--- title: Adobe After Effects Reviews meta_title: 'Adobe After Effects Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 1093 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Adobe After Effects works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.6 review_count: 1093 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-06-20' parent_category: name: Video url: https://www.g2.com/categories/video --- # Adobe After Effects Reviews **Vendor:** Adobe **Category:** [Video Effects Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/video-effects) **Average Rating:** 4.6/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 1,093 ## About Adobe After Effects Adobe After Effects is a digital visual effects and motion graphics software developed by Adobe Inc. Widely utilized in the post-production processes of filmmaking, video games, and television production, it enables users to create stunning animations, composite footage, and design intricate visual effects. With its comprehensive suite of tools, After Effects allows for the creation of cinematic title sequences, dynamic transitions, and immersive visual experiences, making it an essential tool for professionals in the visual media industry. Key Features and Functionality: - Motion Graphics and Animation: Animate still images and illustrations to produce striking motion graphics. Add motion to text for cinematic title sequences and simple credit rolls. Work faster with presets or turn your unique vision into reality with powerful animation tools. - 3D Animation: Design dynamic 3D animations by bringing dimension into your videos within a true 3D workspace. Achieve realistic lighting and shading, or combine 2D and 3D elements to create any scene imaginable. - Visual Effects: Create jaw-dropping effects with a wide selection of built-in effects or customize your own. Simulate natural phenomena like storms, add futuristic elements like lasers, or integrate fantastical objects seamlessly into your footage. - AI-Powered Tools: Utilize the AI-powered Roto Brush to easily select and separate any object from the background, even with complex elements like wind-swept hair or transparent materials. - Content-Aware Fill: Remove unwanted elements from your footage, such as accidental boom mics or background distractions. Content-Aware Fill intelligently fills in the gaps, leaving you with clean, polished visuals. - Motion Tracking: Track the movement of any object within your clip to replace screens, add text to moving subjects, or integrate graphics that follow the action seamlessly. Primary Value and User Solutions: Adobe After Effects addresses the needs of video professionals and content creators by providing a robust platform for crafting high-quality visual effects and animations. It streamlines the post-production workflow, allowing for the efficient creation of complex visual narratives. By offering advanced tools for motion graphics, 3D animation, and visual effects, After Effects empowers users to bring their creative visions to life, enhancing the storytelling potential of their projects. Its integration with other Adobe Creative Cloud applications ensures a cohesive and efficient production process, making it an indispensable asset for professionals aiming to produce compelling and visually engaging content. ## Adobe After Effects Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users find Adobe After Effects to be incredibly user-friendly, enhancing creativity with its **ease of use** and comprehensive tools. (29 reviews) - Users highlight the **powerful plugin support and 3D integration** of Adobe After Effects for creating smoother animations. (19 reviews) - Users value the **powerful plugin support and 3D integration** in Adobe After Effects for enhancing their creative workflows. (19 reviews) - Users appreciate the **comprehensive and versatile tools** in Adobe After Effects, enhancing creativity and workflow efficiency. (14 reviews) - Users love the **stunning visual effects** of Adobe After Effects, enhancing their creative projects with ease and versatility. (12 reviews) - Users love the **ease of use and extensive tools** in Adobe After Effects, enabling professional-quality projects effortlessly. (11 reviews) - Animation Variety (8 reviews) - Creativity (7 reviews) - Rendering Quality (7 reviews) - Users commend the **simple and intuitive user interface** of Adobe After Effects, enhancing their creative workflow and experience. (7 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users find the **steep learning curve** of Adobe After Effects challenging, despite its powerful capabilities and features. (13 reviews) - Users find After Effects **expensive** , particularly in South Asia, making it difficult for beginners to access. (12 reviews) - Users report **performance issues** with After Effects, citing slow speeds and heavy demands on system resources. (11 reviews) - Users note the **high system requirements** of Adobe After Effects, necessitating powerful hardware and significant storage for optimal performance. (6 reviews) - Users find **slow rendering** in After Effects frustrating, particularly with complex projects and mid-range systems. (6 reviews) - Users experience **slow performance** in Adobe After Effects, particularly with heavy files and on mid-range systems. (5 reviews) - Users report **software instability** with Adobe After Effects, facing crashes and slow performance on less powerful machines. (5 reviews) - Users report that Adobe After Effects requires a **tremendous amount of storage** , often exceeding their available resources. (5 reviews) - Poor Usability (4 reviews) - Animation Issues (2 reviews) ## Adobe After Effects Reviews ### 1. Incredible Potential Locked Behind a MASSIVE Learning Curve (& Paywall) **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Curran M. | Integrated Marketing Product Specialist, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 24, 2025 **What do you like best about Adobe After Effects?