Adobe InDesign

4.8 (296)
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Layout and page design software

About Adobe InDesign

Adobe InDesign is a layout design and desktop publishing software designed to help businesses and creative individuals create graphic designs with typography from various foundries and imagery from Adobe Stock. The platform lets teams create and publish digital magazines, books, eBooks, interactive PDFs, posters, and more.

Adobe InDesign enables users to manage design elements and deliver immersive experiences in multiple formats. The application integrates with Experience Manager and Adobe Creative Cloud, allowing organizations to share graphics, fonts, and content across projects. Users can publish content to the web and use the built-in content analysis tool to gain insights into the performance of their content.

Adobe InDesign offers a variety of Adobe Stock free templates such as brochures, landing pages, infographics, and more. Teams can also directly import shapes and color themes from Adobe Capture and receive Adobe Fonts suggestions based on the raster image of a font.


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Adobe InDesign Software - Adobe InDesign character options
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Adobe InDesign

4.8 (296)
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Starting Price

USD 20.99
month
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Pricing Options

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Features

24
7

Integrations

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Ease of Use

4.1 (296)
4.5 (162)

Value for Money

4.2 (296)
4.7 (162)

Customer Service

4.2 (296)
4.2 (162)
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Reviews

Overall rating

4.8 /5
(296)
Value for Money
4.2/5
Features
4.7/5
Ease of Use
4.1/5
Customer Support
4.2/5

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Showing 5 reviews of 296
Adham
Adham
Overall rating
  • Industry: Broadcast Media
  • Company size: 10,000+ Employees
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Customer Support
  • Likelihood to recommend 10.0 /10

From portfolios to 100 page catalogs, InDesign is capable of that

Reviewed on 07/01/2024

I've used Adobe In-design for the first time back in 2017, i created my first portfolio for my...

I've used Adobe In-design for the first time back in 2017, i created my first portfolio for my design business, and that's when all the doors opened, i've used InDesign since then for all of my top clients, from company profiles to product catalogs, i've done it all and it always had my back. i recommend it for everyone who wants to create anything for digital publishing and offline brochures, catalogs, product base, online and offline portfolios, and magazines

Pros

I usually use it for catalog design and portfolios and company profiles, it certainly have the best features, easy to use most of the time, exporting is pretty fast, the fact that you can add multiples layers of complex designs and even edit your previous PDF's.

Cons

Sometimes the app crashes out of the sudden, but that's about it, and i wish there was more templates to use.

Julie
Overall rating
  • Industry: Mechanical or Industrial Engineering
  • Company size: 11–50 Employees
  • Used Monthly for 2+ years
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Likelihood to recommend 8.0 /10

Great Software, But Rather Complex

Reviewed on 12/01/2024

Like all Adobe programs, InDesign is incredibly powerful and robust...almost TOO powerful. It's got...

Like all Adobe programs, InDesign is incredibly powerful and robust...almost TOO powerful. It's got a lot of little intricacies you likely will never use or need...If you do, great--they're there! But if you don't, them it's just more buttons and tabs and windows and options for you to have to dig through in order to reach the features you DO use. Still a million times better than trying to layout a document in Microsoft Word though!!

Pros

It's very powerful and can do a ton of things. After using InDesign, and being able to customize so much of my graphic design and text, I now prefer to use this over most programs, including Microsoft Word. The guides are always helpful, ensuring that my elements are evenly spaces and aligned properly. I love being able to easily copy an entire page and all it's elements, and then rearrange things while still in the same document so I can see how a design progresses as I tinker with various elements of the layout and end up with several variations and options. The program is capable of so much, and I'm always continuing to learn more new and helpful tricks.

Cons

1. The cost. Thankfully this is paid for by my employer, because I wouldn't be able to afford to use it otherwise. It's also rather annoying that I don't have the option to just outright purchase a license to OWN. No, like most other software these days, you can only "lease" it, paying by the month. This program does not have enough major updates to truly need access to the latest version. I could work from an older version quite happily.

2. FONTS. I don't know what the deal is, but I always have issues with the fonts, and regardless of how many times I waste my time, reconnecting each font style when I open a document, I inevitably have to do it each and every time. It's time consuming and cumbersome, and considering the fonts are installed directly in my computer's font library, I don't see why it has such an issue. I could possibly understand if I were only using font's from Adobe's library on the cloud, however, this particular font is installed.

3. The fact that I cannot easily change the color of an icon with a cover overlay or something similar. It's a minor point, but as icons have become so popular lately, they are featured in almost all of my documents and layouts. The only way I've found to do it thus far is a messy workaround that involves using the Inner Glow feature, and changing about 6 different but specific settings in order to change the color of the icon. It's a bit of a hassle for a task that feels rather basic.

4. My user view/layout. You have the option to customize your own layout, which I have done...and yet the layout CONSTANTLY gets reset back to the default....and my custom one has disappeared, so I don't even have the option to select it any more! Given that experience, I haven't bothered to create a new custom view because it seems futile, since it'll continue to be reset with each update, AND I'm not confident that view won't mysteriously disappear like my previous one.

