifiable because thats the fastest tool for their workforce.

for a small company without a design team, it probably makes sense to just use the cheap/free stuff and style it out.

Or you can pay a one time $99 fee for Sketch which in most cases has all you need.

I took that route and haven’t missed Adobe at all.

Not all designers (creative work really) work on Macs!

I went to sketch.com and it said $99 annual subscription. Do you mean we can use the software even though we don’t subscribe anymore?

A chair lasts 10-15 years, so it's more like $40-60/year. $600/year chairs are pretty much the best chairs you can buy for money.

A chair will last many years, lets say 5, so amortised we are talking about a $830 x 5 = $4150 chair for every user.

That's massive in my book. Subscription software is a scam.

Go try and get your employer to buy you a new chair. In most places, that is like pulling teeth

I managed to get a new chair once. It took an ergonomics expert visit. Everyone was filled with envy from vp's down the line. In the end management pushed me into full time remote so they could take the chair.

And it wasn't even $600.00

It is frankly amazing to much how much office politics wind up revolving around chairs in some places.

I was pretty specific about what I said. In the US it's $15 dollars a week for the software and $1000+ a week for the user. It's not a big cost if the software provides that individual with much value.

Sure, they are clearly ceding a chunk of the market to other companies. I don't think it's obvious that this is a bad business decision...

Relative to buying software outright, yes, it's a big cost. Any it's also annoying. You don't own the software, which ends up effecting you negatively in a myriad of small ways.

Yes, not to mention the inevitable downtime when some cloud service can't authenticate. Not an improvement on working with local software.

I think Adobe at least gives you a 30 day grace period of no internet access.

This argument is always brought out like a standard bearer. Adobe software was NEVER a buy it once, own it for life. Sure, that particular version, maybe. But nobody stays on that version forever. Pre-subscription days to CS bundles, the bundles were $1200-$1500USD. They would release a new version of software each year, and they would charge $600USD for the upgrade. So, your $1200 in, plus an annual $600 in upgrades. Pre CS bundles, it was $800 for Photoshop alone. Premiere was even more.

Yes, but you could skip a version easily in the old days!

If you worked alone that might have worked. Sending/receiving files from someone with newer versions caused problems. I suffered through this once when doing 32page magazine layouts, and I was a version behind the printer. That experience alone convinced me to upgrade.

I always just send a PDF or IDML file to the printer. So far that worked out well

You'd send InDesign files to the printer? Why when there are various export formats printers accept..?

Going further back to Aldus Pagemaker. Plus, I come from a time of Quark and SyQuest drives to move data around. Things were different in the stone ages. PDFs were not a thing people used.

When I worked in print design, we’d typically send two things to the printer: a zip of the Quark or InDesign “collect for output,” and a PDF for reference.

Later, though, I seem to recall some printers accepting PDF/x-1a files – I don’t know if the industry has transitioned to that now, or if some still prefer a collect for output.

In my experience the printer was always a good few releases behind the current version. No-one wanted to upgrade unless they absolutely had to. The switch to InDesign from Quark was particularly drawn-out, and even then no one took Quark 5 files.

It’s very different now it’s all done by PDF - as long as it’s formatted correctly it doesn’t matter what program created it or how old it was.

If the moderately paid person is inefficient or unproductive because they don’t have a $600 piece of software, management is egregiously misguided about where to spend money. I mean if an add’l $600 spent on a position or role is the balance between being profitable and bankruptcy then something is seriously wrong in that company.

Sure they can have the user use a $0 piece of SW, but if it’s costing more than $50 a month in productivity via frustration, unfamiliarity or shortcoming (90% of the value at $0), Thats misuse of that person’s talent and detrimental to the success of the company.

If $600.00 a year is peanuts to your company I would invite them to send me $600 dollars a year.

It is not like $600 dollars is going to bankrupt your company. Their would be something seriously wrong if your company couldn't send me the money.

I have a hard time seeing how sending you $600 has anything to do with the productivity of a tool. Most people design PCBs using Altium which is $10,000 per license. Are you saying companies should send you 10k because they could use Eagle instead?

I wonder the number of PCBs designed with Altium ($$$$), Eagle ($$), and KiCAD ($0).

$600 is a budget item that will be available next year to spend. If you never expense me you will never create the budget room for when you really need it.

If the size of your company allows for $10,000 software purchases I would expense me for 2 copies. Next year you can use that budget for post covid grow.

It depends on that $600’s ROI. Are you going to make it worth it, the user productive or contribute to the goals of the company?

The idea is to pay me today to create budget room for you in the future for when you need that budget. By paying me $600 you create a budget increase that carries forward annually. Simply pay me yearly until you are ready to spend your free $600 budget.

The idea is you're spending $600 to use software that directly or indirectly contributes to the co's revenue. If you do it right, you make that $600 back and then some.

Maybe get a locally-priced alternative?

It's a lot for teenagers and students. People prefer to use software they know, and if you keep your creative software from people in their formative years then you are going to struggle.

This might be less of a problem if they hadn't also slashed education discounts (pupils and students used to get 80-90% discount, presumably to discourage buying used or pirating)

Exactly. The SaaS model largely lacks a gameplan for long term sustainability.

How so? The SaaS model lets you price segment more flexibly. You can do a free (or very cheap) loss leader version that has a more limited feature-set (that students & hobbyists don't need) and a non-commercial license. Charge more for larger shops that need collaborative/more professional features.

Just because Adobe is doing the transition poorly (albeit you wouldn't know from their share price), I don't necessarily buy that it's a fundamental flaw in the SaaS business model. Indeed Figma & Canva are both SaaS companies themselves. As MSFT has shown, it doesn't take much for a giant to come back. I don't think Adobe is particularly cash-strapped so they can weather out a bunch of mistakes/internal realignment.

Their financials have done great since they switched. Strong growth in revenue, gross profit and net income.

This may be short-term growth at the expense of long-term sustainability.

The younger generation will reach for the more affordable options like Figma, Sketch, Canva. Everyone will know how to use these tools a lot better so this these will become the new standards in the workplace.

Right. I was explicitly responding to OPs claim that SaaS lacks long term sustainability because Adobe's approach seems like it could kill their long-term userbase.

Also, as an individual having your work locked behind a subscription fee is more than a little scary. For a company it's no big deal to have subscription autorenew in perpetuity, but individuals sometimes need to cut costs, and because of that subscription fees start to look like a ball and chain.

It's also a lot for designers and video makers in the developing world, most of whom are being sought as freelancers for small Western companies.

Going against the .edu discounts is... strange?

That's how you build your userbase 5-10 years into the future. That should be a no-brainer.

