Part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite, InDesign is an industry-standard page layout and print design application for creating everything from brochures and posters to magazines and newspapers to interactive ebooks. Adobe incorporates features like enhanced digital publishing and file export capabilities, SVG (scalable vector graphic) imports, and variable fonts, as well as accommodates ever-evolving technical, professional, and social design trends. The program also supports HTML5, style sheets, XML, and other coding markup, making it suitable for exporting tagged text content in other digital and online formats. We wish there was a tablet or web version, but InDesign is still superb graphic design software and an Editors’ Choice winner.
How Much Does InDesign Cost?
InDesign is available only by subscription as a single app or as part of the entire Creative Cloud suite. The single app goes for $34.49 per month or $22.99 per month if you agree to an annual commitment. You can also pay $263.88 for a full year up front, which works out to $21.99 per month. These subscriptions include 100 monthly generative AI credits to use with Adobe Firefly.
The entire Creative Cloud suite gives you every arrow in Adobe’s professional design software quiver, packing more than 20 apps, including Illustrator, Lightroom, Photoshop, and Premiere Pro. It costs $89.99 per month, $59.99 per month with a one-year commitment, or $659.88 ($54.99 per month) if you pay for a year up front. These plans get you 1,000 Firefly credits.
Are There Alternatives to InDesign?
Even though InDesign is what most professionals use, other page layout applications are still worth knowing about.
QuarkXPress, for instance, lends itself well to institutional workflows (think automated book or ebook publishing houses and in-house corporate graphics teams). It had long been InDesign’s main competitor in professional publishing. However, over time, InDesign evolved faster to capture—and maintain—market dominance. The two share many features (opens a PDF), but it might be difficult to find associates, vendors, or workflows that still use the app. QuarkXPress costs $279 per year or $699 for a perpetual license.
The CorelDraw Graphics Suite ($549, or $269 per year) offers a good range of design tools that go beyond page layout (including CAD compatibility) and is a competent vector editor. However, it’s not as adept as InDesign for designing beefy documents like books or magazines or as robust for complex print work. You also might run into compatibility and workflow issues when moving between the two.
Affinity Publisher (starting at $69.99) is more affordable and easier to learn than InDesign, as well as works seamlessly with other apps in Affinity’s design suite, including Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer. Although Publisher has benefits like iPad availability and a combed vector and raster workspace, it currently lacks some of the advanced features and industry standardization of InDesign.
For PC only, Microsoft Publisher is very user-friendly, though it’s not suitable for professional print work because of its limited color management tools and lack of print production features. Adding to those challenges is that Microsoft is discontinuing it in 2026.
For a free (open-source) and cross-platform alternative, try Scribus. It can handle print page layout, as well as create animated and interactive presentations and forms.
Can Your PC Run InDesign?
InDesign is available for both Mac and Windows computers. For macOS, you need at least version 12.x (Monterey) or later, 8GB of RAM, and 4.5GB of disk space. For Windows, you need version 10 or later, 8GB of RAM, and 3.6GB of disk space.
Adobe doesn’t offer a version of InDesign for tablets or the web, unlike with Lightroom and Photoshop.
What Can You Create With InDesign?
InDesign’s strengths are in assembling, designing, laying out, typesetting, and preflighting complex multipage layouts. The program’s project-specific workspaces, such as Digital Publishing, Interactive PDF, Printing and Proofing, and Digital Publishing, simplify and focus your workflow. Designers and production artists use InDesign to create a spectrum of print deliverables, such as books, brochures, newspapers, and magazines, and digital media, such as ebooks and interactive PDFs. Adobe recently fired up Firefly in InDesign, extending the creative possibilities for your text-based prompts.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
An example of a project for which InDesign is eminently suitable is a user manual that requires Arabic page numbers, chapter divisions with Roman numerals, a comprehensive index, a foreword, and a variety of diagrams. After the design phase, in advance of printing or publishing, a comprehensive preflight panel helps troubleshoot the file, making sure to call out any color inconsistencies, missing fonts, overset text, unlinked or low-resolution images, and related issues.
If you need help, you can consult a range of tutorials from InDesign’s Learn tab on its home screen.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
What Features Does InDesign Offer?
InDesign has far too many features and parts to cover here, but below are some highlights that demonstrate how it streamlines workflows and encourages creativity.
Adobe Capture
Adobe Capture is an underappreciated (and free) mobile app for Android and iOS that captures fonts, color palettes, and shapes from a photo and then saves them in your Creative Cloud libraries to use for inspiration in InDesign later. The latest version of the app can record speech and sound effects, as well as clean up audio with AI-enhanced effects.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag/Shelby Putnam Tupper)
Adobe Fonts
Within InDesign, you get unlimited access to the entire Adobe Fonts library in both screen and downloadable desktop formats. The Character Panel provides real-time visual font browsing (you see highlighted text in the actual font) and gets an improved search. When you engage the drop-down font menu, you can see the fonts on your computer, as well as the more than 20,000 in Adobe’s wider library. You can sort and filter font attributes, classifications, starred favorites, or recently used categories.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag/Shelby Putnam Tupper)
Flexible Layout Options
Have you ever had a client inform you on round four or five of feedback that they need to change the page size or orientation of a document? Of course you have! With InDesign’s Adjust Layout feature, changing the parameters of the layout isn’t the time-consuming grunt work that it used to be.
