Adobe Stock vs. Ion, by Rock Content

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Adobe Stock
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Adobe Stock consists of curated asset collections that allow users to explore diverse collections of high-resolution, royalty-free, stock assets for use in digital projects.
$29
per month
Ion, by Rock Content
Score 8.0 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Ion is an enterprise-grade content experience platform that empowers modern marketers and designers to create no-code interactive content experiences integrated with their CRM or marketing automation tools. Ion helps enterprises to build brand awareness and increase conversions and lead generation enriching their contact database with declared, high intent data. Ion helps brands launch quizzes, ROI calculators, assessments, interactive infographics, and other interactive formats in…N/A
Pricing
Adobe StockIon, by Rock Content
Editions & Modules
Individuals
Starting at $29
per month
Teams
Starting at $29.99
per month
Managed Services + SaaS
Custom
per year
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe StockIon, by Rock Content
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup fee$5,500 per customer
Additional Detailsion’s Build Anything SaaS platform provides organizations with an entirely new and agile interactive content marketing capability. It enables non-technical marketers and designers to create, test and measure an unlimited number of all types of interactive content marketing experiences. It includes unlimited seats, experiences, tests, customization, phone and email support, analytics and more.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Adobe StockIon, by Rock Content
Considered Both Products
Adobe Stock
Chose Adobe Stock
I think across the board, Adobe Stock is in line with all of these. It does seem to have better (and more) options than tools like Pixabay, but there are instances where we find something niche and specific on Pixabay that we did not find on Adobe Stock. I think Getty and Canva …
Chose Adobe Stock
the main thing about Adobe Stock is first its integration with creative cloud you wont see this feature in any platform. the library is rich with high quality assets from vector to videos their offering is really good. their pricing structure is fair to everyone. the trust …
Chose Adobe Stock
In my opinion, Adobe Stock is better value for money than the Shutterstock plan, and the free assets available on Adobe Stock are of higher quality than what can be found on Pexles or Unsplash.
Chose Adobe Stock
Adobe design products are better for print purposes, while Sketch and other new programs are better used for web design
Chose Adobe Stock
The quality and number of images available make Adobe Stock stand out from other options. It's clear artists and creatives trust Adobe Stock with their portfolio - which is apparent in the variety of results provided from a search. The filtering options are more robust than …
Chose Adobe Stock
Adobe Stock has a better selection than most. It also has a free trial to help you decide if the price is worth it. The other companies are free but you may not find the right image or it will take longer to find a unique picture for your needs. Adobe Stock adds new photos …
Chose Adobe Stock
Adobe Stock stacks well against Getty, Depositphotos, Wix, and Unsplash. Although I sometimes find their stock imagery options to be less robust than Getty, I do like how purchased assets integrate nicely into CC libraries.
Chose Adobe Stock
While adobe stock is similar to these products it is also very different. Photo stock sites and uses credits. This means sometimes you have to figure out how much credit is worth. Annoyingly this can get confusing for credit values. Adobe Stock is very straight toward and the …
Chose Adobe Stock
We selected Stock as we have the entire suite of Adobe products and this pairs nicely as well as with its ability to easily integrate into PPT presentations and the Microsoft suite of products.
Chose Adobe Stock
Adobe Stock is heads and shoulders better than Shutterstock. I found myself frustrated that Shutter stock didn't have what I needed or was too confusing to navigate to the original image due to so many low-quality fakes and duplicates. I soon learned that Adobe stock didn't …
Chose Adobe Stock
Adobe Stock has the best automation for creating big data business creation for many users and is powerful in setting business security and managing larger data analytics and is best in integrating other tools and has best marketing aspects than other features in the field and …
Chose Adobe Stock
Adobe Stock is less expensive and has a wider variety than other paid stock imagery offerings. They are far better than any unpaid image outlets as well.
Chose Adobe Stock
Generally, Adobe Stock is cheaper than its big competitors but still has many of the same or similar images, though not quite the breadth of photography/illustrations either. However, it has significantly more options than its cheaper (or free) alternatives as well. The …
Chose Adobe Stock
Adobe Stock is very user friendly. It’s the only one with full integration into other Adobe products. It’s also much more affordable than others like Getty. While it’s lacking some editorial content, there is a wide selection of images to choose from that stand out against the …
Chose Adobe Stock
In comparison to other options, Adobe Stock is far more user-friendly. Adobe Stock has helped me find quality photos. One-stop licensing's convenience and variety were important. Instead of buying photos per image, we usually find something similar at Adobe and license it under …
Chose Adobe Stock
both Adobe Stock and shutter stock fulfill the same function, I believe that both can satisfy their customers, however, the position that adobe has against shutter stock is immense, making there more confidence in adobe, in prices and what it offers each one according to the …
Chose Adobe Stock
We did not evaluate other products - this was highly recommended by others in our space.