What's harder to price in a discount with SaaS is how to deal with smaller companies. Startups with almost no money but that could grow into lucrative customers down the line.

I am so glad that only US-based professional workers are considered worthy of playing with Big Boys' Toys like Adobe products. /s

I'm not sure why you are being sarcastic about how a mega-corp approaches business decisions. Of course they do what makes the most money.

Part of my point is that people would do well to consider how Adobe approaches the situation before they expend a bunch of emotional energy wishing it were otherwise.

That's not the point. The point is that Adobe are being extractive assholes, and they know it. Setting the price point this high basically communicates that they consider anyone unable to pay this much a pleb, where all of their competitors don't. This is quite insulting, considering that we're talking about a graphic manipulation program rather than some hyper-specialised piece of enterprise financial markets software that only a few can use to its fullest.

> Of course they do what makes the most money.

Launching features on iOS/macOS first is a business decision that makes the most money (probably) but it's this very reason I slowly started replacing Adobe software.

Adobe XD, especially in the beginning, would leave Android and Windows users in a lurch focusing their efforts primarily on Mac/iPhone users.

For instance, real time mobile preview via USB (MISSION CRITICAL!!!!!), a feature requested December 16, 2016 ¹ was implemented on iOS on February 04, 2019. Worse still, this feature works on iDevices but only with a Mac. As of last December when I last checked, this was still not possible on Windows for either mobile platforms.

Sure, as late as 2009, users were evenly split between Mac and Windows. Prior, it was more Mac users. It has since changed with majority of Adobe users on Windows. ² So this steadfast commitment to Apple users makes no sense when the majority of your users are on Windows!

Switched to Figma once I started using Linux as my daily driver.

1. https://adobexd.uservoice.com/forums/353007-adobe-xd-feature...

2. https://community.adobe.com/t5/photoshop/adobe-cc-os-market-...

600 dollars a year is a huge amount for a software product. If that was their enterprise/seat pricing you may have a point but this is the standard price for everyone.

$600 is larger than most comic cover commissions (source: have been paid to do them), and unfortunately Photoshop is still a standard in many tangential industries that pay far below the minimum I strongly suspect that you assume for many (corporate) graphic designers.

I started creating graphics in high school on the Gimp, which was a natural transition to a (gifted) copy of PSCS2, and I've been using my college version of CS5 ever since afterwards. That route to graphic design would've never happened at their current prices. They're burning a whole generation of designers.

Fifty bucks a month for the whole suite is half of one page of comics posted to my Patreon. And my Patreon is pretty tiny.

Fifty bucks a month is less than I charge for one single-character flat color commission, which is something I can do in an hour or two.

I am not at all surprised that most comic cover gigs pay like shit. Comics generally pay like shit.

And all that said I sure did pirate Illustrator for a decade until I was at the point where paying the full subscription was the easiest route. If I was a broke student now I’d probably be getting into Affinity Designer instead of Illustrator.

The problem is the kind of work that Adobe's tools are used for. Designers, video editors, artists, illustrators, etc. These are all careers that people get into by having a strong portfolio of prior work, which usually requires them to make stuff outside of professional work. So they need tools for personal use to get hired. Then when they start working they are going to want to use the tools they are familiar with.

That absolutely has the result of eating into Adobe's bottom line. Even big companies that can easily afford Adobe's prices aren't going to pay them if their employees don't even want to use the software.

You have everyone arguing about whether $600 is too much for photoshop, but everyone should note that you can also get it for $10/mo. It doesn’t get you all the other adobe products, just photoshop and lightroom, but that’s fine for a ton of people.

The post I replied to was talking about multiple Abode products, so I don't think the focus on Photoshop is my fault.

Oh yeah definitely not blaming you, just trying to do a PSA for the discussion. People are probably focusing on it because the article emphasized it.

Depending on your use case, you can get similar products for a one-time purchase of less than $40.

That’s just photoshop though, honestly if you work in a field that needs this software photoshop alone is just one piece of the puzzle, once you add another app the cost goes so high it forces you to get all of them.

There are plenty of "US professional workers" who do not need all of Photoshop's functionality. I've found Pixelmator meets all of my needs, for a one time purchase of less than $40. The moment that changes, I can purchase Photoshop; doing so now would be a premature optimization. I believe many still use Adobe products merely because they accepted that as a default.

I believe many still use Adobe products merely because they accepted that as a default.

This supports the notion that it isn't particularly expensive!

I didn't say "it's the cheapest" or "it's the best value", I said it wasn't expensive, and qualified the remark with a statement about the group of users I believe that Adobe targets.

People are replying that they think it's a bad decision to ignore user acquisition from less expensive licensing options, but that is separate from whether Adobe is having any trouble finding users (they appear to be printing money).

There's plenty of power users, but I think Adobe makes plenty of money off of users who don't need the product(s), but don't seek lower priced alternatives out of ignorance or apathy. The same could be said of things like computers and fitness equipment.

I use Affinity Photo, and previously used Pixelmator; I don't miss any of Adobe's overpriced products.

For every freelancer who sits in an Adobe product 40 hours a week, there's many who need an Adobe product for a couple hours every few months. For these people, it's a pretty terrible deal, and feels more alike a tax, or rent-seeking than it does like paying for a useful service.

This exactly. I am not asking my employer to spend so much money on something I am not using for free in my free time.

Subscriptions are also tricky to "purchase(?)" at some places.

I'm pretty sure I'm not actually allowed to charge them to a grant.

I tried buying a student discount subscription in my country and I could never finish the process.

I then contacted two local partners and none of them allowed me to buy the license as a student. One said that the student discount did not exist, and the other one siad thst my University had to buy it for me.

use it for one month. stop paying for it. pay for it again the next month you need it. stop paying for it.

frictionless process, smooth as butter

How is it any different than renting a car, or a hotel, or any other various things one might rent? There's just this illusive concept people seem to have of owning software. This kind of model would have had me as a legit paying Adobe customer way back when I did "borrow" their software. I never had enough money to buy a >$1k bit of software for a couple of things, but I could have found $50 (maybe closer to $60 if not doing 12 months??) for a month's legit use of the software for a random freelance gig

But Adobe doesn't make it easy to pay for it one month and don't pay for it the next. Their site uses dark patterns which make you choose yearly subscriptions instead of monthly (happened to me even though I thought I had a monthly subscription) and terminating it is a whole ordeal with several steps.

> How is it any different than renting a car, or a hotel, or any other various things one might rent?

All of these other activities are far from being friction-less. But the problem is that you have to remember to disable the thing otherwise it's going to burn a hole in the pocket and they are counting on that.

I fail to see how this isn't objectively worse than purchasing software outright.

