Adobe Animate: End of Life and Support Timeline

There are a lot of mixed messages in your post, the FAQ, and the notice email we got. But all we want is to be able to continue to use the software perpetually, as-is.

When you say the application will be “available for download during the support period” does that mean Animate will be completely removed from the Creative Cloud app after March 1 2027?

Will the software stop being allowed to run by the Adobe server host after that date? Will the application quit immediately upon startup, similar to how it quits now if we’re not logged into an adobe account with an active subscription?

Do not end support for Animate! The software is still used industry wide and is still best in class for a lot of it's features.

After Effects is not a replacement for Animate. No real time playback for one!

If you insist on going down this path you must make Animate open source or you'll be responsible for destroying unfathomable amounts of art and history purely by removing access.

I will cancel my subscription with Adobe and move all of my productions to competing software if you don't reverse this decision!

THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE! 

I’ve used Animate for everything (in studios/productions and at home) for the last 20 years. It’s by far the best and more intuitive way for making vector-hand drawing animations and many other creative tasks.

And the only solution they are giving is to use some other of their apps that basically don't do what this can do. I won't be staying with Adobe if I have to move to another software. No more from me when this happens. The other apps are easy replaceable. Not this one.

For a company that put Artist at their heart, this is a wrong, badly thought move. I’m sooo disappointed with Adobe…!

Animate is my primary tool. I use it for technical illustration work instead of Illustrator because I can work much faster, don’t need all the Illustrator tools, and can more easily create and navigate through multiple sheets (using frames), that reuse elements and symbols that I create as instances, and with layers with content that is persistent across all of the pages. I don’t even know if Illustrator can have shared layers across different pages, as well as a quick and easy way to create and use instances, but even if these capabilities exist, everything is much faster, simpler and easier to navigate in Animate.

At least keep the application indefinitely accessible!! Otherwise I will have to spend a great deal of time going through thousands of projects and exporting all the content.

If I have to do that, there will be NO REASON for me to maintain my Adobe subscription.

What Adobe has just announced with the complete discontinuation of Adobe Animate is, frankly, unacceptable. This is not a “strategic decision”: you are leaving dozens of 2D animation series and hundreds of professional studios worldwide stranded in the middle of production. This isn’t a change of direction — it’s irresponsibility.

The community has been warning for years that Animate’s development was being abandoned. Six years of superficial updates, without direction, without investment, without vision. Now it is clear why: you have been letting the application die. And still, thousands of professionals have continued to rely on it because there is no other Adobe tool that fulfills its role.

Your recommended “alternatives,” such as After Effects or Adobe Express, show a complete disconnect from the reality of 2D production.
Let me say it clearly: they are not substitutes. They do not address the needs of frame‑by‑frame drawing, nor do they fit into professional animation pipelines. The impression is that you don’t understand what Animate is for, who actually uses it, or what it means to eliminate it in the middle of ongoing productions.

While you chase every AI trend with urgency, you have ignored a huge, active, professional community that has depended on Animate and its legacy for decades. You have allowed yourselves to be blinded by the rush to jump onto the next wave, and in that process you have dismissed a tool that remains essential for thousands of creative workers.

If Adobe has no interest in continuing its development, the least you could do is release the Flash/Animate code. If your decision is to bury it and destroy its future, that would be a deeply petty move. But if you place it in the hands of the community, we can keep it alive and adapt it to the real needs of contemporary 2D animation.

Burying Animate is not just discontinuing a product: it is a direct blow to those of us who have built projects, studios, and professional careers around this tool.
If you truly value the creative community, prove it.
If you won’t continue its development, set it free. Let those of us who know its worth keep it alive.

This decision is genuinely baffling. Animate sits at the core of our company’s workflow, and there is currently no software, Adobe or otherwise, that can replace it in what it does best.

There is no alternative that allows for efficient hand-drawn animation and exports in a format as lightweight and flexible as SWF for use in After Effects. We have tested Toon Boom and multiple other animation tools, and none come close in terms of speed, ease of use, or integration. Animate fills a very specific and critical gap that nothing else currently addresses.

From a production perspective, this feels deeply out of touch with how many studios actually work. It’s a worrying signal that the real-world impact on professional animation pipelines may not be fully understood internally.

I strongly urge Adobe to reconsider the direction being taken here, or at the very least to clearly acknowledge and address the loss this creates for working animators.

How about HTML5 support?? I use Animate to create HTML5 banners. After Effects and Express don’t have HTML5 support that I am aware of? Will Adobe add HTML5 support to any animation software to create animated display ads? Does this mean I have to use Google Web Designer?

Are you kidding me? Does this mean you won’t even let the program be usable after March 2027? What am I even paying for.

also your suggestions for replacement don’t include any that are capable of hand drawn animation….. you don’t even know how people use your products.

you could at least make it open source if you don’t want to run upkeep for it anymore

While this is hugely disappointing news, I think you serve a bigger commitment to the community. OPEN SOURCE ANIMATE.

Why? Because you're still serving us an app that imports SWF files, After Effects. SWF is such an understated file in that you can commit vector, hand drawn, cel animations and import it into AE and have it scaleable making it incredibly useful for compositing.

This doesn't need to be the continuation of Animate since the decision has been made there, but making the libraries open source will help app makers implement swf export into their apps so that scaleable animations can still be made and imported into one of your core apps. Let's be real, Adobe After Effects has no vector tools for making traditional, hand drawn, cel animations and the work arounds are frankly not feasible in production environments. Loads of studios still depend on this app and would like to see it continued even if outside of your remit, and open sourcing the app will help keep this app alive. It's better than just locking it up and discontinuing and stomping it out of existence. Give it back to us. 

This is incredibly disappointing. I rely on Animate almost weekly for fast, lightweight animations that are significantly more efficient than After Effects. Yet I fully expect Adobe to keep charging the same licensing fee while removing another useful application from the suite. If that’s the case, it’s a clear step backward—and frankly, unacceptable! 😡