Adobe Express vs Balsamiq Pricing (2026)
How do these two stack up on price? Here's what each one costs, what you get, and where the value sits.
| Adobe Express | Balsamiq | |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | $10/mo | $16/mo |
| Number of plans | 2 | 3 |
| Free plan | — | |
| Free trial | ||
| Pricing model | flat-rate | per-seat |
Adobe Express Free
- Templates: Access to 100,000+ static and video templates
- Assets: 1M+ royalty-free Adobe Stock photos, videos, music tracks, and design elements
- Fonts: Access to 4,000+ fonts from the Adobe Fonts collection.
- Editing tools: Standard photo, video, and document editing tools
- Content scheduling: Plan and schedule posts to 1 account per social network
- Version history: 10 days
- Storage: 5GB
- Devices: Works on desktop browsers and mobile phones
- Seamless integration across Adobe apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Firefly, Acrobat and Lightroom
- Professionally designed templates
- Template recommendations: Preview your photo in fully editable templates that complement the context of your photo.
- Adobe Stock photos
- Adobe Stock videos
- Adobe Stock audio/music
- Adobe Stock sound effects
- Adobe Stock backgrounds
- Adobe Stock design assets: Illustrations, brushes, textures, frames, and more.
- Adobe Stock icons
- Basic Shapes
- AI Assistant (Beta): Prompt-anything, edit-everything
- Generate Presentations: Turn your documents into presentations in minutes.
- Generate images, text effects, templates & more
- Insert & Remove Objects
- Generate 5-second videos
- Erase
- Photo Adjustments and Effects: Adjust contrast, shadows, saturation and more, or add effects and blend modes, powered by Photoshop.
- Start from photos: Start from a JPG, PNG, PSD, and more to bring your photo into the all-in-one editor.
- Adobe Fonts
- Font recommendations: See recommendations for fonts that match the style of your design.
- Add and sync your .psd and .ai files
- Export in JPEG, PNG, PDF, GIF, PPT
- Export as PNG with transparent background
- Draw and paint with 85+ brushes and coloring pages
- Drag-and-drop video creation
- Remove video background
- Animate All: Automatically apply motion to your entire design
- Dynamic Animations: Add physics-based animation to your photos, videos, text, shapes, and icons.
- Record voiceover and video directly in-app
- Video transitions
- Video length
- Remove Image Background
- Resize Image
- Crop Image
- Generate QR Code
- PDF Quick Actions: Edit, Combine, Organize, Import/Enhance PDF
- Convert to GIF
- Convert to JPG/PNG/SVG/MP4
- Caption Video
- Resize Video
- Clip Maker: Turn video podcasts, educational videos, and product reviews into social clips with captions
- Merge, Crop, and Trim Video
- Animate Characters
- Libraries: Store all your Adobe Express and Creative Cloud assets in one place.
- Branded templates: Create brand-specific templates for use across all your teams.
- Real-time co-editing and commenting
- Content Scheduler: Plan, publish, and schedule direct to social channels.
- Shared social calendars
- Cloud storage
- Version history
Acrobat Express
Popular- Templates: Access to all premium static and video templates
- Assets: 200M+ royalty-free Adobe Stock photos, videos, music tracks, and design elements
- Fonts: Access to the complete Adobe Fonts collection with over 30,000+ fonts.
- Editing tools: Additional tools like Remove Video Background, advanced animation, and more
- Content scheduling: Plan and schedule posts to 3 accounts per social network
- Version history: 30 days
- Storage: 100GB
- Devices: Works on desktop browsers and mobile phones
- One-click Resize: Automatically resize assets for multiple channels
- Brand management: Brand kits to maintain consistency across your content
- Acrobat Reader: View, comment, print, plus fill and sign PDF forms
- Acrobat AI Assistant: Summarize documents and get answers with citations
- Generate podcast: Listen to key insights on the go with AI-generated podcasts
- PDF Spaces: Bring documents, AI insights, and team feedback into one shared workspace
- Generate presentations: Turn documents into decks, customizable in Adobe Express
- Seamless integration across Adobe apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Firefly, Acrobat and Lightroom
- Do more with your documents. Create, convert, export, and secure PDFs, with AI Assistant (includes PDF Spaces) built in to help you summarize, search, and get answers fast.
- Professionally designed templates
- Template recommendations: Preview your photo in fully editable templates that complement the context of your photo.
- Adobe Stock photos
- Adobe Stock videos
- Adobe Stock audio/music
- Adobe Stock sound effects
- Adobe Stock backgrounds
- Adobe Stock design assets: Illustrations, brushes, textures, frames, and more.