Chose Adobe Stock
I have found that compared to Getty Images, Adobe stock is much more user-friendly. Adobe Stock has easy-to-use filters that make finding the perfect image much easier. I also believe that Adobe Stock has a wider variety of photos compared to Getty.
Chose Adobe Stock
I've always had an easier time finding quality photos I needed on Adobe Stock. Other services like Shutterstock work fine, it's a personal preference for the catalogue of resources that Adobe curated vs other services.
Chose Adobe Stock
Adobe Stock was given to us as initially an inexpensive add-on to our Creative Cloud subscription. Once the trial pricing expired, we found it so convenient, that we continued subscribing. The convenience of one-stop licensing and its wide variety was key. You do find some …
Chose Adobe Stock
We use iStock and Adobe equally because we have subscriptions. They are pretty equal altho sometimes I think it's easier to find candid shots on iStock.
Chose Adobe Stock
Pexels offered some great free stuff, but Adobe Stock has been the site of choice for graphic designers due to the size and quality of the images and videos that exist on the site. Budgetary choices were made by our company to use both, but the preference overall went to Adobe.
Chose Adobe Stock
For on-demand buying, Adobe Stock wins in flexibility and per-image rates. Shutterstock offers the simpler buying method, though. Shutterstock has a larger collection of stock images, lower prices, and cheaper extended licenses if you buy them in bulk. Adobe Stock is better …
Ion, by Rock Content
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
I haven't had a lot of experience with templated CMS systems and was not involved in the original selection, though I was part of the renewal discussions. Most of the templates I've used have been html and created in house on an as-needed bases.
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
I wasn't involved with that process.
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
When I chose ion, my alternative was to have developers build what I was envisioning. Just two tools I wanted were going to cost me $50k to build. With ion I was able to create those, plus dozens of other tools.

Early on when I started using ion, another division had just …
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
Incredible customer support is one of the reasons for opting towards ion interactive. They have been very useful and helping in every way possible.
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
SnapApp was a decent platform, but it was a bit limited in what we could do with it and it was challenging from an Eloqua-integration perspective regarding accessing our customers' answers.

One of the things that drew us to Ion versus SnapApp was the advanced metrics and …
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
I was not the decision maker to choose this over Uberflip, but the UI is much more appealing to me. It's incredibly easy to use, clean, and from a backend standpoint, it requires little to no tech savvy'ness. Our team has really enjoyed using it and has required no training …
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
Compared to Adobe's products, I prefer ion. However, Optimizely is slightly more intuitive to use than ion, but the value comes in big savings over Optimizely's prices.
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
The primary reason is flexibility and customer service!
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
ion is in a different league than other well-known landing page providers. They deal with many large organizations and their landing pages feel more professional than competitors. The key piece in my decision to move forward with them was their customer support and tool …
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
Again, functionality and customer service beat them all.
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
There are obviously other platforms out there that do more or less in different capacities. Platforms like Marketo are more user-friendly in places and have more marketing automation functionality, but fewer features and functionality for landing page creation. Whereas …
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
The ion interactive just offers so many more options for customization. You can make the pages you create truly beautiful. Act-on has worked well for simple, straightforward pages and emails, but it ultimately just cannot accomplish the same results as ion without the use of an …
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
The closest tool I can compare ion to is WordPress. To me, ion is easier to use, with more interactive features.
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
Honestly, we did not evaluate competitors--we had an influential new member of our marketing team come in with previous experience using Ion from another company, and after checking it out/evaluating it, we did their sandbox demo and found it to be very usable...and what we …
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
I prefer ION because of the granularity of visitor data that I have access to and am able to analyze / optimize off of.
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
Both ion and Drupal are essential in our business but they're used in completely different methods. Our Drupal pages are live and searchable on Google. Our landing pages are not indexed because we [like] to pinpoint traffic sources to them. We can turn a traffic source on and …
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
The ion platform is easy to use and quick to create websites. Using ion allows us to not need developer resources to create the websites. It is cost effective. The decision to use ion was made prior to my arrival at the company.