** The best of the best in motion graphics software. The integration features with programs like Photoshop or Premiere Pro expand the capabilities exponentially and make cross-application editing easier. The software couldn't be easier to implement on your device from Creative Cloud's native app where you just hit download. As long as you have the right specs. To see what people create from the simplest text with stock effects to full blown animations is staggering. **What do you dislike about Adobe After Effects?** The program is like learning a foreign language. What is a null object? How do I work the cameras? What do "layers" mean? Where is the effects panel? How do I motion track? How do I do anything in the thousands of sub-menus? Unless you watch specific tutorials, take a class or just go in and start playing per thing you want to do - it's hard to recommend for simple things. Things you can now do in Premiere Pro twice as easy without owning or buying another program. I used to use AE multiple times a week and now only a couple times a year because it's become a little redundant unless you do motion/animation work daily. And of course being behind a subscription makes it all the worse. My hope is to see AE and Premiere Pro rolled into one. **What problems is Adobe After Effects solving and how is that benefiting you?** rom typography, to 3D models, creating lower thirds, animating sequences, logos or digital media manipulation (even some editing). It's insane how much you can do, and using templates for shortcuts has been a ton. I did a motion logo for my company's product all in AE with our designed assets. ### 2. Endless Creative Control, But Can Get Cluttered with Complex Projects **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rishabh S. | UI/UX Designer , Internet, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 03, 2025 **What do you like best about Adobe After Effects?** I like the freedom in after effects , it has endless creative control. A designer can bring any creative idea into motion with After effects. It has plugin integration which helps in making the workflow faster. Some basic features in After effects are easy to use nowadays. I like the AI features and cloud storage in After effects as well. **What do you dislike about Adobe After Effects?** When working on complex animations, I find that After Effects tends to become cluttered. There should be some custom made templates available so that design workflow should get faster, the pricing of the software is also high. **What problems is Adobe After Effects solving and how is that benefiting you?** As a designer, it is easy for me to create logo animations, motion graphics, micro interactions for UI design, and applying visual effects. ### 3. Industry-Standard Tools for Every Creative Need **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Bairon P. | Creative Editor Lead, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 29, 2025 **What do you like best about Adobe After Effects?** I love how Adobe Creative Cloud offers a complete suite of professional tools for design, video editing, photography, and more. Each app—like Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and After Effects—offers deep functionality and integrates well with one another. The cloud syncing and shared libraries also make it easy to move between projects and devices without losing progress. It's the gold standard for creative professionals. **What do you dislike about Adobe After Effects?** The subscription pricing can be high, especially for freelancers or small teams that only use a few apps. Some apps also require a steep learning curve, and performance can lag on lower-spec machines. Adobe’s updates are frequent, but they sometimes introduce bugs or change workflows unexpectedly. **What problems is Adobe After Effects solving and how is that benefiting you?** Adobe Creative Cloud solves the need for an integrated, professional ecosystem where I can create, animate, and edit without switching between incompatible tools. It enables me to handle entire campaigns—from branding to motion graphics—while maintaining quality and consistency. Having shared assets, synced libraries, and project compatibility across apps streamlines collaboration and speeds up delivery. It empowers me to work like an octopus: many tasks, one fluid creative process. ### 4. Best software for 2D Motion Graphics and Animation, Extremely RAM Hungry. All in one for Video work **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vikas G. | Motion Graphics Artist and Video Editor, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 18, 2020 **What do you like best about Adobe After Effects?** You can edit videos, do 2D and 3D animations, import 3D models and composite files from other software like Cinema4D and Blender. It's the best software to edit videos and add graphical elements or basically motion graphics in videos. You can create typography videos, character animations and even add VFX to your footages. You can create a Marvel like movie in after effects if you have access to enough 3D assets. It's an all in one video software and definitely the best in the market. It's on your creativity and you can build some cool and **What do you dislike about Adobe After Effects?