Since its debut in 2019, Adobe Fresco has provided a powerful digital drawing and painting experience for tablet users. Now, as part of its five-year update, Adobe is making Fresco free for everyone, while continuing to support Creative Cloud integration for smooth cross-platform use. Here’s what you can expect from this update.

Adobe Fresco Becomes Free to All

On October 23rd, 2024, one week after theAdobe Max 2024 conference and the new updatesreveal,Adobe Fresco was announcedto be 100% free to all users.

Before October 2024, users could download and use Adobe Fresco for free on iPhone, iPad, and some Windows tablets, with a few limited Premium features requiring a paid plan. However, this five-year celebratory updateputs Fresco ahead of Procreateby making every feature free to anyone and everyone—whereas Procreate costs a flat $12.99 to install on the iPad.

This makes creativity, art, and design accessible in a way that few powerful tools offer.

Fresco Introduces Powerful Features That Have More Precision

Fresco was updated to support the dynamic haptics of the Apple Pencil Pro, which include:

Learning thedifferences between Fresco’s many different brush typesis a fun learning curve, and without paying to customize or add your own brushes, you can learn at your own pace with no stress.

Fresco has added new reflective and rotational symmetry tools to help you perfect those fine details on images that need to be pixel-perfect. This feature is great for illustrators, tattoo artists, and sticker makers, but anyone who loves to draw digitally can enjoy the reflective features too.

Even More Animation Features in Fresco

While there were some animation features in previous versions of Adobe Fresco, the five-year update brings even more. You’ll be able to apply motion presets to your drawings, including bob, breathe, and bounce. Adding subtle motion to your artwork creates eye-catching art pieces that are fun and engaging to share across social media or in your digital portfolio.

Adobe Fresco is a hidden gem amidst a vast array of Adobe’s creative tools. If you don’t want to pay for Procreate, and you do want to be able to draw in vector brush types, then Adobe Fresco should be your number one choice. A free tool with this much power doesn’t come about every day, but Adobe is pulling out all the stops with Fresco.