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
ion is a comparable product to Wordpress in some aspects of user experience and versatility. We've integrated elements of ion with Salesforce, which has given certain groups more flexibility in their day-to-day tasks. There are pros and cons when comparing Ion to Drupal, and …
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
There are endless ways to make your content interactive and personalized in Ion Interactive. My organization switched from another content creation tool to Ion and although the learning curve is quite high, we've all been enjoying the experience and execution on Ion more than …
Chose Ion, by Rock Content
I've used squarespace, which is perfect to build my portfolio site. But ion is an ideal place to build templates with strict styleguides for our marketing team to use.
Features
Adobe StockIon, by Rock Content
Content Creation
Comparison of Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Stock
-
Ratings
Ion, by Rock Content
7.5
Ratings
7% below category average
Ideation00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Content collaboration00 Ratings5.00 Ratings
Content Publishing
Comparison of Content Publishing features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Stock
-
Ratings
Ion, by Rock Content
8.7
Ratings
7% above category average
Content hub00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Forms / Gated content00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Embedded CTAs00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Content distribution00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Content promotion00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Content automation00 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Content Reporting & Analytics
Comparison of Content Reporting & Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Adobe Stock
-
Ratings
Ion, by Rock Content
8.5
Ratings
8% above category average
Audience profiling and targeting00 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Closed-loop tracking and reporting00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Content performance analytics00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Campaign optimization dashboard00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Adobe StockIon, by Rock Content
Small Businesses
Pexels
Pexels
Score 10.0 out of 10
CoSchedule Marketing Suite
CoSchedule Marketing Suite
Score 10.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Pexels
Pexels
Score 10.0 out of 10
CoSchedule Marketing Suite
CoSchedule Marketing Suite
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Pexels
Pexels
Score 10.0 out of 10
Conductor
Conductor
Score 8.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Adobe StockIon, by Rock Content
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.0
(0 ratings)
7.4
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Adobe StockIon, by Rock Content
Likelihood to Recommend
Well suited for background images and graphics where you want to channel an idea or theme that is known to the general population, e.g., a football field for a social media post related to a company fantasy league or a child holding crayons to promote a donation drive for local schools in need. Where it is less appropriate are images involving people and it's not necessarily Adobe's fault but it's very hard when you consider "your people" unique and want to reflect them in a way that feels genuine when you're creating graphics to represent your company. Many of the best shot set-ups and styles for pictures involving people that Adobe creates have people in them who just don't look like "our people."
Read full review
I don't give 9 ratings easily. Anyone wanting greater user engagement would benefit from ion interactive. I can slap together a simple interactive tool for a social post easily. I also have a plan selector with complex logic built in that would have cost me $50k to build without ion. Now I'm able to duplicate it and make adjustments to use it for various other applications. We've created a couple dozen fun interactive tools for social posts and now we simply re-purpose them easily to create new ones frequently. I just created a new page for our website that we'll want to be fluid; so the site developers suggested we simply embed an ion tool to give us real-time flexibility. Marketers in other divisions are jealous when they see all the fun stuff we're doing--they're gradually becoming ion converts
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Pros
  • Robust portfolio of licensed content available without needing to worry about copyright and ownership infringement.
  • Unique images that are available for our design teams to produce best-in-class collateral and digital design materials.
  • Diverse video and audio content available in addition to rich images.
Read full review
  • I love that ion interactive autosaves. So many of these platforms leave me terrified of disconnection or closing my laptop.
  • This WYSIWYG actually works. I've yet to have a translation or code glitch.
  • Fast load times are a huge bonus, as well as mobile-optimized display.
Read full review
Cons
  • It does much more than images however for somebody that doesn't have experience using video or fonts it can be too much.
  • Cost can be a barrier for images that are not free. Your adobe membership does not transfer over to adobe stock unfortunately.
  • I have noticed certain images being used by others, some of their more popular images are often used and duplicated throughout my industry. This isn't a fault of them, but ideally, they would update their images more often.
Read full review
  • no revert option/revision history if you make a bad mistake
  • some simple styles that should be just there for you have to be made through custom CSS
  • some of their template options have some pretty bad designs and are not usable beyond a basic functionality level/have to be completely reskinned
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Likelihood to Renew
Because it is easy to use, has a robust database of all kinds of photos, has industry photos that we serve clients in, is quick and easy to download the licensed images, easy to find similar images, cost effective, acts as a source of quality images we can use on high resolution art.