Adobe sells access to Creative Suite in one-year increments exclusively. You can opt to pay monthly, but with a minimum one-year commitment.

this. Subscription software models extract more money from the pro market but cut out the casual market completely.

I think the better way to look at it: Is $600 / year / employee enough of an incentive for competitors to step up?

I think lots of software companies( and entrepreneurs) are seeing Adobe's revenue stream and asking "Whats the moat?, What's stopping us from building the top 5-10 Adobe features and charging $300 / year?"

It would seem that Adobe doesn't have much of a moat and that perhaps their software will be commoditized as we move forward.

Yes and no. People become professionals using tools that they're familiar with.

600$ a year for an industry standard that makes a person productive isn't a lot. But what happens when 50% of your workforce is using a different tool that they're more comfortable with because they've already invested 5-10 years into learning it?

It's not expensive for a productivity boost once you're a professional. The question is, if you are a professional, and you're just now getting to the point where you can afford to start using Adobe tools, are they so much better than the tools you've been using your entire life that they're still worth $600 a month? Will they still provide a productivity boost that justifies their cost if they're not an industry standard anymore?

Right now, Adobe products are still at least arguably (if not obviously) an industry standard. But when we talk about a market decline, a current decline in hobbyist usage may signal a heavy future decline in the professional market. It's not necessarily the case that they're completely separate from each other.

> $600 a year isn't expensive for software for a US professional worker.

It's expensive for what a lot of those workers use it for. In the pre-SAAS days, companies would handle this by having an few license and not necessarily following the upgrade churn.

Going SAAS only "solved" that for Adobe, but disgruntled that user base that is now no longer served. This obviously creates market room.

$600 is nothing for a worker who is going to be in a software an appreciable part of every week. When it's $600 here, $300 there, $1000 here for stuff they only use a few times a month? Not a good deal.

>but disgruntled that user base

The user base that is disgruntled are the ones that would have been using the cracked versions anyways, so there's no monetary loss to adobe at all in that regard.

I get being a poor student that can't afford the software that you eventually need to know how to use. I grew up learning Adobe products from those cracked versions. However, now that I'm a working stiff, I pay for my software. I can't think of the last time I used a cracked version. Everyone has to start somewhere. Adobe now gives full version access via trials for 30-days.

> The user base that is disgruntled are the ones that would have been using the cracked versions anyways,

I disagree; I think I correctly identified a user base of corporations and users who would much rather do things right, but don't have 600/yr/user of need. Currently they are paying adobe subscriptions, or juggling free trials. If someone offers them good-enough software for significantly less, they won't think twice about jumping.

This is separate from the issues of students etc. using cracked or 'educational' versions. Some of them may not like the subscription only approach, but as you say that isn't a real impact to bottom line because they would never buy it.

Trial period was shortened to a week in May 2016. See https://prodesigntools.com/adobe-cc-7-day-free-trials.html

>> $600 a year isn't expensive for software for a US professional worker.

Let's be crystal clear here.

$600 is the subscription for ALL of the Adobe Apps. That means you're paying $600 for what? 15-20 different apps? That means you're averaging around $40 per app. Which is roughly the same cost per month as other competitors products. Adobe XD is $9.99/month which is the same cost as Sketch $99/year and has more functionality then Sketch. If you toss in the additional $8/month for InVision, then XD is now cheaper. A lot of orgs like having one vendor for all of those apps as opposed to having multiple subs for several different companies.

I'm no Adobe apologist, but let's make sure when people are tossing around the $600 cost, we're comparing apples to apples. You can hack on them for their lack luster customer support, new versions not working on newer PC's and completely ignoring Linux users - but arguing about price? Not really a good enough reason not to use them in my opinion. Over the past few years, the newer apps they've come out with, they're keeping their pricing competitive: XD vs Sketch/InVision vs Figma.

Their pricing has also slowly come down as more competitors come into the market. I agree, I don't see them declining, they just need to stay competitive now that they are a number of legit products to compete with several of their products.

Professionals use an assortment of tools, maybe one of which may be Photoshop. I would agree if your hypothetical processional only used and needed Photoshop.

One thing I don't like about Adobe is that they set the same price for high and low income countries.

For many people and companies in my region their license is unafordable.

Other companies that offer subscription based es services, like Microsoft, Spotify, Disney, several antivirus vendors offer lower prices.

I mean, I could afford the student price, but not the commercial price of their subscription .

That's not how pricing works. Just because "you" can/are willing to pay doesn't mean the pricing is right.

What other software/service with the amount of users of Adobe charge $50/mo?

The pricing is set based on their lockdown through their closed file format, so the competitions can't exist.

Just as a counter point, when the first CS subscription came out it allowed me to use Photoshop and Illustrator legally for $30 or so for a month at a time on an as-needed basis (I didn’t always need it), when the alternative was to pay like $1k up front (I don’t remember exactly). As a bootstrapped and low income person at the time this made it possible for me to access the software when I otherwise couldn’t have. So, it’s not exclusively a bad thing.

That's fair, but it's terrible for people like me. I hate not being able to own my desktop software.

I'm a hobbyist photographer, and I use Lightroom quite a bit. I purchased Lightroom 4.0 back in 2013, and it has been worth every penny, but now I'm stuck on version 4.0 forever because I refuse to pay a never-ending monthly fee for software that I use as an amateur.

I use Darktable now. It's an excellent open-source competitor, but it's not as good as Lightroom. I would gladly pay a few hundred dollars to buy a perpetual license for a new version.

Would 4.0 even run on modern OS? 32bit vs 64bit considerations. Hooks into graphics libraries in OS changes as well. No hardware acceleration in debayering RAW, etc. There have been a lot a lot a lot of changes since perpetual licensed versions of software that nobody would be happy sticking with just for license sake.

Yes it runs fine on Windows 10. Version 4 came out in 2012. Old, but not ancient by any means.

Edit: I mispoke, I'm using version 4.4.1. Not sure, how different that is from 4.0

Pretty sure you would not be able to on macOS. While not your problem, it could be for others.

> very expensive subscription model which has resulted in people seeking out alternatives

I disagree, from my own experience and people I know in graphic design field, Adobe products just feel clunky and unintuitive. First time I've tried Sketch, I was blown away by how simple and intuitive the interface is and I would not mind paying the same or more for Sketch compared to Adobe suite.

The goal of software is to make me work faster and more efficient, if 2x more expensive software makes me work 3x faster - it's always worth the price.

Sketch is focused on UI design, it's more specialized tool than e.g. Photoshop. Of course you're able to design faster and more streamlined in it than in a tool that was repurposed for the job.

