You don’t have to rip out Adobe to stop overpaying for it
The biggest line in most enterprise creative budgets isn’t the software people use. It’s the software they don’t.
Walk into almost any large organisation, and you’ll find the same thing: a full Adobe estate, hundreds of seats, and a usage report that tells a very different story. A handful of designers live in it every day. Everyone else got a licence “just in case” during a rollout a few years ago, opened Photoshop twice, and never went back.
Nobody set out to waste money. It’s just what happens when enterprise software gets bought in bulk and reviewed rarely. The seats renew, the bill grows, and the question of who actually needs what quietly goes unasked.
It’s worth asking. Because the savings are large, and you don’t have to rip anything out to find them.
The ground just moved.
For years, the logic was simple. Canva for the everyday stuff, Adobe for the serious design work, and never the twain shall meet. That logic is now out of date.
Canva owns Affinity, the professional design suite, and as of late 2025, it’s free. One app covering photo, vector and layout, the same ground Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign cover, with no subscription. The old assumption that real design work locks you into Adobe simply no longer holds. The Canva family now spans the full stack, from a marketer creating a social post to a designer producing print-ready artwork.
That changes the question. It was never only “who’s barely touching their Adobe seat.” It’s increasingly “Does anyone here actually need to be locked into Adobe at all?”
Right tool, right person
Map your people against what they really do, and it sorts into a few groups. The difference now is that there’s a credible option at every tier.
The everyday creators, almost always the large majority, belong on Canva. Faster, on brand, because the controls are built in, and no enterprise design licence for someone putting together a deck.
The professional designers, the ones doing real photo, vector and layout work, now have Affinity. A genuine professional suite, free, in the same family. For most of that work, it’s a real alternative, not a downgrade. Keep Adobe only where a specific workflow truly needs it: deep video, a niche plugin, or a file pipeline a client locks you into.
The document work moves to Nitro. Most companies carry Acrobat seats purely to edit and sign PDFs. Nitro does that, e-signatures included, for a fraction of the cost.
Nobody loses the ability to do their job. They just stop paying Adobe rates by default.
The saving is hiding in your licence report.
The first move is the unglamorous one: pull your actual usage. How many Adobe seats are assigned versus genuinely active? How many Acrobat licences exist only to sign the odd PDF? How much of your “professional” design work could Affinity now carry? The gap between what you pay for and what you truly need is the saving, and with a free professional tier now in the mix, it’s wider than it has ever been.
From there, it’s sequencing, not a rip-and-replace. Move the majority to Canva, with the brand controls set up properly so quality goes up, not down. Put your designers on Affinity and see what genuinely still needs Adobe, which is usually less than people expect. Move the document work to Nitro. Retire the idle and the now-replaceable seats at renewal.
When done well, the result is a creative software bill that reflects reality, a workforce that can make things, and a brand that stays consistent because the easy path and the on-brand path have become the same path.
You don’t have to rip out Adobe overnight. But for the first time, you can question all of it, not just the seats nobody opens.
Curious what this would look like across your own organisation? Talk to us.