5. Not the most intuitive. Its complexity is both a blessing AND a curse, and if you use a lot of other Adobe products, it'll look familiar and you'll be able to identify a lot of the buttons and figure things out. However, new people will likely have a bit of a struggle learning their way around. Also, there's SO many features that a lot of them area tucked away, "hidden" in various drop downs, buttons, options, etc. It's hard to remember where things are if you don't use them very regularly. It's difficult to truly learn the whole program. I've been using it for 13+ years, and I still feel like I'm just mediocre with it.

NORMAN
Overall rating
  • Industry: Graphic Design
  • Company size: Self Employed
  • Used Weekly for 1-5 months
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Customer Support
  • Likelihood to recommend 1.0 /10

You cannot upload anything

Reviewed on 27/07/2024

Terrible. It doesn't work. Again, no matter what file I try to upload to InDesign, it will take it.

Terrible. It doesn't work. Again, no matter what file I try to upload to InDesign, it will take it.

Pros

Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing

Cons

I have been trying to upload a pdf book to InDesign for weeks, unsuccessfully.

Renea
Overall rating
  • Industry: Graphic Design
  • Company size: 2–10 Employees
  • Used Weekly for 1+ year
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Customer Support
  • Likelihood to recommend 10.0 /10

Industry Standard for Professional Publishing, but Costly for Small Businesses

Reviewed on 31/10/2024

Despite the cost, InDesign remains my top choice for high-quality, professional publishing. For...

Despite the cost, InDesign remains my top choice for high-quality, professional publishing. For those who need top-tier tools and work on larger projects regularly, it’s worth the investment.

Pros

Adobe InDesign is my go-to for complex and detailed design projects in my genealogy and family history business. It’s an incredibly powerful tool with virtually unlimited options for layout, typography, and customization, making it ideal for crafting professional, detailed templates that I sell to clients. The learning curve can be steep, but once you get the hang of it, the flexibility and precision are unmatched.

InDesign shines with its extensive export options and seamless integration with other Adobe products like Photoshop and Illustrator, which are essential when working on intricate projects across multiple platforms. That said, Adobe’s monthly subscription can get pricey, especially for small business owners who don’t need the full suite every month.

Cons

Expensive monthly subscription and a steeper learning curve for beginners.

Sean
Overall rating
  • Industry: Oil & Energy
  • Company size: 11–50 Employees
  • Used Daily for 2+ years
  • Review Source

Overall rating

  • Value for Money
  • Ease of Use
  • Likelihood to recommend 9.0 /10

Short Learning curve - A must have for text-based content creation.

Reviewed on 03/11/2023

Coming from using photoshop for creating designs for flyers and brochures - company profiles ect......

Coming from using photoshop for creating designs for flyers and brochures - company profiles ect... and this has been an absolute eye-opener. Now I feel like i know what the pros do. I can edit elaborate,(and readable, text-heavy + image-rich content with huge page-counts without creating monstrously big file-size. - nothing can convert into pdf as efficiently as Adobe InDesign. I have found myself almost fully ditching Photoshop, Microsoft Word and others for weeks at a time because editing here feels effortless for me (someone that loves beautifully designed and thought out documents) . The only big gripe for me is that InDesign isn't very well adopted by my collogues... so when they need to edit a file that i made - they cant easily open it like they would an MS Word document.

Pros

IT just works! - it looks like a photoshop-ey interface, but the user experience is more fitting to Designers/Nothing else seems to convert my elaborate book designs filled with HD images into PDFs with the level of optimization like InDesign does.It feels like a proper design tool but with a built-in word processor. A perfect middleground between Design and Word functionality.Its an Adobe product so it gets updated often! and now with those nifty Ai tools that automagically makes your work alot easier!

Cons

Its an Adobe product so its probably on the expensive end for a non-pro user.Coming from Photoshop - I had to rethink the way i designed and that was a small but noticeable learning curve.Lacks some of the granular functionality of Microsoft Word to be considered a possible competitor for word processing.

Alternatives Considered

Adobe Illustrator

Reasons for Choosing Adobe InDesign

Needed more efficient way to make small file size PDFs with very high quality.

Switched From

Adobe Photoshop

Reasons for Switching to Adobe InDesign

Made for documents and long format text files, books and magazines. Just what i needed
Showing 5 reviews of 296 Read all reviews

Adobe InDesign FAQs

Below are some frequently asked questions for Adobe InDesign.

Adobe InDesign offers the following pricing plans:

  • Starting from: USD 20.99/month
  • Pricing model: Subscription
  • Free Trial: Available

Adobe InDesign has the following typical customers:

Self Employed, 2–10, 11–50, 51–200, 201–500, 501–1,000

Adobe InDesign supports the following languages:

English

Adobe InDesign supports the following devices:

We do not have any information about what integrations Adobe InDesign has

Adobe InDesign offers the following support options:

FAQs/Forum, Knowledge Base

Related categories

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