The specialist pick, and the one reason for it
Adobe Stock is the most expensive way to buy ten images a month in our stock photo comparison, and for one kind of buyer it is still the right one.
That buyer designs in Photoshop or Premiere every day. Adobe bundles Photoshop, Premiere and Adobe Express web and mobile access into the plans, and lets you preview and edit a stock image inside Photoshop before you license it. For somebody who places forty images a week, not leaving the canvas is worth more than the price difference. For everybody else it is a premium for a convenience they will not use.
It scores 8.1 under how we rate, second highest in the set, and it is our pick for Photoshop and Creative Cloud users.
Ten credits, priced as a year
The entry plan is 10 Stock credits a month at $29.99 on an annual plan billed monthly, which is $359.88 for the year. Shutterstock sells ten a month for $300, and unlimited for not much more.
Adobe has moved from selling images to selling credits, and the word matters. One credit buys one standard image. A premium photo costs 12 to 50 credits. HD video costs 8. So the plan name tells you how many standard images you get and nothing about the ones you may actually want.
The plans with AI Studio start at $39.99 a month and add generative editing, with a seven-day free trial the cheapest plan does not offer.
Rollover with a trapdoor
Unused plan credits roll over for up to twelve months. That is the best rollover period in the set, and it comes with the clause every rollover here shares, stated more bluntly than most.
If you cancel, you lose access to Adobe Stock and your unused licences and credits expire. Move to a cheaper plan and the same happens. A year of saved-up credits is only worth something while you keep paying for the plan that holds them.
Two kinds of credit that never meet
Adobe also sells credit packs outside the subscription, and they behave differently. Eighty credits cost $359.99, last one year from purchase and do not renew. Pack credits and plan credits "are not interchangeable", so you cannot top up a subscription with a pack to license one premium image.
For a buyer who needs one 4K clip and nothing else this year, a pack is the sensible purchase. For a subscriber it is a second wallet.
The exit fee
Cancel in the first 14 days and there is no fee. After that, Adobe charges up to half of the remaining annual commitment, and every rolled-over credit goes with it.
Leave in month four and you pay half of eight months for nothing, and lose whatever you had saved. Shutterstock has the same 50 percent structure without the rollover to lose. Dreamstime's monthly plan has no commitment to break.
The legal side is better. Adobe publishes indemnification of up to $10,000 on its standard plans, level with Shutterstock, Dreamstime and iStock, and its standard licence allows 500,000 copies, with no cap at all for web, social and app use.
One account, one person, unless you buy Teams
An individual plan is for one person. Adobe's answer for a studio is a Teams plan, where licences are shared between members. It is the right structure for three designers who keep licensing the same campaign images, and Adobe sells it as a separate product with its own price list.
The alternative some small teams reach for, one login passed around, is outside the individual licence at every paid library in this comparison. Dreamstime prices that need as an extended licence per image; Adobe prices it as a plan.
Who should buy it
Buy it if you already pay for Photoshop or Premiere and license images several times a week. The integration is real, the rollover is long, and the cover is the market standard.
Do not buy it to save money. Anyone choosing on price alone should look at Dreamstime for a few images or Shutterstock for many. And anyone who might want out before the year ends should read the exit clause twice before the trial converts.
Prices, rollover and cancellation terms on this page were read from the Adobe Stock plans page and licence terms on , using the US plan list. We did not test the service.
