Head-to-head · October 2026
Artlist vs Adobe Stock
Artlist takes Pricing, Music & SFX, AI features; Adobe Stock takes Library, Photos, Teams & enterprise — and the honest answer still depends on the work: Artlist is solo creators and small teams who want music, footage and templates on one bill — especially music-led edits, while Adobe Stock is creative Cloud teams and enterprises who live inside Adobe apps and need DAM-level, org-wide licensing.
Published by Brollvia — a third platform with its own horse in this race, declared up front. Everything below is scored from the same public dataset as our own comparison pages, and the section at the end says where we fit.
Meet the contenders
Artlist — All-in-one creator subscription
A music-first creator bundle: music, SFX, footage, templates and a large AI suite under one Max subscription.
Artlist began as a music licensing service for filmmakers and has grown, tier by tier, into the closest thing the market has to Brollvia's shape: one subscription that bundles royalty-free music, sound effects, stock footage, video templates and LUTs, wrapped in a fast-growing AI toolkit. Its flagship Max plan adds AI video, image and music generation, AI voiceover and avatars, and a Studio product for keeping characters and locations consistent across AI-generated scenes. Reviewers count roughly 60,000 music tracks, 50,000 sound effects, 180,000 footage clips and 20,000 templates — a mid-sized but carefully curated catalogue, positioned on quality and ease rather than raw scale.
Two Artlist features deserve respect from any filmmaker. The first is music depth: Max includes stems, so an editor can rebalance a track or lift the vocal out of a cue, and the catalogue is organised into playlists by mood, genre and use case. The second is Clearlist, which connects to your YouTube channel, monitors uploads and automatically clears the false copyright claims that plague stock-music users — unglamorous, monetisation-saving work that most libraries, Brollvia included, do not yet do for you. Artlist also ships plugins for Premiere Pro, After Effects, Final Cut and DaVinci Resolve, so its media can be pulled into the timeline without a browser round-trip.
Where Artlist's model differs from Brollvia's is openness. There is no documented public API for searching and licensing its catalogue, and the one report of an MCP integration — a secondary source describing Claude-based in-chat generation — is about generating media, not licensing the library, and was not verified on an Artlist page in our research. Licensing proof is account-bound: your coverage lives in your Artlist account rather than behind a public verification anyone can check. And while Max is a strong bundle, its price — $39.99 a month for Pro, before the RAW/LOG upgrade — sits well above Brollvia Pro.
Adobe Stock — Stock library inside Creative Cloud
A giant credit-based library woven into Photoshop, Premiere and the whole Creative Cloud — plus Firefly AI and a real DAM story.
Adobe Stock is less a website than a layer of the creative industry's default toolkit. Its plans page claims more than 900 million assets — photos, vectors, illustrations, videos, templates and 3D — searchable without leaving Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro or Express, with licensing that flows into Creative Cloud Libraries and, at enterprise level, into Experience Manager Assets as a proper DAM. Contributors sell through it, enterprises pool licences across the whole organisation, and licences are perpetual once granted. If your company already pays Adobe, Stock is the path of least resistance, and Adobe knows it.
The AI story is twofold. Firefly generates images (and increasingly video) trained on licensed Stock and public-domain content — the legally cautious generator, with enterprise IP indemnification positioning. AI Studio, bundled into the mid and top plans, edits: unlimited image edits plus thousands of generative credits a month for motion edits. It is a broader AI offer than Brollvia's generate-on-credits, and it is priced accordingly — AI Studio is a reason to climb from the $29.99 tier to $39.99 or $129.99.
The friction is the meter. Adobe Stock runs on credits: a standard photo might cost one, a video six to eight, Premium and templates draw on separate credit packs that expire in a year. Only the $129.99/mo tier is unlimited. There is no MCP server for agent licensing, no script-to-shots matching, no public licence verification, and nothing at all for DaVinci Resolve — the ecosystem ends at Adobe's property line. For a Creative Cloud shop that is fine. For everyone else, it is a very large, very metered library.