But what’s the difference between Adjust Layout and the Liquid Layout and Alternate Layouts tools? Liquid Layout facilitates the process of designing alternative layouts to handle multiple page sizes (such as for a range of devices) by letting you create and apply specific rules (centering, guide- and object-based, and scaling) about the mechanics of how those changes adapt to various destinations. It can be semi- or fully automatic. Although you can use Alternate Layout in conjunction with Liquid Layout, the former is primarily for digital and print publications that require different layouts within a document. Both systems reduce the manual work that comes with laying out every page in a document a second (or third, or fourth) time. The Adjust Layout tool, by comparison, is what you should reach for after the text and images are already in place.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
You no longer need to live through the madness of page-by-page manual adjustment via the Document Setup or Margins and Columns pull-down menus, thanks to the Adjust Layout option. This lets you change the global bleed, margin, and page measurements, as well as the font size. You can also find another Adjust Layout option in the Margins and Columns dialog box to further assist with your reconfiguration requirements.
Discriminating designers should expect some trial and error to get things perfect. In any case, the Adjust Layout feature can save you time and agita the next time you need to change the page or spread layout of an entire document.
Graphic Format Support
InDesign supports HEIC, JP2K, and WebP images, along with a host of other common file formats. This comprehensive support means fewer interruptions to your workflow.
What’s New InDesign?
Adobe continues to reimagine and refine InDesign. Below are the most important changes since the time of my last review.
Analytics
You can now review documents you published online—along with their analytics (via Google Analytics)—in the Publish Online Dashboard (File > Publish Online Dashboard). For analytics, you need to generate a Measurement ID in Google Analytics and add it to the document. Here, you can also enable a cookie banner that users can accept or reject.
Direct Export to Adobe Express
You can export and open InDesign documents in Adobe Express with one click. Then, you can do several things—such as create links for different stakeholders to participate in real-time collaboration, edit text, enhance images, and share to social media platforms.
Generative Expand for Images
If you make layout changes that necessitate a different aspect ratio for your image, use Generative Expand to expand it to match the new frame dimension with contextually relevant pixels. This works with seamless backgrounds and objects.
Left to right: Without and with Generative Fill enabled (Credit: Adobe/PCMag/Shelby Putnam Tupper)
Hideable Spreads
InDesign now lets you hide spreads. This is fantastic if you have a multipurpose document that requires only a certain combination of pages for variable audiences—or if you have in-app notes. You can toggle the hidden spreads in Presentation Mode, and they won’t appear when you export your document as a PNG, JPEG, or PDF (Print or Interactive).
MathML
With the latest release, InDesign can create, edit, and style math expressions to your heart’s content with the MathML panel. This places the end equation as an editable (stylistically) SVG file.
Math expressions in Adobe InDesign (Credit: Adobe/PCMag)
Text-Based Image Generation
As with Express, Illustrator, and Photoshop, you can tap into InDesign’s engaging generative powers. The Text to Image panel includes a prompt window (with sample prompts), a choice for your image to be photographic or illustrative, and the new Advanced option that lets you add a reference image, see prompt suggestions, and choose a Style Effect.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag/Shelby Putnam Tupper)
Note that generated images are detailed rasters, as opposed to the vectors in Illustrator.
(Credit: Adobe/PCMag/Shelby Putnam Tupper)
Collaboration and Sharing
If you are familiar with Creative Cloud, you already know the convenience of being able to save a file (and previous versions) as a Cloud Document so it’s ready for the next steps in another Adobe app or on a different device. From there, teams and individuals can Share for Review or Invite To Edit, and all feedback stays in the same place. Share for Review allows collaborators to add comments, a bit like commenting in a PDF. This makes collaboration and feedback cycles that much easier—even if not all parties have a Creative Cloud subscription.
Accessibility is important for certain exports, and now you can optimize your PDFs for assistive devices like screen readers. Assistive tech can even announce figcaptions (brief descriptions that explain what’s in a figure, image, or graph) instantly.
With InDesign’s Merge Data utility, you can create variable data versions of your document using a CSV file. A simple example would be creating 200 personalized coursework certificates, with the two points of variable data being the person’s name and the course of study.
Export Options
InDesign saves and exports documents to all common file types—PDF (Interactive or Print), EPS, JPG, PNG—and more advanced formats like ePub (Fixed Layout or Reflowable), HTML, HTML5, and XML. You can even save your file as an IDML file (InDesign Markup Language) that’s compatible with older versions of the software.
Verdict: Still a Trailblazer
Adobe InDesign is still indisputably the leading software for page and publication design, but it doesn’t rest on past achievements. New features, such as generative image expansion, text-to-image generation, hideable spreads, and more, are all welcome changes that can streamline your workflows and help you be more creative. Combined with its exceptional set of existing layout and collaboration tools, InDesign remains our Editors’ Choice winner for graphic design software.
Pros
View
More
Cons
The Bottom Line
Adobe InDesign is the standard-bearer for layout, page, and publication design software, and a must-have for any creative professional.
Like What You’re Reading?
This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links.
By clicking the button, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our
Terms of Use and
Privacy Policy.
You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time.
About Shelby Putnam Tupper
Contributor