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Because unless I find something better to replace it with, we're probably going to renew our contract. Ideally, Ion interactive can update Liveball so it's easier to use, more functionality that includes forms and javascript options currently not in place
Read full review
Usability
the user interface is very basic their filter function is difficult for beginners to use although after sometime of use you wont find any problem in that, their library is good but again. they still have to work on their library volume with current quality standards. apart from interface which is a personal perspective everything is amazing in this platform.
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Usability is straightforward, with extensive documentation and tutorials provided to ensure landing pages are built to specifications and can be optimized for performance. Built-in platform funnels give insight into customer dropoff, success/failures, and conversions (at a glance). Setting up a landing page can be done quickly and easily, with numerous integrations (CRMs like SalesForce, for instance) supported
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Reliability and Availability
It's always available
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No answers on this topic
Performance
It loads quickly and we have not had any issues
Read full review
Sometimes the editor can be a little slow.
Read full review
Support Rating
Never really used it.
Read full review
The ION support team is amazing. There has not been a single issue they they could not solve for me. If there is a feature or request that they do not have, they have even, on occasion, created custom scripts for our team. *Update 6/5/17 - ION has continued to delight on multiple occasions. I appreciate their attention to detail and ability to solve whatever issue I have. After 3+ years of use and support, ION still has my full endorsement.
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Online Training
No answers on this topic
They offer a great amount of online training, videos, articles, etc. There is usually an answer available if you run into an issue. I would recommend taking advantage of the online training they offer. I wish I would have done it sooner.
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Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
There were a lot of things we learned about the tool once we really got in and got our hands dirty. Being hands-on was essential for our team to be able to utilize ION in the most effective manner.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
In comparison to other options, Adobe Stock is far more user-friendly. Adobe Stock has helped me find quality photos. One-stop licensing's convenience and variety were important. Instead of buying photos per image, we usually find something similar at Adobe and license it under our subscription. I prefer Adobe's curated resources over other services. Adobe Stock's filters make finding the right image easy.
Read full review
I haven't had a lot of experience with templated CMS systems and was not involved in the original selection, though I was part of the renewal discussions. Most of the templates I've used have been html and created in house on an as-needed bases
Read full review
Scalability
It's very easy to integrate
Read full review
Separate client portfolios enable scalability, however, some elements are still grouped for all accounts so it's difficult to scale for an ad agency with multiple clients. Would prefer totally separate sections of the platform for all clients with each element housed separately.
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Return on Investment
  • I used stock photos for my blog posting on medium and website creation. I found adobe stock a very amazing site for high-quality images.
  • It has resolved the issue where I would spend countless hours looking for a photo on Google or other stock-image websites, no other stock photos website is perfect and stunning like Adobe Stock. Overall, it's a fantastic time-saver.
  • Overall, I found images impact more than words while blog posting on medium and other social media, so I can say that Adobe Stock helps me in growing my startup…
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  • So far the impact has been positive, but as we are new to the platform that opinion is based on relatively few interactive assets.
  • There hasn't been any negative reactions or impact from Ion as of yet, but as I said before it's still early for us in terms of usage (less than a year).
  • We do really appreciate the level of complexity and customization available in the platform.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Ion, by Rock Content Screenshots

Screenshot of ion empowers your other marketing technologies to deliver higher fidelity, data-driven scoring, targeting, segmentation and personalization.Screenshot of The types of interactive experiences the ion platform can create is near-endless. These are the most common types used by our customers: Assessments, Calculators, eBooks, Interactive Infographics, Interactive White Papers, Landing Pages, Lookbooks, Quizzes, Resource Library, Solution Finder.Screenshot of See what our customers are saying about our platform and services!Screenshot of Starting at $2,000 per month, you get an unlimited, scalable interactive content platform with our full feature set. Including: Unlimited experiences, unlimited use of Quick Starts, Unlimited Seats/Users, Unlimited A/B/n Testing, Unlimited Sell-Side Experiences, Unlimited Phone, email & chat support, unlimited analytics... PLUS a FREE custom-branded theme that can be applied to all of your experiences.Screenshot of You have the option to start from a template or entirely from scratch. Our Quick Start template library includes more than 100 fully tested, responsive and flexible interactive experiences you can brand, customize and launch.Screenshot of ion is the only interactive content platform that provides the scalable foundation to grow from one interactive experience to one thousand interactive experiences. With ion, interactive content development complexity, long timelines, high costs and maintenance problems are replaced with freedom and agility.