At a glance
| Artlist | Adobe Stock | Brollvia | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Type | All-in-one creator subscription | Stock library inside Creative Cloud | Filmmaker-first stock library |
| Full-access price | Max Pro — $39.99/mo (annual billing) | Unlimited Stock + AI Studio — $129.99/mo (the only unlimited tier) | $15/mo or $99/yr, unlimited |
| Starting price | Music & SFX Social — from $9.99/mo | 10 credits/mo — $29.99 | Free to start |
| Library | claims ~0.3M assets | claims ~900M assets | New library — growing |
| Best for | Solo creators and small teams who want music, footage and templates on one bill — especially music-led edits. | Creative Cloud teams and enterprises who live inside Adobe apps and need DAM-level, org-wide licensing. | Filmmakers and small teams who want unlimited licensed media with verifiable paperwork, editor panels and an agent that can license for them. |
| Feature coverage | 8 / 16 in full | 9 / 16 in full | 16 / 16 in full |
The scorecard: nine categories, scored from the record
Each row is derived from the shared dataset — the feature matrix, published pricing and each platform's own record. The Edge column names the winner or calls the tie; nobody wins a row on adjectives.
| Category | Artlist | Adobe Stock | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Max Pro — $39.99/mo (annual billing) | Unlimited Stock + AI Studio — $129.99/mo (the only unlimited tier) | Artlist |
| Library | claims ~0.3M assets | claims ~900M assets | Adobe Stock |
| Footage formats & quality | Fully supported | Fully supported | Tie |
| Music & SFX | Music: fully supported; Sound effects: fully supported | Music: fully supported; Sound effects: audio is music-led; sound-effect depth is thinner than dedicated SFX libraries | Artlist |
| Photos | No headline photo library in Max | Fully supported | Adobe Stock |
| Templates & extras | Carries templates, LUTs | Carries templates, 3D | Tie |
| AI features | AI generation in-platform: AI video, image, music, voiceover and avatars on credit tiers; MCP server for AI agents: one secondary source reports a Claude MCP integration for in-chat generation — unverified on an Artlist page, and generation rather than search-and-license; Script-to-B-roll: not offered | AI generation in-platform: firefly generation + AI Studio editing on generative credits; MCP server for AI agents: not offered; Script-to-B-roll: not offered | Artlist |
| Editor workflow | Editor panels/plugins (Premiere): plugins for Premiere Pro; Editor panels/plugins (Resolve): plugins for DaVinci Resolve | Editor panels/plugins (Premiere): native panel inside Premiere and the other CC apps; Editor panels/plugins (Resolve): no Resolve panel — integrations are Creative Cloud apps only | Artlist |
| Teams & enterprise | Teams: max Team seats; Extended licences: licence scope follows your plan tier; RAW/LOG is a paid add-on | Teams: pooled team and enterprise licences; Extended licences: extended licences available; standard indemnification capped at $10,000 in Adobe's own compare table | Adobe Stock |
The price of full access
Compared on the tier a working filmmaker would actually buy — full media access, not a teaser plan. Brollvia Pro is drawn as the reference line: it is the third option scored at the end of this page.
Library size, as claimed
Both figures are the platforms' own published claims (log scale), not audits — counts mix photos, vectors, templates and footage differently per platform.
Where Artlist wins
- Music depth: stems, playlists and Clearlist claim-clearing have no Brollvia equivalent yet
- Templates and LUTs: roughly 20,000 templates per reviewers — Brollvia offers none
- Professional formats: RAW/LOG and ProRes/DNxHR footage via Artgrid and the Max upgrade
- Catalogue maturity: around 180,000 footage clips per reviewers, against a new, growing library
- AI breadth beyond generation: avatars, voice cloning and consistent-character Studio productions
Where Adobe Stock wins
- Catalogue scale: a claimed 900M+ assets — no contest for a new platform
- Asset-type breadth: templates, 3D and Premium collections Brollvia does not carry
- AI Studio: unlimited image editing plus generative motion edits, beyond plain generation
- Ecosystem depth: Creative Cloud Libraries and Experience Manager DAM integration
- Enterprise licensing machinery: pooled, perpetual, org-wide
Pricing, in each platform's own terms
Artlist
Artlist pricing rewards commitment and bundles. The entry point looks gentle — Music & SFX Social at $9.99/mo — but that buys no footage at all. The honest comparison against Brollvia Pro ($15/mo, unlimited everything) is Max: $29.99/mo for Social, $39.99/mo for Pro, billed annually, so $360–$480 a year against Brollvia's $99 annual launch rate. AI usage is where Artlist bills get unpredictable: Max Pro's price climbs steeply through AI-credit tiers, from around $50 at 16,500 monthly credits to $300+ at half a million, per Artlist's launch materials as summarised by reviewers. If you generate heavily, model your credit burn before the annual bill surprises you.
The RAW/LOG upgrade (+$20/mo) deserves a line of its own, because for colour-critical work it is not optional decoration — it is the difference between footage that grades like your camera originals and footage that does not. Brollvia has no equivalent tier today (its absence is scored honestly in the matrix below), so a fair total-cost comparison for a professional colour workflow is Max Pro + RAW/LOG at roughly $60/mo against Brollvia Pro at $15/mo with that format gap accepted. For everyone else — social, corporate, YouTube, most commercial work — the $15 flat rate is simply cheaper for a comparable bundle.
