Adobe takes the fight to Canva with new AI marketing platform

Joseph Foley
·2 min read
Adobe GenStudio.
Adobe GenStudio.

It's been a big week for design software news. First Canva agreed to buy to Affinity, one of the main Adobe rivals, entering the desktop software space for the first time. Now Adobe revealed more of its weapon to take a bite out of Canva's traditional space with an AI-heavy online hub for brand design assets and advertising.

GenStudio is intended to serve as a single centralised online hub providing easy access to a range of generative AI tools for building marketing campaigns. It can be used to provide access to brand kits, copy guidance, preapproved assets and performance analytics alongside Adobe Firefly generative AI-powered tools that can generate images and backgrounds.

GenStudio isn't entirely new to us; it was announced at Adobe MAX 2023 in October. But Adobe revealed more at the Adobe Summit yesterday as alpha testing nears an end, and it's started taking applications for beta access, which it says will be coming soon.

As we noted back in October, GenStudio sounds like it's designed to compete with Canva's Magic Studio, an AI-powered design platform that includes various text-to-image tools to generate and edit images for campaigns plus AI copywriting and more. Like Canva, Adobe says its platform will include AI-powered copy guidance that can advise users on whether their copy fits their brand voice, though I've yet to see very convincing demonstrations of copy-oriented features in action on either.

Adobe hasn't commented yet on GenStudio pricing, which it says will vary according to the size of each business customer.

Adobe GenStudio
Adobe GenStudio

Also at the Adobe Summit, the creative software giant presented Firefly Services, which will provide brands with over 20 AI-powered tools and APIs to automate repetitive creative tasks such as image resizing and generative background expansion.

Another announcement was the introduction of the Adobe Firefly Structure Reference tool, which is intended to help generate more consistent variations in images. Meanwhile, Custom Models will allow companies to train their own versions of Firefly. Finally, Adobe said that it's working with Microsoft to integrate workflows and insights from its Experience Cloud platform into Copilot for Microsoft 365.

See below for current pricing on Adobe Creative Cloud, and see our roundup of the best AI art generators and the best AI art tutorials for more on AI tools.