Adobe made its painting app completely free to take on Procreate

Adobe is attempting to lure illustrators to join its creative software platform by making its dedicated drawing and painting app entirely free for everyone. Fresco is essentially Adobe’s answer to apps like Procreate and Clip Studio Paint, which all provide a variety of tools for both digital art and simulating real-world materials like sketching pencils and watercolor paints.

Adobe Fresco is designed for touch and stylus-supported devices, and is available on iPad, iPhone, and Windows PCs. The app already had a free-to-use tier, but premium features like access to the full Adobe Fonts library, a much wider brush selection, and the ability to import custom brushes previously required a $9.99 annual subscription. That’s pretty affordable for an Adobe subscription, but still couldn’t compete with Procreate’s $12.99 one-time purchase model.

Starting today, all of Fresco’s premium features are no longer locked behind a paywall. The app first launched in 2019 and isn’t particularly well-known compared to more established Adobe apps like Photoshop and Illustrator that feature more complex, professional design tools. Fresco still has some interesting features of its own, like reflective and rotation symmetry (which mirror artwork as you draw) and the ability to quickly animate drawings with motion presets like “bounce” and “breathe.”

Competing apps like Procreate, Clip Studio Paint, and Krita are already popular in the digital art community: they’re affordable, easy to use, and supported on iPads, which can be much cheaper compared to buying both a computer and professional drawing tablets. Chances are that most of the fan art, web comics, and general illustrations from hobbyists and indie designers you see online were made using these tools instead of Adobe’s apps, let alone Fresco. 

Procreate especially has a notably devoted user base because of both its pricing and vocal pledge against introducing any generative AI tools, which appeals to artists who are concerned about how the technology is trained and may impact job opportunities. 

Fresco hasn’t integrated any of Adobe’s generative AI features and has some advantages over Procreate, such as a desktop app and cloud storage support (while Procreate files are saved on-device). Making it completely free could be enough to tempt new users to the platform, despite the wider image problem Adobe has with parts of the creative community.