I’m with you. I use Figma for all UI/UX work, Resolve for editing/grading but still reach for AE for motion graphics and some video things. Even though After Effects is super slow and doesn’t seem to get much faster with newer CPUs/GPUs, there’s nothing else that comes close. Maybe Fusion in Resolve if Blackmagic spent enough development effort on it.

Having said that, I think Adobe can still continue to grow with the overall digital/creative market growth, even if they are losing market share on a couple of the flagship products. They have some enterprise cloud software and I guess the photography/print design/illustration users are still there.

This. It’s still a long way down for Adobe to descend, and they have strategic control over many “cash cows” which aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. The entire publishing industry has no reasonable alternative to InDesign for instance. That’s a lot of software subscriptions getting paid for.

Adobe must know this, and their lack of agility must be no accident. It’s like they’ve turned from being a versatile army of innovative creative developers into a strategically located stronghold of trolls.

Yep. This happens to many businesses as they grow and get older - the people change, early innovators leave and decision making starts becoming dominated by milking the cash cows. The company becomes too large and too risk averse to be able to move fast.

Feels like classic Innovator’s Dilemma [1]. Adobe’s incumbent bread-winning products do not allow them to internally develop less expensive alternatives that would actively erode revenue from the legacy products. So outside companies do it instead.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

There's more going on here. Figma targets collaboration. Canva tackles ease of use. Nothing was stopping Adobe improving in that department.

Photoshop already has a cheap monthly subscription. Why not do a similar price point with a new collaboration and ease of use layer slapped on Illustrator?

Cheap is relative, would I rather have Photoshop for 2.5 months or a permanent license of Affinity Photo?

I'm taking into account a current 50% discount, but I think that's fair since Adobe products no longer go on sale.

But even without the sale, it's 5 months of Photoshop versus a permanent license.

The main thing that was stopping them from improving in the collaboration / usability department was the fact that Adobe's products are extremely comprehensive – that's how they differentiate. But that comprehensiveness comes at the expense of complexity, makes it harder to have a really tight interface and add things like collaboration features.

The comprehensiveness is what allowed them to win in the enterprise, but it came at a high price. If Figma wants to become an enterprise solution they'll probably end up getting really complex too.

Comprehensiveness is one of Adobe's differentiators, the other is specialised products that seamlessly interoperate. Illustrator is "Photoshop, but focus on vectors", InDesign is "Illustrator but for page design", Animate is "Illustrator, but for animations", Aftereffects is "animate but for video". All of them seamlessly interchange files with each other.

Adding tools with the sole purpose to give a less powerful, more intuitive interface would have fit perfectly into the Adobe ecosystem.

Well Adobe products in reality interoperate very badly. It's very apparent Indesign, Illustrator, AE used to be made by different companies and they have different codebases.

For example if you want to import some vector shape from Illu to either Indesign or AE... its pretty complicated. Especially if you need to be able to make edits after the import (like animate the shape or change colors). Or if you want to copy text boxes? Forget it.

This is obvious when you compare it to Affinity suite where not only you can copy anything around but you can instantly switch from one app to other inside the apps. Switching is then more like "vector mode", "pixel mode" and "layout mode". It all works much better and faster.

Collaboration is pretty difficult to retrofit onto an existing product. A collaborative text editor like Google Docs needs to be designed for that purpose in mind, and the state-of-the-art techniques (CRDTs and OT) are still undergoing active research. See also the xi-editor retrospective: https://raphlinus.github.io/xi/2020/06/27/xi-retrospective.h...

I imagine Figma, being built around CRDTs and a web platform, probably had a number of intentional design differences from Photoshop etc.

Reminds me of another classic Innovator's Dilemma to have panned out with Google and Y! guarding their web-scale infrastructure from the outside world even as AWS was running away with IaaS.

https://gigaom.com/2007/12/04/google-infrastructure/

They can always buy outside companies and kill their competing products, right?

Maybe that's just my bitterness talking as someone who really liked Fireworks for screen design work, and think it fell prey to the dilemma between it and Photoshop.

(I'm still using FW, but that won't be an option on macOS once Mojave stops getting updates.)

I believe it. We needed to make some coupons for the kid's Easter eggs this year. Google led me to Adobe Spark Post. I couldn't figure out how to get anything done and the app immediately started trying to upsell me for some sort of subscription. My more social-media-savvy wife told me to download Canva instead. I did, and got what I needed done easily in a couple of minutes, and then I deleted Spark Post.

I think you are selling short your social-media-savviness. You seem pretty capable here on HN which fits my definition of social media.

Perhaps, but she's done it from the side of managing the social media presence for a business; I have not. I don't need any design assistance to post on HN, but I was going for something flashier than "Verdana on beige" for the Easter eggs.

My point was more that calling someone social-media-savvy on HN is usually code for (at best) someone who works in marketing who does something that’s “not real work.” Not accusing you of that (and your explanation makes perfect sense) but trying to keep in mind that HN in itself is social media and a marketing tool for a VC fund.

I'm surprised at the choice of competition named in the article. I'd say the strongest contender to Adobe's core business is Affinity with their desktop software suite.

I agree. Affinity started very strong and just keeps getting better. Adobe's subscription BS is going to hurt them in the long game.

I love affinity products but I wonder about their plan long term. With the current pay once, get updates for free model they will run out of customers at some point. Adobe sold upgrades back in the day, but that is not a possible path for Affinity, at least not if they mainly sell through the Mac App Store.

Something that you sometimes see is developers offering a bundle that includes v1 and v2 of an app where the price is (v1 cost + "upgrade fee"), which is automatically discounted to just the upgrade fee. This definitely works on iOS, so I figure it would also work on macOS.

I saw that done but it definitely feels hacky.

Well i am sure they are already preparing some form of v 2 thats going to be such upgrade.

My bet for features would be 1. Plugins API/scripting 2. Better panel management

I agree that Affinity deserves mention here, since they are another player. Just slightly different than the other two and meeting a need in a variation of the theme. I do some graphic design and photo editing, but not enough to justify the large recurring price of Adobe products, so I went with Affinity and I've loved it. I'm not a profession artist, so I'd only ever really heard of Adobe, but went looking for something else simply because of cost.

EDIT: I think the main reason they don't mention Affinity is because Affinity capitalized on Adobe's price increase; the price increase is mentioned as a positive for Adobe's stock price in the article, though a lot of customers dislike it. It is an interesting case of Figma and Canva having better functionality for certain segments, and Affinity having better price to capabilities ratio for other segments. When Adobe was more of the only game in town, it was fine, but now others are carving into the space and competing on variations, providing better alternatives to different needs or prices.

