We were pretty impressed with Adobe Animate when we looked at the animation app just over a year ago. It’s a clever repurposing of Macromedia’s defunct Flash technology, turning it into a useful and fun 2D animation tool. Has a year brought in any new and interesting advances? We put the latest version of the animation software to the test.
Adobe Animate: Pricing & plans
- Expensive software to rent on its own, but it you already subscribe to Adobe’s Creative Cloud, then you essentially get it for free.
As with most of Adobe’s professional apps, Animate is available through either a standalone subscription or as part of Creative Cloud All Apps. Subscriptions are available as annual, monthly, or annual billed monthly (contract) plans.
If you use three or more different Adobe apps, then the Creative Cloud option will provide a bit more value for money here, as it bundles Animate alongside other top tools like Photoshop, After Effects. and Premiere Pro. There is no free trial of Animate, but you can cancel your subscription anytime within the first 14 days to get a full refund.
We’ve explored the different costs and discounts in our guide Download Animate: How to try Adobe Animate for free or with Creative Cloud
Adobe Animate: How it works
- A highly versatile way to easily animate 2D objects, even those not designed for animation – and it’s great fun to use.
Adobe Animate is a good and fun app to perform anything from quick to highly complex 2D animations, either using existing artwork or creating it right from within the app itself. Not to be confused with Adobe’s simple 2D digital puppeteering app, Character Animator.
In Animate, you have complete freedom to use the software as you see fit, such as drawing each frame manually, or use the motion tween tool to automate the process (while removing a bit of individuality from the process).
In order to get started, you’re offered a series of templates, from standard 16:9 resolutions, to banner ads, various social media platforms, game consoles, web pages, the list is impressive, but if none of that suits, you’re free to customize your canvas however you see fit.
All the tools you’d expect to animate anything are there, such as keyframes, onion skinning, the works. The flexibility is quite impressive, giving you a lot of freedom when it comes to creating unique shapes, but the part we liked the best is the app’s Asset Warp tool. This allows you to add motion to an object that wasn’t originally designed for such a process – like a photo of a figurine on a transparent background, for instance. This exoskeleton informs Animate how the object’s various sections are connected to each other, enabling you to move them… within limits: if the angle means you can’t fully see one of the figure’s limbs, this method won’t magically make it appear; you can animate what you see. Nothing’s stopping you however from creating that limb from scratch, connecting that creation to the photo and controlling its movements.
When it comes to exporting your work, you’ve got a handful of options, namely sharing it directly to YouTube and Twitter (yes, at the time of review, the software still calls it Twitter), or exporting it as an .mp4 or .gif file, which you can then use anywhere you wish.
Adobe Animate: New features
- Welcome improvements for sure, but the list is very paltry, and what’s actually changed, although ok, doesn’t feel like it’s worth a full numbered version upgrade.
Animate was already surprisingly versatile and powerful as it previously was, so what wonders did Adobe introduce with the latest major upgrade? Well, it may depend on which platform you’re using the software on: there are three updates being advertised, the first of which is native Apple Silicon support.
That’s right: Animate works natively on all the best MacBook Pro laptops and Macs with M1 to M3 chips. According to the advertising, not only will this lead to smoother drawing when compared with Intel Macs, but the app itself will launch faster, your project will export up to twice as fast, and your timeline will playback up to three times as fast. Very welcome, especially for professional creatives, but nothing to get too excited about. After all, the original M1 chip was introduced in November 2020. That’s a long time to wait for a native app from one of the most successful professional software developers in the world. Still, it’s here now, so mustn’t grumble, I guess.
Next up, is a “sleek user interface”. Hearing about this got us pretty excited. After all, Animate’s previous interface was excellent, and extremely customizable, letting you tear off tabs, keep them as floating windows, or dock them elsewhere in the interface. But there’s always room for improvement. So what did they give us? We have to admit, we had to look pretty closely and make sure we were actually running the latest version. Essentially, all the windows are slightly more compressed, leaving more room for the main preview section, helping you focus more easily on what you’re designing. Again, this is great, but the change is subtle. Put the previous interface next to the current one, and it might take you a few seconds to figure out which is which. But more room to preview your work can only be a good thing.
And our third tentpole new feature is the ability to reset a Warp Asset. Warp Assets are the secret sauce behind Animate’s ability to give motion to still images that weren’t initially designed for movement. Once you’ve created a skeleton frame of sorts, you can stretch and bend your image to give it the illusion that it’s moving. Subtle changes are usually best so as not to distort the image too much, which would make the motion feel unnatural, but how far is too far? There’s always been the potential for concern to experiment too much, and then having to manually move the frame back to its original settings. Until now. Thanks to this latest version, you can find the ‘Reset Warped Asset’ button to the right of a selected object’s ‘Warp Options’, in the Properties’ Object tab.
These really feel like very minor improvements, hardly worthy of a full version number upgrade. However, this shouldn’t detract you from the appeal of an app that was already pretty excellent to begin with – overall, one of the best animation software we’ve tried.
Adobe Animate: Scorecard
| Row 0 – Cell 0 | Row 0 – Cell 1 | Row 0 – Cell 2 |
| Pricing & plans | Subscription-based software, with the usual Adobe plans | 4 |
| How it works | Great fun to use, and very versatile | 4.5 |
| New features | Not much compared to the last round of big updates | 3 |
Should I buy?
Buy it if…
You need to animate static objects in 2D, you need something that’s powerful yet easy to use, with a bunch of original tools, and ideally you already subscribe to Adobe’s Creative Cloud.
Don’t buy it if…
You’re not already an Adobe subscriber, or you want even more control over effects, as in After Effects or any of the best Adobe After Effects alternatives.
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