** It uses only 1 Core of the processor. Earlier versions used to work on all cores and were much faster and more efficient. Need a heavy graphics card and a lot of RAM to run smoothly. Higher processor clock speed is more important than number of cores. Generated large cache files and fills up the Storage quickly. Have to clean temporary files everyday. No perpetual license available. You need to pay either annually or monthly. **Recommendations to others considering Adobe After Effects:** There no other software in the market that has all the features that Adobe After Effects provides. I recommend you to go for it without having a second thought. Your love for this software will increase as you get better at it. **What problems is Adobe After Effects solving and how is that benefiting you?** I've created explainer videos for Ed-tech startups that they use to train teachers and teach basic science concepts to students. I've helped business to create ads with an impact to reach more potential customers. I create slideshows for events, add music to videos, create lyrical videos for music. ### 5. Industry standard for motion graphics and video FX **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sean M. | User Interface Designer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 27, 2025 **What do you like best about Adobe After Effects?** Very broad capabilities in the default effects catalog, but if you can't do it, there's a plugin/extension that can. **What do you dislike about Adobe After Effects?** Render times can be very long (and large file sizes, depending on the project). Also, plugins can add up and be expensive. Would be cool if After Effects had even more embedded effects. **What problems is Adobe After Effects solving and how is that benefiting you?** Render times have been greatly reduced with the implementation of Adobe Media Encoder. When used in tandem with After Effects, you can save a ton of time on rendering . ### 6. Adobe After Effects for animation and VFX **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Bijay S. | Creative Head, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 21, 2024 **What do you like best about Adobe After Effects?** Adobe after effects helps me to create a motion graphics animation. Creating title animations, shape animations and other complex animations is much easier than other animation software. I frequently use this software for my projects and it gives best result. Plugins and extensions are easy to implement in adobe after effects. **What do you dislike about Adobe After Effects?** Adobe after effects is bit expensive. Also you need to purchase some premium plugins. You need a bit knowledge of animations principles, keyframes and more. Also take huge storage of your system. Need high end and expensive computer to use this software. **What problems is Adobe After Effects solving and how is that benefiting you?** Easy to create time consuming animations in short period of time. I can easily use 3D objects in my composition. VFX is made with perfection. Chroma key and green screen edit is very good. ### 7. The best toolset for design, animation **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Eliezer M. | Senior Motion Graphic Designer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 20, 2024 **What do you like best about Adobe After Effects?** The ease with which all programs are integrated, that is a capability that no other alternative has yet. **What do you dislike about Adobe After Effects?** It is a bit expensive, compared to the alternatives that exist today. **What problems is Adobe After Effects solving and how is that benefiting you?** Everything I do on a visual and audiovisual level I do in the Adobe suite ### 8. A good set of apps that unfortunately has seen less and less relevant updates each year **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tiago G. | Product Designer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 15, 2023 **What do you like best about Adobe After Effects?** Adobe Creative Cloud is a great set of tools for designers to do pretty much anything creative, from illustration, to photo manipulation, branding, packaging, video editing and more. **What do you dislike about Adobe After Effects?** Each version of Adobe Creative Cloud brings less and less improvements and doesn't change the very outdated UI significantly. This lack of change, when associated with the high price, makes the product less appealing every year. **What problems is Adobe After Effects solving and how is that benefiting you?** It's allowing creatives to do a wide range of creative work. In my case, it allows me to create iconography, logotypes and image mockups effectively, to be imported into our product, sales decks, and more. ### 9. How Adobe Creative Cloud helped me to unleash my creativity **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Shubham R. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 13, 2023 **What do you like best about Adobe After Effects?** Adobe Creative Cloud stores all the data in cloud making it easy to access from anywhere and work in collaboration with others. It is the best tool to edit all sort if images and create various Business Cards, Fliers and Infographics for the social media post. **What do you dislike about Adobe After Effects?** Sometimes it takes time to sync when the internet is slow. It is quite expensive when it comes to some South Asian countries and may not be afforded for the people who wants to get started with it. **What problems is Adobe After Effects solving and how is that benefiting you?** It is helpfull in creating all the social media and marketing campaign posts that I create. I also use it for editing and creating new images. I also use Adobe After Effects for creating animation for the posts. ### 10. Adobe Creative Cloud: Making impossible things possible **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sagar S. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 17, 2023 **What do you like best about Adobe After Effects?