Adobe Express Add-ons: What’s New and Coming Up for Developers
From enhanced text capabilities to AI-powered documentation support, discover how you can build add-ons faster and more efficiently
The Adobe Express add-on marketplace continues to thrive — nearly 300 unique integrations are now available to extend the functionality of Adobe Express and boost both the creativity and productivity of users.
From add-ons that make it easier to design, test, and publish eye-catching ads across various platforms to add-ons that enable users to better manage their work with connections to project management tools, there’s a wide range of use cases. Check out our last blog post on the main areas that currently resonate with Adobe Express users.
In this article, we’ll introduce new capabilities you can start building with today, plus what’s on our roadmap coming soon.
The latest enhancements for Adobe Express add-on developers
We’re introducing several new ways to help make your add-ons more powerful and even easier to use. Read the changelog for the full list of updates and see code samples in our “Getting Started” guide.
Here are a few highlights:
Improved editing and text workflows
Lately, we’ve focused on rolling out one of the most frequently requested features from our developer community: richer, more flexible text editing and styling APIs.
Expressive, on-brand typography is core to so many add-on use cases — whether you’re building a headline generator, a localized typesetter, or a style-bot for accessibility. In our latest SDK release you can now modify character and paragraph styles, apply presets across multiple text boxes in a single API call, and more.
Coming soon:
- Apply hyperlinks and subscript / superscript styles to text
- Easily modify text while maintaining the user's existing styling
Improved automation
Now you can also resize and rescale elements (still experimental). Specifically, we have added four new APIs to the Node class:
rescaleProportionalToHeight()rescaleProportionalToWidth()resizeToCover()resizeToFitWithin()
Coming soon:
- Stabilizing the resize and rescale APIs
- Resizing the page so that add-ons can be customized and better fit the content to the pages
- Duplicating elements (in addition to duplicating pages, which you can already do today)
Go beyond a ‘create content’ experience
Add-ons can now detect and react to changes in the user's selection and document, while also saving some add-on-specific private metadata on elements (using the AddOnData class). This means users are able to edit content that your add-on previously added.
By saving configuration settings to a given element, your add-on can read those later and use them to reconstruct any parameters the user specified — then allow them to edit those parameters and replace the old content with the new content (for example, with the replaceMedia API).
Coming soon:
- Support persistent metadata that remains associated with media through pixel-based edits and transformationsApply data directly to a media resource, so that the data is correctly replaced (or removed) if the user replaces the media with something else
- Store metadata on individual nodes when adding content via drag-and-drop, click-to-add, or APIs
Building for high-value use cases
Every feature we ship is guided by real developer feedback and the need to support high-impact use cases in Adobe Express.
We've seen a growing number of add-ons focused on generating or enhancing assets using AI, customizing and adding design elements, and importing content from various sources. These trends highlight how developers are leveraging the SDK to bring more creativity, automation, and efficiency into the Adobe Express experience.
Here’s an overview of some of the most popular use cases that add-ons are currently solving by leveraging our SDK APIs:
- Importing media content (images, video, and audio)
- Editing and styling text (apply character and paragraph styles)
- Create renditions, different output versions of a document made for specific purposes
Media and text effects, along with accessibility, are other areas where add-ons can deliver high value to users.
A special shout-out to those who’ve requested improved text styling. Your input drove our recent SDK API releases, such as those enabling updates to text character and paragraph styles.
Under active development: Photo effects
We're currently working on unlocking the ability to transform images directly from the image panel with your own custom controls and transformations.
This feature will expand the surfaces where users encounter add-ons by intuitively introducing the add-ons to the image panel, allowing users to leverage your custom image transformation logic to create new and compelling visuals. By using per-element metadata, you can persist configurations to make the editing experience even more powerful.
How you transform an image is up to you — because your add-on runs in a browser, you have access to versatile client-side technologies (including HTML Canvas, Web Workers, WebAssembly and others), but can also use server-side logic if you need even more computational power or scale.
We can't wait to see what kinds of image transformation experiences you'll build. Look out for these APIs to drop experimentally soon!
Smoother onboarding and developer journey
We want your time-to-“Hello World” to be minutes, not hours. We are therefore continuously collaborating with developers to improve the overall add-on development experience.
Here’s what we’ve done (and are doing) to simplify the onboarding process and reduce friction:
Better documentation
We’ve completely revamped the information architecture of the documentation to make content easier to navigate, whether you’re just getting started or you’ve been building add-ons for a while.
For example, we’ve rewritten existing guides and tutorials and added new ones, like the “Developer Journey” walkthrough, especially useful for any new add-on developers.
As AI becomes a core part of modern development workflows, we’re evolving our documentation to keep pace. We're actively making it more LLM-friendly and building a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server designed to plug directly into your LLM workflows.
This will enable fast, context-aware access to the exact documentation you need, right when you need it. Whether you're building, debugging, or exploring add-on APIs, our goal is to bring structured, searchable docs directly into your development environment — no more tab-switching or guesswork.
New features for the code playground
Our in-app code playground allows you to experiment, prototype, and iterate on ideas without any setup, from within Adobe Express. It’s a great way to start your journey in a matter of minutes.
Coming soon:
- Deep-linking between the documentation and the code playground: Jump directly from a doc page into a pre-loaded playground example with a single click, helping you to get started faster and experiment more efficiently.
- Export your playground experiments into CLI-compatible projects: Seamlessly transition from quick prototypes to fully-fledged add-on projects in just a few minutes — bridging the gap between exploration and production.
Why build for Adobe Express?
Adobe Express is used by millions of users around the world, and its broad user base is made up of everyone from business pros and marketers to educators and entrepreneurs. By building add-ons for the platform you can help transform the workflows for this thriving creative community.
Got an idea for an add-on? Apply for a product grant from the Adobe Fund for Design, or take part in the Adobe Express Add-ons Hackathon (ends on July 16), an exciting opportunity for developers, designers, and creative builders of all backgrounds to bring their idea to life and shape the future of Adobe Express for millions of users. Design and pitch your idea for an add-on, then get paid to build and ship if you win!
We’d love to hear your feedback on all the new and upcoming enhancements, especially on APIs that are still experimental. Join the conversation on Discord and share your feedback in UserVoice.
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