- Adobe Stock icons
- Basic Shapes
- AI Assistant (Beta): Prompt-anything, edit-everything
- Generate Presentations: Turn your documents into presentations in minutes.
- Generative credits
- Generate images, text effects, templates & more
- Insert & Remove Objects
- Commercial Use: Create content with features designed to be commercially safe, powered by Adobe Firefly generative AI.
- Generate 5-second videos
- Erase
- Photo Adjustments and Effects: Adjust contrast, shadows, saturation and more, or add effects and blend modes, powered by Photoshop.
- Start from photos: Start from a JPG, PNG, PSD, and more to bring your photo into the all-in-one editor.
- Adobe Fonts
- Font recommendations: See recommendations for fonts that match the style of your design.
- Add and sync your .psd and .ai files
- Export in JPEG, PNG, PDF, GIF, PPT
- Export as PNG with transparent background
- Draw and paint with 85+ brushes and coloring pages
- Drag-and-drop video creation
- Remove video background
- Animate All: Automatically apply motion to your entire design
- Dynamic Animations: Add physics-based animation to your photos, videos, text, shapes, and icons.
- Record voiceover and video directly in-app
- Video transitions
- Video length
- Export in 4K
- Enhance Speech
- TikTok Symphony Assistant Add-on: 1M+ songs and sounds from TikTok's Commercial Music Library.
- Remove Image Background
- Resize Image
- Crop Image
- Generate QR Code
- PDF Quick Actions: Edit, Combine, Organize, Import/Enhance PDF
- Convert to GIF
- Convert to JPG/PNG/SVG/MP4
- Caption Video
- Resize Video
- Clip Maker: Turn video podcasts, educational videos, and product reviews into social clips with captions
- Merge, Crop, and Trim Video
- Animate Characters
- Brand Kits: Keep all your colors, fonts, logos and graphics in one brand kit.
- Extract brand colors, fonts, logos from image in one-click
- Libraries: Store all your Adobe Express and Creative Cloud assets in one place.
- Branded templates: Create brand-specific templates for use across all your teams.
- Brand controls: Specify which brand colors and fonts can be used in a shared template.
- Custom Home: Featured branded banner and instant access to approved on-brand templates.
- Real-time co-editing and commenting
- Share templates across teams
- Resize: Resize for multiple formats - at one time, in the same file.
- Translate: Automatically translate text into 45+ languages.
- Safe Zones: Format-aware guides to keep important text, visuals, and logos visible
- Caption Writer: AI-generated social captions tailored to your design
- Social Mentions: Add mentions directly in captions when scheduling posts.
- Content Scheduler: Plan, publish, and schedule direct to social channels.
- Shared social calendars
- Cloud storage
- Version history
Starter
- Up to 10 projects
- Invite unlimited reviewers
- 500 monthly Balsamiq AI credits per editor
- Slack integration
- Create custom, reusable UI components
- Export to PDF or image
Teams
Popular- Up to 100 projects
- Invite unlimited reviewers
- 1,000 monthly Balsamiq AI credits per editor
- Billing admin role and permissions
- Create custom, reusable UI components
- Export to PDF or image
- Priority support
Enterprise
- Up to 400 projects
- 2,500 monthly Balsamiq AI credits per editor
- SSO with SAML
- Legal and security review support
- Data storage in the US or EU
- Premium support
Adobe Express vs Balsamiq FAQ
- Which one is cheaper?
- Adobe Express starts lower at $10/mo, compared to $16/mo for Balsamiq.
- Can I use either one for free?
- Adobe Express has a free plan. Balsamiq doesn't — though they do offer a free trial.
- How do they charge?
- Different approach here. Adobe Express uses flat-rate pricing, while Balsamiq goes with per-seat. That changes the math depending on your team size and usage.
- Which one is a better deal?
- Depends on what you need. Adobe Express: At $10.99/mo they're undercutting Canva Pro ($15/mo) while bundling in PDF functionality that Canva doesn't touch — a deliberate move to win SMB users and solo professionals who bounce between design and document work. It's a value play dressed up with Adobe's brand credibility. Balsamiq: Balsamiq sits at the budget-to-mid end of the design tool market, well below Figma or Sketch on price, and they're leaning into that. They're not chasing enterprise design teams — they're targeting PMs, BAs, and scrappy product teams who want low-fidelity wireframing without a steep learning curve or a steep bill.
Keep tabs on both.
We'll monitor pricing changes for Adobe Express and Balsamiq and let you know when something moves.