Adobe Muse EOL announcement - Alternatives to Adobe Muse?

[Preran]

Hi all,

For those of you that haven't received the email around the Adobe Muse EOL, see the FAQ Product Announcement that tries to answer some the common questions around the announcement including the reasons behind the decision.

Before we proceed with discussing alternatives, the Muse application will continue to open on your computer. You will be able to continue to edit existing or create new websites with the application. Adobe Muse will continue to be supported until May 20, 2019 and will deliver compatibility updates with the Mac and Windows OS or fix any bugs that might crop up when publishing Muse sites to the web. However, it is quite possible that web standards and browsers will continue to change after Adobe stops support for the application.

While there is no 1:1 replacement for Adobe Muse at this stage, the FAQ link above provides some alternatives. Also, Adobe is making our own investment in DIY website creation and welcomes all Muse customers to join our upcoming pre-release program for a new format that will be introduced this year as part of Adobe Spark. Build a beautiful website—in minutes | Adobe Spark

That being said, I would like to open up this discussion for discussing other solutions and migration paths. It would be ideal if we could focus our efforts on the topic at hand.

Thanks,

Preran

[Pukeko65]

I agree, Adobe is going to isolate itself so much that competition will rise and there will be little conscience left in jumping ship!  They have made it almost impossible to get help...unless you want to wait for an hour or two on the phone for assistance, and then when you do get to speak with someone they direct you to old and no longer applicable helpsheets.

Take note Adobe, you are failing your loyal customer base and they will not forget.

[Peter Villevoye]

I beg to differ that Adobe's Help pages are "old and no longer applicable". These resources are vast and quite detailed. Adobe's Search box might not be the best starting point (I prefer to use Google with "Adobe Help" and the application name and topic added to it), but as a reference these Help resources are very well maintained.

[Guest]

You are just wrong...

[Peter Villevoye]

Well then, could you describe for which question(s) you asked for help and which "help sheets" you've been referred to, which were old and inapplicable. I'm willing to accept your complaint, but not without the opportunity to prevent that any misguiding information simply continuous to exist. There's no point in having wrong or useless information available, especially right now, concerning Muse.

[JustiBru]

You guys just took the bread off of so many tables. I don't think you realize the extended impact this has on your own customer base. Saddened to see innovation tossed for internal, corporate convenience. I thought Muse was a bold statement in the face of other solutions such as Squarespace, Wordpress and Wix. It gave voice to the designer and a way out of the templated options.

Now the Adobe Muse user is burdened with anxiety and panic over what to do next. The cost of transition for many will be great and painful. The communication to existent clients, the hours of migration, the cost for new hosting - all expenses.

I hope that Adobe at least provides a discount to Muse users  until May of 2019 for Creative Cloud because it just became...not so creative. It is the very least that can be done.

I also wonder if Adobe is throwing this in the garbage, perhaps they would be interested in letting the community take over support? Open it up! We have smart people here and I'm sure there are others interested in making it better.

[hunterscotty]

Adobe should release the source-code to Muse and let the community take it over.

Why not?

If Adobe are not going to continue with the platform, why not release it as a gesture of good-will?

[JustiBru]

Yep. That's the idea. Open source it and keep it alive by people who care!

[shiznit1994]

I was just about to suggest this very thing!

[JR Creative]

Bring it on - we can take over Muse and continue to grow it with all the expertise and experience gained by its users.

[HawkeEye]

Who is "we" BIGRED?

[LindaFazili]

I agree 100%. I am speechless. So glad you found the right words. Thank you.

[Illostraight]

Yes, they did take the bread off of many tables. This is terrible.

And btw, here's a petition

Here's a petition someone started on another thread. Share and bump it, please:

https://www.change.org/p/adobe-systems-adobe-do-not-discontinue-muse

[andrew10998967]

Sell adobe Muse To Muse Themes ..Thats The answer

[michellew24939864]

I have been a loyal Adobe customer for at least 25 years. Several times I have been put in a tough position like this, and I have had to bite the bullet and redevelop. Flash sites were the big deal. Out! All Flash sites redeveloped. Dreamweaver pushed out the WYSIWYG users. I tried one or two others, but eventually I trained in Muse and once again redeveloped all my sites. Months of work. I came to really value Muse. It’s been the best web site tool I’ve used. I am trying not to panic here, but feel like weeping. It’s hard to face the mountain of work it will take to once again retrain and redevelop. I feel deeply betrayed by this decision.

[cloudninedesign]

As a designer that has used Adobe apps for over 23 years, I feel exactly the same way you do. Detractors scorned Muse for being simplistic and clunky (at the first release, one HTML snob in a forum called it a "baby rattle"), but Muse was the one web design tool that really fueled my creativity. I've designed some beautiful websites with Muse and I, too, feel like weeping knowing the amount of work I will have to do to learn a new app and redesign 61 websites. Even if I spread 61 redesigns out over one year, the amount of money I will lose to convert all my Muse sites is catastrophic to my livelihood. Adobe has betrayed me and all of their Muse users and I will never, ever champion Adobe again.

