Adobe After Effects Price: Single App vs All Apps (2026)

Adobe After Effects is sold two ways: as a single-app Creative Cloud plan on its own, or bundled inside the full Creative Cloud All Apps suite. Here’s what it costs each way and which makes sense for you.

After Effects on its own

A single-app After Effects subscription gets you just After Effects — motion graphics, animation and visual effects — without paying for Photoshop, Premiere Pro or the rest of the suite you won’t use. We sell a 12-month After Effects single-app licence, redeemed on your own Adobe account the same way Adobe’s own subscriptions work.

After Effects through Creative Cloud All Apps

If you also need Premiere Pro to edit and assemble your raw footage, the full Creative Cloud All Apps 12-month plan is worth comparing — it includes After Effects plus over 20 other apps, and the price gap versus two single-app plans is often small.

After Effects vs Premiere Pro: After Effects is for animated titles, visual effects and compositing — built for shorter, effects-heavy clips. Premiere Pro is for cutting a full video together from raw footage. They’re designed to work together, not to replace each other, which is why video editors are often the ones who end up on the full All Apps plan.

Is there a one-time / lifetime licence for After Effects?

Not a genuine one. Adobe moved After Effects to subscription-only pricing when Creative Cloud launched, so any listing offering a permanent, one-off “lifetime” key for current After Effects is not a real Adobe licence — treat those as a red flag.

System requirements

Windows 10 (64-bit) or macOS Big Sur and later
16GB of RAM minimum (32GB recommended)
5GB of available hard disk space plus space for cache files

Who actually needs After Effects?

If you are adding animated titles, motion graphics or visual effects on top of video, After Effects is what handles that. On its own it does not replace a full video editor, it is a companion to something like Premiere Pro rather than a substitute for it.