Affinity apps are professional-grade and feature-rich but they don't match Adobe apps feature-by-feature. This is perfectly understandable, and the Affinity team are not trying to make clones of Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. But some users are clamouring for their must-have feature from Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign to make it into the Affinity apps. It will be impossible to satisfy all users and some won't switch.

The one Adobe app that has no rival is After Effects. DaVinci Resolve has motion design tools, but nothing to match the sheer features of After Effects (not to mention the vast ecosystem of plugins and the huge number of tutorials).

I would too. I had never heard of either Figma nor Canva. I'm in the printing industry and if it does not have Pantone support, it's not really that useful. I have the Affinity suite for home use. It's getting better but not quite up to the Adobe standard.

I’ve used Photoshop since before you some of you people were born. (I’m 37, but I started very, very early.) I breathe Photoshop. I live in Photoshop. I am like a surgeon with Photoshop.

And the vast majority of the time, using Photoshop for a design task is gross overkill, or it’s poorly suited to the task in subtle ways.

It never felt right for UI design. They've made nice improvements (hello, Artboards), but it never “feels” quite right. Am I using the right color space and management settings? Can I override that symbol? How do I edit that global color? Oh god, did I rasterize that layer!?

In the same boat. I started using PS in 1998. Never felt right for UI design, but nothing has ever really felt right for me, even Figma/Sketch/etc. I’ve tried them all.

I don’t know precisely what I’m looking for, but they aren’t it.

I feel like the future might involve writing a little bit of code, so you can more easily link properties together and that sort of thing. Maybe a node-based workflow, I'm not sure.

Totally agreed. No one has explored textual interfaces for designers, because everyone assumes “well designers are visual thinkers so they must draw”. I think that’s somewhat reasonable but it’s also blunt and obtuse.

As it happens, I’m currently creating a platform-agnostic DSL specifically for designers. The goal is to give them a parametric language through which they can communicate their designs using their own mental models and verbiage.

Not only that, but the SaaS model has not netted any 'killer' features at all. I haven't found a new feature indispensable since at least CS2.

content aware fill

It's neat, but I can't say I have ever needed it in production.

if you do compositing and background replacement, it's a huge time saver

Introduced in cs6 which was before subscription model.

I would say biggest Photoshop feature since subscription was GPU acceleration enhancements. And i guess now the AI image scaling which other software already does better.

It's the other way around. Photoshop hit the limit for what people needed out of a photo editor, and when they realized fewer and fewer customers were paying for new versions anymore pivoting to a subscription model was the only way to ensure a revenue stream. It's the exact same reason why Microsoft started shoving Office 365 down everyone's throats. What new killer feature has Word added in the last 10 years?

I've been using it since v1.0 before the days of layers and editable text. And 1 step undo was all we had. I still remember seeing Knoll brothers named prominently every time you boot up the application. Good times :)

Same here, 36. I've been using Adobe products since the beginning of my relation with computers, I guess started with Dreamweaver, and now it is so hard to quit, as I use almost all the CC apps professionally, to make my living.

I mentioned here before on another post, it is mostly because of the long-years offline archive, mockups, and all the resources I can find easily, both offline and online. Recently I get my courage and decided to end my subscription, at the last stage of the process they proposed a two-month free, so I took it. What a shame, but I hope I'll decide the same after these two months.

Adobe is really what Steve Jobs described back than; "rapid energy consumption, computer crashes, poor performance on mobile devices, abysmal security, lack of touch support."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash

The web was a big "feature" to allow Figma succeed over Adobe.

In Figma you design and changes instantly for everyone, just sent a link and anyone (designers and non-designers) can see/collaborate the latest version because is web based.

Adobe sleep many years bloating Photoshop with features that try to cover UI design needs and fail, finally releases Adobe XD but is miles away of Figma, in Adobe XD today, you make changes in a file and have to go to Share > Update link everytime, and then the web based version of the file is updated. Is crazy. Sketch sleep on that too.

Also Figma was clever to make prototyping and developer handoff a core features pretty quickly, now they have a polished "trifecta" with UI desgin + Prototying + Developer handoff.

Here a good resource to compare UI design tools (and more) https://uxtools.co/tools/design

I'm wondering whats the next step to smooth even more the gap between visual design and development.

Figma's dev handoff is still pretty bad though, especially around images.

True, it's pretty hidden and frustrating

But even then, being able to do it at all exactly when you're ready, is just night and day better compared to having to ask the designer for the file they forgot for the nth time

On the photoshop/illustrator front I've been really happy with Affinity Photo and Designer, they are good enough that I haven't really missed any functionality, they certainly feel more stable (looking at you illustrator) and they are way cheaper.

I wish they would make something that could replace Adobe XD, because adobe XD is terribly slow in adding features and there is a lot of room for improvement there.

At first I thought XD was great, but as the app I've been designing has grown in size I keep encountering more and more warts.

Creating animatioms in XD is awesome. Haven't had that much fun in years. As a tool it misses a lot of features present in Sketch and Figma.

+1 for Affinity Designer. I was stuck on an old version of Adobe Fireworks for years because I refused to give in to their SaaS model. The Affinity suite has been worth every penny, and I actually own the software, which is great

Changing customer needs are the largest source of entropy in markets. When customer needs rapidly change, there is less advantage in being an incumbent. Instead, legacy companies are left with all the overhead and a product that no longer is what customers want.

There are many causes of changing customer needs. Often there are new and growing segments of customers with different use cases. Existing products may work for them, but they aren’t ideal. The features they care about and how they value them are very different from the customers the legacy company is used to. Companies resist changing core parts of their product for every new use case since it’s costly in work, money, and attention.

This is one of the best product articles ever written.

All planets aligned for Figma:

- Companies big and small acknowledging the importance of UI/UX design resulting in more and more designers entering the workforce.

- Remote work going mainstream pushing more people toward online collaboration tools.

- Web technologies progressing and enabling desktop-like experience inside a browser.

Resulting in designers, managers, customers all loving Figma. It's a game changer and it will be a bigger success story than Slack.

appreciate the kind words!

Another app that has captured "mindshare" among artists and designers is Procreate - a digital painting app for the iPad. It's leapt over Adobe to dominate the digital painting space on the iPad. Adobe is playing catch-up with their late-to-market rival painting app Fresco.

However, to keep things in perspective, usage of Adobe's apps still dominate the creative industries. That grip shows no sign of loosening. Just the volume of tutorials for Photoshop alone is humongous.

What the likes of Procreate, Sketch, Figma, and Affinty show is that you can carve a profitable space in the design and graphics field and succeed even when that field is dominated by a behemoth like Adobe. It's also refreshing to see rivals rethink the way of accomplishing design tasks. A lot of Adobe apps have accrued so much clunky UI interactions and lack the fresh ideas from some of their rivals.