This Muse fiasco is great timing for me. The version of QuarkXpress I have been using for my print projects has recently reached its end-of-life with my current Mac OS, so I was debating whether I should just move everything over to InDesign since I have a CC subscription. Now, I will gladly pay Quark the upgrade fee since I'm going to move all of my business away from Adobe.

[dannygarber]

Can't give you a wealth of information in regards to switching to QuarkXpress (since late October 2017). However, I can say it's been

positive and not a decision that I jumped into. The realization that CS5 stopped functioning properly with the release of the Mac OS system Mavericks painted a clear picture: I'd have to either invest in CC or find an alternative. Poked around a bit and as I posted previously, the QuarkXpress demo impressed me. I asked fellow designers, read forums and picked the brain of my friend who is an IT

genius. Lot of negatives, but using the software demo said otherwise. I do not regret purchasing it and I'm set for the May 2018 release.

I'm also using Affinity Photo and Designer (and plan to purchase Publisher upon release). The lesson I've learned is to be flexible with choosing tools to get the job done. Failsafes. Never hurts to know more than one piece of software, especially those that suddenly vanish (Freehand, Fireworks, . . . Muse).

[Red Point]

Michelle you nailed it! Its a combination of panic, sadness, anger and ultimately betrayal. OK, if its open source I understand, but we entered into a trust relationship with a big player and have been paying thousand of dollars just to find ourselves locked out of Adobe's new business model. They say its legal. Its hugely frustrating. Immensely unfair, totally unacceptable and unethical. There still is some hope Adobe will reconsider. It would be a huge blow for me if I had to turn my back on Adobe.

[Jonis_Voice]

Great! Let the people take over. I am not a coder and I love Muse! Please. . . someone step up and save this amazing tool for those of us who must use "drag and drop" for our clients! Muse is the TESLA of DIY web builders and we drive it with pride.

[tab7778]

Very elegantly and intelligently stated JustiBru. I went to look at Spark's page, as suggested, and every single example is "exactly" the same. A poor and thoughtless alternative to Muse. Incredibly disappointing. Adobe should be so ashamed, but seems they could care less.

[Peter Villevoye]

It has been said before and obviously it needs to be said again once in a while in this super long discussion: Adobe never expected or intended Muse users to regard Spark Page as a viable alternative. They did suggest that there might be some other Spark component for creating larger web projects, but it hasn't surfaced yet (although PortFolio sure upgraded quite a bit in that direction). And there's a totally other, non Adobe-related web design application called Sparkle.

[sstuart48]

Preran, you are dealing with a serious situation here. You shouldn't have been put up to deal with this, it's not your fault. We need answers now Preran, jobs and livelyhoods as much as anything depend on the immediate answers our businesses need now. Please get the correct authority to provide the technical roadmap. Essentially the question is... Will Adobe keep its middleweight web designers? Or do we leave you?

[sstuart48]

We can't 'hang around' for an answer on spark. We run businessess, this isn't a hobby.... we need to mitigate risks as soon as they are presented to us. For the first time for me personally, Adobe is now presented to me a risk. Either remove that, or confirm that... You have until Friday to make a call or I will take the decision to dump you as one of my most trusted suppliers

[pziecina]

Adobe Spark is apparently being developed to support a single page site, and not multi-page sites.

As for using Dreamweaver as a replacement, (maybe it is the next 'to go' announcement). You could, but only if you know how to code.

[Preran]

Hi Paula,

The Spark software being created is not the same as the single page creation tool that exists today in Spark. It is more of a DIY website creation software from what I have been led to understand.

Thanks,

Preran

[aaronp96515281]

I have used Spark a little. I don't know what Adobe's plans are for development but when I last used it a a month ago, Spark Page was hosted on their servers and you have to link to it. I checked out the link at the beginning of this post and it didn't give me any answers as to how that will be handled on Spark Web. Perhaps Spark Web will essentially be like (or is) Spark Page which MIGHT a single page web site that you can host where you like, but I'm totally guessing (fingers crossed) on this. It is also touted as using intelligent design. This from my experience makes it in a way like PowerPoint where anyone can easily use it. More advanced users will likely find it very frustrating and extremely limiting. But on the upside, you can probably build a fairly decent single page website in literally minutes. The target users are non-designers. Also working from a Mac or PC it is a web based software and I have found it to become very buggy and un-useable at times on the weekends. There are no undos with Spark Page (again when I used it last). I found that very frustrating. From my view this product is worth exploring but is quite a stretch to think of it as a replacement for Muse. I haven't made it all the way through this thread but I think everyone should start making suggesting for other comparable software to migrate to because from what I understand this is not going to suffice for most of the users in this forum.