53. How much do Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator cost?
Short story: This is how much the Adobe applications cost
| Application | Cost (updated 2017-09-18) |
|---|---|
| Adobe Acrobat Pro | 818 SEK (perpetual license - one-time fee) |
| A single application (example: Photoshop or Illustrator) | 444 - 996 SEK/year depending on app |
| Adobe Complete (all applications) English | 1620 SEK/year |
| Adobe Acrobat Reader | free |
- If buying more than one application the Adobe Complete with all applications are cheaper.
- All applications using the Adobe Campus UU agreement with the ETLA license type has to be removed (uninstalled) from all computers.
- All Adobe applications without valid license has to be removed.
- Old perpetual licenses fully paid via one-time fee (Adobe CS3, CS4, CS5, CS6 etc) or within the ELA license type may still be used but not be upgraded. Those softwares are NOT recommended to use due to unpatched security holes! And old software might not work at all on a modern computer OS.
Long story:
You can rent the whole suite from Adobe called Creative Cloud for teams All Apps which contain the following applications:
You can also rent a program as Single-App, but that cost is more than half of renting All Apps.
This means that it will be less expensive to rent the entire suite if you are interested in more than one application.
The applications below are possible to rent as Single-Apps (note that Acrobat Pro and Photoshop Lightroom are not possible to rent as Single-Apps):
Notice that Acrobat Pro is not required to read PDF-files, fill PDF-forms or create PDF-files. This is possible by combining the freeware Acrobat Reader and Microsoft Office.
Some of you may consider finishing your Adobe Campus UU licenses to reduce cost. The Adobe applications must then be removed from your computer. In some cases certain applications can be replaced with earlier versions if they have been bought (not rented). There is no guarantee for how long earlier Adobe versions continue to operated since they may become incompatible with newer versions of Windows and Mac OS.
The applications probably contain report functions allowing Adobe to identify and count computers within UU using their applications and relate that to the number of paid licenses. It is therefore risky to keep Adobe applications without paying for the new license. Such cheating may lead to financial claims from Adobe.
There are some free alternatives to the Adobe applications but no perfect replacements. Here are some suggestions:
| Application | Alternative | Platform |
|---|---|---|
| Photoshop | GIMP | Mac OS, Windows, Linux |
| Illustrator | Inkscape | Mac OS, Windows, Linux |
| Draw.IO (simple block diagrams) | Web | |
| InDesign | Scribus | Mac OS, Windows, Linux |
| Acrobat Pro | Acrobat Reader (to read PDF and fill forms) | Mac OS, Windows, Linux |
| PDFCreator (to create PDF by "printing" from other applications) | Windows | |
| PDF-Xchange (create, edit, merge PDF) | Windows | |
| Word 2013 (to open PDF, edit and convert to Word) | Windows | |
| PDFsam (to combine, divide and rotate PDF-documents) | Mac OS, Windows, Linux | |
| AbleWord (to open PDF, edit and convert to Word) | Windows | |
| CutePDF (to create PDF by "printing" from other applications) | Mac OS, Windows, Linux | |
| PDFtk Server (command line tool to manipulate PDF in many ways) | Mac OS, Windows, Linux | |
| Dreamweaver | We have found no direct replacement, but here is a list of 10 alternatives to Adobe Dreamweaver. Also read the Wikipedia page of Comparison of HTML editors - general information. |