Procreate is awesome! I don’t even paint but use it often enough for quick sketching of diagrams or simple image editing. I have the Adobe subscription and use Lightroom a lot, but Photoshop feels like a heavy machinery better fit for the PC when you want complex editing.

Aside, I’ve learned Photoshop around 7th version (not CS), and was really impressed by modern capabilities — they support nondestructive editing workflow for almost everything!

author here! haha, yes I love Procreate. i use it for all my (very bad) drawings in blog posts.

And all i wish is that someone would make plugin to integrate procreate and figma nicer

procreate is so great

Related from same author a few months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23584954 "Why Figma wins"

This is the same story for every media creation tool, which goes hand in hand with advances in technology. Editing audio used to require all kinds of expensive hardware and software, now you can get the basics done (and sometimes a lot more) with Bandlab and Garageband on your phone. Same story with putting printed words on paper, video creation, etc.

There are a couple of interesting things about Canva, though.

First, it's a VC funded startup so the motivation behind it is not just ease of use, it's profitable exit - probably by Adobe. This does not give me confidence that Canva will work for me 2, 3, or 5 years down the road when someone screws up the M&A or deliberately sinks the acquired product.

Second, Canva hits that non-designer quadrant and new use cases mentioned in TFA pretty well, but it is not useful for many advanced use cases. I use Canva every week for my own business, but I also depend on a paid subscription to Adobe Acrobat to do things with PDFs that free tools can't match or can't do well.

The usability of Canva is exquisite.

Seems limited but it is limited in all the right places. Saves so much busy work when for example designing a presentation vs PowerPoint or Slides. You if just want to get shit done just use Canva.

Big omission not mentioning Affinity products, excellent Photoshop and Illustrator replacements for a one and only beautiful payment of $25.

I heard by a few UX designer that they prefer Adobe XD as a design tool actually over Figma, but the cost is why they use Figma instead.

I find it a glaring ommision from the article analysis that it didn't even mention Adobe XD anywhere? It seems to me maybe newcomers are only competing against price and nothing else?

Yeah, I found it strange they didn't even compare XD. Which is the direct competitor to Figma/Sketch.

Also the cost for just XD is similar to that of Figma/Sketch

Free Plan / ~$10 monthly plan

Author here!

Yes, totally right. There was a bunch i wanted to write about Adobe. Both XD and the current moves they've made with CC etc. But had to cut because too much--so hopefully will have an essay entirely on Adobe coming at some point

"Most successful companies, especially startups, have found tailwinds to harness that help pull them forward."

Allow me to entirely miss the point of this article by saying that is a really very confused metaphor. Tailwinds don't pull anything, and you can't put them in a harness. I'm not even sure what I'm supposed to be picturing. I know, this is irrelevant to their point.

I imagine a sail.

But “harness” can be specifically used in relation to natural resources e.g. harness the wind or harness solar energy. And it’s used generally with other words that you can’t put in a harness. It’s not just a noun.

oh god you're right haha, I malaphor'd that

"malaphor" is a wonderful word, thanks for that. :)

Isn't this just a classic case of unbundling[0], as to which Figma and Canva are just unbundling Adobe products.

Come to think of it, I also think the reverse will happen when people realise that using multiple tools in concert will cause friction and then some customers revert to a 'bundled' service with their needs accommodated in just one service/program.

Hopefully Figma, Canva and many others like them don't not get ironically acquired by Adobe and the like.

[0] https://stratechery.com/outline/bundling-and-unbundling/

Sketch unbundled Photoshop, while Figma offered something Photoshop never had - collaboration.

Sketch changes how designers work, while Figma do that equally well + it changes how teams work.

Used to use sketch, moved to Invision and finally landed on figma - and heck I'm not even a UI/UX designer.

I love how I can put up nice designs relatively quickly without having to learn the dazzling array of menus and tools found in Adobe.

We are also fan of Figma. It's easy to work together inside the same design and the results are easy to test and present. But be warned of vendor lock-in! You can't use .fig files in other programs. Before you move your complete Sketch design library into Figma, think carefully. They make switching to Figma easy, but switching away hard. Converting your complete Figma library can be done with xd2sketch.com for hundreds to thousands of dollars. Our policy is that we only make one-offs in Figma and delete them afterwards.

It took a lot for me to give up trusty ol’ Photoshop for design. I pretty much built my career playing with and learning Photoshop. But they were years behind Sketch and then named their competitor “XD”.

What a terrible name. App didn’t seem great either. And I really really hate the whole Creative Cloud licensing thing that’s always running in my menubar as well as their strange bundle pricing.

In the meantime, Figma quietly came along and somehow built a web app that had such good collaboration and sign up/licensing that it somehow makes me OK with using a web app.

I just wished Figma would run offline when not having internet without the need to login every day. One of the reasons I keep using Sketch.

Currently, it's less of a problem because you can't travel much but before, for me, it was a pain to use Figma on planes, or trains.

Figma desktop works offline.

https://www.figma.com/downloads/

You need to keep logging in

Odd, I didn't need to but thanks to know.

Let’s not forget the hell you go through when uninstalling Adobe products

Is it still next to impossible to cancel? It's been a while (I'm now a happy Affinity customer) but they had no self service cancellation and their offshore customer service team gave me the run around for days, at one point lying to me about deactivating my subscription when they hadn't.

Still the same. Also the license is not monthly as they try to show. Its auto extending annual contract that you pay month by month and if you want to cancel you have to pay rest of that contract.

I really like this kind of market analysis (discussing levels of abstraction as the primary variant in market differentiation), because it's been my focus of thought for the past few years.

I actually think that Figma is still somewhat legacy in its model, because it still relies on the concept of a designer as akin to an illustrator. Give them a canvas, and some tools, and let them draw. No one has attempted to deviate from that model, and I think there could be a wealth of opportunity outside of it.

What is the distinction between a designer and an illustrator?

Switches to Morpheus' voice

What if I told you you can use ANY Adobe software, procured legitimately, in perpetuity without using cracked/pirated copies; without paying a dime?

No shenanigans like modifying or deleting files, changing your PC's clock, etc. Just using the OS's system tools[]. It's so obvious, I'm certain a sizable number of Adobe users do this.

Obviously outlining how would alert Adobe and I'm not sure I want to risk that.

Which OS?

Probably Windows Sandbox or one of the other Hyper-V based out-of-the-box VM solutions.

Wait the article doesn’t mention Adobe XD which is Adobe’s UI design tool that competes with Figma and Sketch. XD is great for my needs and with frequent updates it is always improving.

