Do we like them?

Do we like Adobe?

Makes Photoshop, Acrobat, Illustrator and Firefly AI software, sold mostly by subscription. Based in San Jose, California.

Our score: 5 out of 10. Mixed. Adobe makes tools creators rely on and has tried to build ethical AI. It also paid $150M over how it handled cancellations, and it faces AI copyright suits. We'd back it cautiously.

Adobe is the company behind Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat. It is based in San Jose and listed on Nasdaq. Shantanu Narayen has been CEO for 18 years. In March 2026 he said he'd step aside once a successor was found, and Anil Chakravarthy takes over on 1 December 2026.

The big drama was subscriptions. In 2024 the US government sued Adobe and two executives. It said Adobe buried an early termination fee on its "annual paid monthly" plans and made cancelling a maze. Adobe said its terms were transparent and its cancellation process was simple.

A judge refused to throw the case out. Judge Noel Wise said cancelling Creative Cloud was "far from simple". Compliance Week later reported that Adobe agreed to a $150 million settlement with the DOJ. The case was about accusations, not a trial verdict.

AI is the newer headache. Authors have filed proposed class actions accusing Adobe of training its SlimLM models on pirated books. Adobe has said it used an open-source dataset. Voice professionals have also sued over AI voice training. These are allegations so far.

On the plus side, Adobe says its Firefly AI is trained on licensed and public-domain content, not customers' files. It co-founded the Content Authenticity Initiative, which tags where content came from. We think that's better than most. Still, a $150M settlement keeps us at a middling score.