** Adobe Creative Cloud is truly a revolutionary set of tools, casually making things possible that might seem impossible a few years ago. The ease of use in Adobe softwares for graphic designing, multimedia editing is unmatched to competitors like Canva. **What do you dislike about Adobe After Effects?** For economies like south asian countries, the prices maybe a bit on the higher end. Pricings can be revamped. For lower end machines, sometimes the rendering becomes slower. I feel like a few rendering optimisations can be done. **What problems is Adobe After Effects solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our organisation creates marketing and sales work. Thus it always helps me create creative social media campaign posts. I regularly use adobe after effects for editing. It has helped our business create amazingly attractive graphics and animations. ### 11. adobe creative suite application to design images, video editing and also design portfolio **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Raj S. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 10, 2023 **What do you like best about Adobe After Effects?** adobe cloud provide multiple applications in one place. create easy to design images, edit videos, and themes.I use this product very frequenlty in my company design posters and website photos. **What do you dislike about Adobe After Effects?** i like your software but all the software only paid version available not any trail or free version. also your customer support is less. **What problems is Adobe After Effects solving and how is that benefiting you?** my personal exeperince in adobe cloud has been covered multiple application in one place and not install everyone easily use by adobe cloud. it's ease to use in editing of image, video create new reels and create advertising page. also download platform provide various format jpg,pdf,mp4 ### 12. The ultimate bundle for content creators **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Astro K. | Founder, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 12, 2023 **What do you like best about Adobe After Effects?** The thing I like the most about the Abobe Creative Cloud is how well all apps are connected together. For example, I can create an infographics using Photoshop or Illustrator and animate the same using After Effects, and add it to a video project in Premiere Pro. **What do you dislike about Adobe After Effects?** Adobe Creative Cloud pricing can be a bit too much for many. **What problems is Adobe After Effects solving and how is that benefiting you?** Whether it be creating poster, flyers, custom illustrations, animations or editing videos, Adobe apps got us covered. ## Adobe After Effects Discussions - [What is Adobe After Effects used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-adobe-after-effects-used-for) - 3 comments, 3 upvotes - [What is the use of After Effects software?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-the-use-of-after-effects-software) - 4 comments, 1 upvote - [The slide bars of every file don't have the automatic snap option like Premiere Pro.](https://www.g2.com/discussions/the-slide-bars-of-every-file-don-t-have-the-automatic-snap-option-like-premiere-pro) - 2 comments, 1 upvote - [Extremely helpful information](https://www.g2.com/discussions/51449-extremely-helpful-information) - 2 comments, 1 upvote - [about vga](https://www.g2.com/discussions/46995-about-vga) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [View Adobe After Effects pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/adobe-after-effects/reviews?filters%5Bsentiment_snippet%5D=1305248&qs=pros-and-cons§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-06-20+17%3A03%3A37+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=2f69cc50-d409-4503-8641-04eb2e266919&secure%5Btoken%5D=ffdebecabdd212ccb7314cbc0fde48de7ea5c73f40812d57de6ae675ea371579&format=llm_user) ## Adobe After Effects Integrations - [Adobe Audition](https://www.g2.com/products/adobe-audition/reviews) - [Adobe Illustrator](https://www.g2.com/products/adobe-illustrator/reviews) - [Adobe Media Encoder](https://www.g2.com/products/adobe-media-encoder/reviews) - [Adobe Photoshop](https://www.g2.com/products/adobe-photoshop/reviews) - [Adobe Premiere Pro](https://www.g2.com/products/adobe-premiere-pro/reviews) - [Blender](https://www.g2.com/products/blender/reviews) - [Canto](https://www.g2.com/products/canto/reviews) - [Cinema 4D](https://www.g2.com/products/cinema-4d/reviews) - [FinalCut Pro](https://www.g2.com/products/finalcut-pro/reviews) - [LottieFiles](https://www.g2.com/products/lottiefiles/reviews) - [Maya](https://www.g2.com/products/maya/reviews) - [Mister Horse](https://www.g2.com/products/mister-horse/reviews) - [Nuke](https://www.g2.com/products/nuke/reviews) - [Synthesia](https://www.g2.com/products/synthesia/reviews) ## Adobe After Effects Features **Compatibility** - Integrations - Operating System - Format Compatibility **Generative AI** - AI Image-to-Text - AI Text-to-3D **Functionality** - Text Animation - Rotoscoping - Visual Effects - Motion Tracking **Agentic AI - Animation** - Multi-step Planning - Cross-system Integration **Project Management** - Content Library - Team Review **Generative AI** - AI Text-to-Image - AI Text-to-Video - AI Text-to-3D **Agentic AI - Video Effects** - Multi-step Planning ## Top Adobe After Effects Alternatives - [Blender](https://www.g2.com/products/blender/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (307 reviews) - [Unity](https://www.g2.com/products/unity/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (354 reviews) - [Maya](https://www.g2.com/products/maya/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (260 reviews)