I’m also in the camp where Adobe shortcuts are burned into my muscle memory. I’ve tried the others but am more productive using the tools I know.

Photoshop and Illustrator alone are worth it also. Some amazing power that other tools just don’t have.

XD has nearly no adoption compared to Figma. I saw a chart in the last week or so, and XD barely registered and Figma had the most adoption by far. Can't find it again atm.

ok as a product designer in the business what ppl fail to understand is that the smaller companies like figma

1. move faster and are more innovative

2. priced right for most designers

3. know their audience

adobe is not as nimble, has excessive pricing and for the most part the traditional apps are robust but harder to use

designers change software pretty often these days because

1. students can't afford adobe and use figma or sketch, get into the workplace and expect to use the same tools

2. almost all designers, even product designers to work on the side for fun...and no i do not want to pay adobe 75$ a month for a bunch of apps i will not really use ( i myself use figma for all my personal projects now and my team at work will transition to it this year)

3. transitioning from sketch to figma to adobe xd is not that hard as they have similar features...it's def easier than going from PS to figma. which is why almost 0 product designers use PS anymore

4. mid-smaller companies can change design software pretty easily..we are always moving forward as designers

5. ppl only stay at a company for 2 yrs so if I go from using Figma at this small company, I might bring that along to a larger company if i get hired

Adobe is going acquire one of them

My gut says the same. The costs of trying to scale Adobe XD to the same utility as the best-of-breeds will be known pretty soon, and Adobe will have two options, grow or acquire, and a price against both. It'll be straightforward thereafter.

This just reminded me: does anyone remember Macromedia? Adobe bought them a looong time ago.

No, they were gone in a flash.

What's that old saying ? Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

Whether it's Adobe, Apple, Bloomberg, Microsoft or any other similar company. The fact is those companies have such an enormous moat that no minor competitor is ever going to get any serious traction.

In the specific case of Adobe. Figma, Canva, $name_your_competitor are, frankly NEVER going to get any serious traction. Just look how many decades it took Adobe to finally unseat QuarkXPress, and that was two Goliaths battling out !

Why do I say that ?

First, the old adage "time is money". If you are a business who employs designers, you want them to work in an efficient manner. You give them the tools they trained with. You give them the tools they used at previous employers. For designers, that is Adobe. The same goes for DTP and AdobeIndesign, or Video Editors and Adobe Premiere. Not giving a designer Adobe is a bit like telling a techie he can't install ping.

Second, collaboration. Your designers, publishers and video editors will be collaborating with others. They'll be importing and exporting files all over the place. Sticking with Adobe removes problems, and hence wasting time troubleshooting, "time is money".

Finally, integration. If you have used Adobe Creative Cloud remotely seriously, you will know how awesome it is. Adobe have done a spectacular job at cross-product integration with extensive native support. You can take Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator files and pull them straight into InDesign for page layout. You can be working on a video in Adobe Premiere and from within Adobe Premiere, you can throw the audio into Adobe Audition, manipulate it, and Adobe Premiere will pick up the changes without you needing to lift a finger.

That, my friends, is why you should take talk of minor competitors of Adobe claiming they are "winning" with a generous pinch of salt.

It’s anecdotal, but I’ve seen Figma become almost the de facto standard for web design over the last few years, whilst Canva is massively democratising design such that you don’t even need to work with professional designer for your day to day designs.

I agree Adobe will be sticky and nobody is suggesting they will die any time soon, but these tools are so good and so widely adopted that I don’t see how they can’t eventually take a bite out of Adobe.

I was of this mind for quite a while. I hate changing tools.

I do a lot of front-end dev work that involves translating non-technical designer's layouts into templates for a CMS.

Figma is way, way more efficient for me to use than Ai or PS.

Time is indeed money.

Most of our team isn't bought in to any specific package... I have to be able to take deliverables from a wide variety of systems, so it wasn't a big deal to add another system on my side of thing.

On the designers side, he likes it just as well, and the familiarity is the only hurdle. However, it's not like having to re-understand design, it's just another tool.

In the end, that's all it takes... because I don't care what general standard for cross-industry design is. I remember when it was Fireworks. All I care about is the specific tool chain that we use.

So, yeah, Figma isn't probably going to become some cross-industry standard, but it so much easier to use for the limited tasks we use it for that it's winning at our very local, agency, level.

And just for context, the documents that I get in Figma cost in the high 4-figures to mid 5-figures to create before I get them; the folks using these tools aren't picking them because they are cheap.

As you yourself admit "for the limited tasks we use it for".

And there I certainly agree with you.

If you can work in a relative silo with a limited number of tools, then sure, there may well be scope for shopping around, just like you did.

But once you're in an environment where you may use multiple tools that come under Adobe's remit, then its likely better to stick with Adobe and get the benefit of the cross-integration.

For example, a friend of mine runs a small business, they have someone on their team whose day job is something else, but is good with design and has become the office's go to designer.

In the course of an average year, that person will regularly use Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator for all manner of graphics tasks. They will use InDesign to create print and electronic documents for dissemination. They will occasionally use Adobe Premiere and Adobe Audition to edit videos and podcasts. And they store photos in Adobe Lightroom.

Even as a small, non-design focused business, its not difficult to get your money's worth from Adobe.

Counter-point: I used Adobe products as a professional designer since before CS1, right up until switching to Sketch in 2015.

The moment I used Sketch, I knew I'd never use Illustrator or Photoshop for work again. Then, a few years later, I used Figma for the first time and realized I'd never use Sketch again if I could help it.

The point is, at least in the realm of UI/UX design, the competition has leapfrogged Adobe. XD is a distant third^1, and you'd have to add every Creative Suite product together to get to second place. So, they've already lost that race, and the trend seems to my mind accelerating rather than slowing down.

I don't think the argument that designers experienced with Creative Suite will be hesitant to switch holds up. I'm the oldest working designer I know, and like I said above, I jumped ship in like five minutes of working with superior tools. I don't know anybody younger than me who has any loyalty whatsoever to Adobe; quite the opposite, Adobe seems creaky, and old-fashioned in a "I can't believe you used to use that, Grandpa" way.

^1 https://uxtools.co/tools/design

I have a question about this - does Sketch/Figma support creating designs that fall outside the current flat design trends?

Can it do things like this?

https://image.freepik.com/free-vector/hud-ui-gui-futuristic-...

Or this?

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/7b/09/c0/7b09c038e0c644338a9a...

Genuinely asking, because these are the sorts of things that I have long used Photoshop for, but if there's a new, better tool, I would like to take a look.

For first link: Yes, can be done easily.

