How to download after effects on pc

If you're looking to download Adobe After Effects free to your PC or Mac, you'll be pleased to know it's quite a simple process. But there are a few options to choose from. In this article, we’ll explain both how to download After Effects for free, and how to get it as part of the Adobe Creative Cloud. That can be either as a single app or as an all-apps subscription. By reading this article, we hope you'll discover which option is right for you, and what action you'll need to take. 

First off, what is Adobe After Effects? It's the industry standard motion graphics and compositing software. It's widely used by graphic and motion designers, animators and 3D artists to create everything from TV title sequences and simple explainer animations to full-blown Hollywood VFX. In this article, we outline the best ways to download After Effects to your devices, and we also have a round up of the best After Effects tutorials to help get you started once you've got your copy of the software.

Can I download After Effects free?

Yes, you can download Adobe After Effects free Well, a free trial, at least. You’ll then have seven days to try it out and find out if it’s right for you. 

A free trial is the only legitimate way to download After Effects for free. You might find a pirated version on the web of course, but that would mean breaking the law. You’d also be putting your devices and data at risk from viruses and malware, the version you download will probably be out of date, corrupted and won't work properly, and basically it's just a very bad idea.

To take out a free trial to After Effects, you’ll first need an Adobe ID, if you don’t have one already. This is easy to set up and free. Go to the Adobe Account Page, click 'Create Account' and follow the instructions.

Once you have an Adobe ID, head to this page, click on the words 'Free trial' (next to the blue 'Buy now' button at the top) and follow the instructions. You'll be asked to enter your credit card details but don’t be scared. As long as you cancel your account in good time, you won’t get charged. If you decide to keep subscribing, though, payments will be deducted from your card automatically.

Where do I buy After Effects?

The only way to buy After Effects is as part of a Creative Cloud subscription, for which you pay monthly or annually. However, there are two broad options. The first, and cheapest, is to subscribe to After Effects only. The second is take out an All Apps subscription. This will cost you more, but gives you access to all of the Creative Cloud apps, along with a range of other benefits. (If you’re not sure which Creative Cloud apps might prove useful, read our Adobe software list). 

If the cost seems too high, then bear in mind that Adobe often runs special promotions; we keep track of these in our constantly updated guide to the best Adobe Creative Cloud discounts. 

Beyond that, there are always discounts for students and teachers, as well as separate pricing for businesses, schools and universities. So it’s always worth having a look to see what deals are available at any given time.

How much does After Effects cost?

Your lowest cost option is to buy Adobe After Effects through the Single App plan, which at time of writing costs £ / $ / AU$ per month on an annual plan, and includes GB of cloud storage, Adobe Portfolio, Adobe Fonts, and Adobe Spark. 

The alternative is to buy After Effects through the Creative Cloud All Apps option, which gives you access to After Effects as well as Adobe’s entire collection of creative desktop and mobile apps. This normally costs costs $ / £ / AU$ per month on an annual plan.

After Effects discounts for teachers and students

If you’re a student or teacher, you can buy After Effects as part of a discounted All Apps plan at a much lower rate. So right now, you can get the entire Creative Cloud suite of apps, along with GB cloud storage, Adobe Portfolio, Adobe Fonts, and Adobe Spark, for just $ / £ / AU$ per month for the first year, and then $ / £ / AU$ the following year. 

Get started with After Effects

Once you've downloaded After Effects, check out our roundup of thebest After Effects tutorials to get started with the software, and boost your skills and knowledge, whatever your current level of expertise. So whether you want to get to know the interface and basic features, get to grips with techniques such as custom transitions, text write-on and warp stabilisation, or move on to advanced projects such as rotoscoping nature footage and mocking up AR effects, these tutorials have got you covered.

Also, if you'd like to save yourself time and effort using After Effects, you can check out our roundup of the best plugins for After Effects. These plugins will help enhance your workflow, add features that simply don’t exist in the core After Effects application, and simply make stuff look cool.

Download After Effects: What you need to know

Adobe After Effects is a visual effects, motion graphics, and compositing software used for animation and post-production process in the digital design, film, games and TV industries. With capabilities ranging from keying and tracking to full 3D stereo compositing, this industry-standard tool is at the core of the workflows of many professional motion graphics, VFX and 3D artists and animators.

After Effects can be used in conjunction with many other Creative Cloud apps. For example, you can import media from Photoshop, Illustrator, Character Animator, Adobe XD and Animate; integrate 3D elements directly inside your compositions using C4D Lite (free with an After Effects subscription); and use Team Projects to collaborate with editors remotely.

After Effects is continually being updated, and all subscribers can access new features automatically through the Adobe Creative Cloud. The most recent update, version , includes the ability to create tapered shape strokes (see video below) and concentric shape repeaters, copy project media to a shared location fro multi-user access, and enable collaboration on cloud documents.  

Free alternatives to After Effects

Finding an alternative to After Effects, whether free or paid-for, is not really possible right now. Because quite simply, there isn't really a tool that does all the things that it does. If you have zero money to spend, though, then your next best option is Blender, a long-running and popular tool for Mac, Windows and Linux.

Free forever, and constantly being updated by its open source community, Blender offers some surprisingly powerful capabilities in the areas of 3D modelling, animation, rendering and composition, and is nowadays even being used in some professional projects. It won't do everything After Effects does, but it will get you most of the way. Check out our list of Blender tutorials to see what it's capable of.

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