For the textures in the second link: You can go a long way in Figma and just use stock-photo images like wood for textures. You'll still need a bitmap-based app like Photoshop for the bubble, and import them into Figma

Thank you for the info, this is helpful!

The first example would be easier than the second, but yes, you could technically do both. The second one has more pixel-based textures (like the drawings), and you could certainly use those as layer fills, though I wouldn't advise trying to draw them there. I wouldn't say that either Sketch or Figma handle pixel artwork particularly well, because they're both optimized for vectors, but you can import and manipulate that kind of artwork (move, resize, crop, change color properties, etc.) fairly well.

It might be worth checking out Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer as lighter, cheaper alternatives that handle pixels better. But PS is still the best tool for this, sure.

What is interesting is that the article left out Adobe XD, which is their product that should be competing with Figma or Sketch. I've tried to use it a few times, and well, honestly, it doesn't measure up (it could be that I'm stuck on the bottom of the learning curve, but that's a problem, too).

Tools like Figma, Canva and Sketch are enabling workflows where all that integration doesn't matter. For example, I'm not going to take a bunch of UI prototypes and polish the audio with Audition or bitmap edit with Photoshop.

Finally, tools like Affinity, Da Vinci and so on are showing that smaller budgets focused on specific workflows can deliver a competitive product. I have a Creative Cloud subscription. I also bought Affinity. Why? Because Designer and Publisher save my team time vs. Adobe. And that includes import and export. We're not a print design house, so all the print specific tooling doesn't really matter in our all-digital, made for the screen, RGB world.

I think things might be shifting more than you realize. All the designers at my current workplace use Figma. The workplace before that was Sketch. It's only the older members of the team who have any Photoshop skills, and they rarely seem to use them these days.

Having said that, I don't think this matters so much for Adobe. They're well aware that professionals are dropping their tools. It's part of their plan, even. All their comms these days focus on "the democratization of creative tools" -- they make more money selling subscriptions to hobbyists than they ever did selling to pros.

I am a user of PaintShop Pro 7, love it. Bought PSP8. Hate it. Anybody can recommend something similar to PSP7 which is having issues with Win10? Tried GIMP but too complicated. Paint.NET too simple.

Adobe have XD which is very similar to Figma. We use it at my agency.

Adobe is one of a long line of companies who appear to sell products as their bread and butter, but actually get a large portion of revenue through ad analytics and data offerings.

Can you break that down a bit for those of us less-informed? Looking at an earnings report[0] it looks like the vast majority of their revenue (about 90%) comes from "subscription", which I assumed was mostly for their products sold via subscription models. Is there somewhere that breaks down how much of that subscription revenue is from ad analytics and data?

[0] https://news.adobe.com/news/news-details/2020/Adobe-Reports-...

If you look here, you can see that in 2019 29% of their revenue came from the digital experience division, which is described as: "subscriptions to Adobe Experience Cloud, a cross-channel marketing optimization tool that includes analytics, targeting, campaign management, content delivery and commerce enablement."

https://dashboards.trefis.com/data/companies/VMW/no-login-re...

I suspect that the share has probably grown since then, but I don't know that for sure.

Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, Affinity Publisher, Canva, Figma, Logic Pro, Final Cut Pro — it’s nice living an Adobe-free life.

This resembles the era of Salesforce vs Oracle. Having everything on the cloud (Salesforce) versus having expensive in-house systems maintained by Oracle/SAP.

Not surprising at this point as Adobe is a mature and slow moving company. What innovations have they done in the last 5 years besides closing down Flash?

Adobe products are not stale. Photoshop has already successfully incorporated some of the recent research on image processing using GANs and it's getting ever more powerful.

There's nothing in Photoshop since CS2 that I need, and I use it every single week. In fact, with every update they seem to either break something, or make the tool worse. I've use the tool for 20 years. I don't WANT to be forced to upgrade to the newest version where some shortcut is inexplicably changed for no good reason. They need to stop trying to add new keys to a piano. Let us play the instrument as we learned it.

I agreee with everything you said, but none of it is relevant in the context of comparing Photoshop to an obsolete database.

My point was not that it’s UX is improving, only that the technology isn’t stale.

I mean, if the only features that get added aren't useful, then isn't that actually worse than being stale? It's an antipattern at that point.

Useful _to you_

I am centered pretty squarely in the middle of their use case, so I would be relatively surprised if I'm an outlier.

Not sure why they compare to Photoshop and not XD.

XD was a tactical response to Sketch and Figma's encroachment of Photoshop as an UI/UX tool. Whilst XD is now a better target for a like-for-like comparison, from a historical perspective, Adobe is on the back-foot trying to re-capture the disciplines which no longer use their product.

This. I just used adobe XD for the first time and I actually truly enjoyed it. I'm not an Adobe fan boy - there just happened to be a sale on the Adobe cloud suite that I bought and XD came with it.

This is like saying Clojure is taking on Java, and winning.

It solves some problems some people have and that's great. It isn't moving the needle in any meaningful way.

Every industry disruption starts out this way... by solving some problems, but faster, cheaper, or better.

Taking the chance, I am working on JavaScript SDK to make canva-like design editors: https://polotno.dev/. Will be useful if you want to make a similar tool on your website.

There is also https://studio.polotno.dev/ product that as positioned as canva alternative without signups or paywalls. Not as good as canva yet, but it is in progress.

I assume they helped grow new markets and Adobe had to pivot into these “new” markets. All the old users of Adobe are still the users of Adobe. But most new entrants have grown up with new approaches like Canva etc..... I remember when GIMP was the only “credible” alternative to Adobe (acquiring competitors like Macromedia etc). Now there are dozens of alternatives.

> All the old users of Adobe are still the users of Adobe

That's definitely not true. Some niches like photo manipulation are still Adobe, but Adobe tools used to be the goto for Web Design and now they're not.

Closer to the truth is that Adobe stopped development on their tool in this area (Fireworks), which opened up the market for competitors (primarily Sketch, and the later Figma), who did indeed bring their own innovations. And only later realised their mistake.

Adobe keep doing really, really stupid things.

The latest Photoshop update removed some of the tools from the toolbar. Some of the tools have been there for decades, and regular users have their locations in muscle memory.

When you're done wondering why you've lost your way in a product you've used since the 90s, you can get the tools back by by Googling and changing a magic setting in the prefs.

But it's hard to be too offensive about a company that can do something like that in the name of "development", while leaving many of Photoshop's more annoying warts unattended.

What's Figma?

Sorry to be that guy, but have you done a quick google?

I think this is a pun related to "Whats Ligma?" and the inappropriate answer to it :)

It's a new-ish design tool that is cloud-native. It's kind of like Sketch but as a web app.

FIGMA NUTS

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