Adobe Stock
Model Adobe Stock by what you actually download. Ten credits a month at $29.99 sounds comparable to Brollvia Pro until a single 4K video costs six to eight credits — two videos can exhaust a month. The 40-credit tier at $89.99 is the realistic video-user plan, and the only honest unlimited comparison is Unlimited + AI Studio at $129.99/mo, roughly $1,560 a year against Brollvia Pro's $99 launch year. Trackers have shown the 10-credit + AI Studio tier at both $34.99 and $39.99 recently, so treat Adobe's pricing as moving and verify on the plans page before budgeting.
Two softeners deserve honesty. First, Adobe credits roll into a system many teams already expense — if Creative Cloud seats are sunk cost, Stock's marginal friction is low. Second, enterprise pooling is genuinely valuable: one licence, org-wide, perpetual, DAM-served. Brollvia's counter is simplicity — one unlimited price, Teams at $12/seat, extended licences per asset when a production needs them, and no credit arithmetic in the edit bay. If your downloads are mostly images, Adobe's meter may never bite; if they are video, do the 6–8 credits-per-clip maths first.
The third option
Brollvia
Neither of these two is the library publishing this page. Brollvia is — and rather than pretend otherwise, here is its case and its weakness, scored on the same dataset.
Brollvia is built around a simple observation: the hard part of stock is no longer storing millions of clips — it is finding the right twelve seconds, proving you may use them, and getting them into the timeline. So Brollvia puts its engineering into the search and the paperwork. You can search by describing the scene in plain words, by uploading a single frame and asking for matches, or by pasting a script and letting the platform break it into scenes and propose shots for each one. Every download — by you, by a teammate, or by your AI agent — writes a licence record with a certificate, and anyone can verify that record publicly. No other platform in this comparison publishes a verification page.
The agent layer is the deepest difference. Brollvia runs an MCP server and a REST API with OAuth sign-in, so Claude, ChatGPT and your own tools can search the library and license footage inside the conversation where the brief already lives. When a shot genuinely does not exist, integrated AI generation creates it on a credit system — clearly labelled as AI-generated on the asset, in search filters and on its licence certificate, so nothing synthetic ever passes itself off as photographed footage. Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve panels bring the same search-and-license flow into the editor, licence records included.
And the price is deliberately boring: Pro is $15 a month or $99 a year, unlimited, with packs of curated footage included. There are no credits that make a single video cost six downloads, no per-media plan fragmentation, and no sales call between you and the library. If a rival on this page beats Brollvia for your kind of work, its page here says so plainly — that is the deal these comparisons make with you.
On the shared matrix, Brollvia fully offers what neither Artlist nor Adobe Stock does:
- MCP server for AI agents
- Script-to-B-roll
- Public licence verification
- Curated packs
The honest weakness: catalogue scale. Brollvia is a new contributor library — if the brief needs the deepest shelf on earth, one of the two platforms above is the safer pair of hands, and their pages here say so.
Start free See pricing Brollvia vs Artlist Brollvia vs Adobe Stock
Choose Artlist if…
Choose Artlist if music drives your edits: stems, curated playlists and Clearlist's automated YouTube claim-clearing are genuinely class-leading, and if you cut with templates and LUTs you will find roughly 20,000 of them waiting. Its footage arm reaches RAW/LOG and ProRes through Artgrid tiers and the Max upgrade — formats Brollvia does not yet serve.
Choose Adobe Stock if…
Choose Adobe Stock if your organisation already runs on Creative Cloud: the library is inside Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Premiere, licences pool across the enterprise through Experience Manager, and Firefly generation is trained on licensed content with enterprise IP positioning. At a claimed 900M+ assets, the catalogue depth argument is not close, and templates and 3D are first-class citizens.
In the edit: workflow
Artlist
In daily use, Artlist feels like a well-stocked record shop: strong playlists, quick previews, plugins that drop media into four different editors, and Clearlist quietly defending your monetisation after publish. The gaps show up when the workflow leaves the browser-and-timeline loop: there is no API for your tools to license footage programmatically, no script-to-shots matching, and no public page where a client or a platform can verify your licence — your proof is your account. Brollvia was designed for exactly that wider loop, at the cost of a younger catalogue.
Adobe Stock
Inside Adobe apps, nothing here competes: search, comp, license and replace without leaving the timeline or the layout, with Libraries keeping a whole team in sync. Outside Adobe apps, the platform thins quickly — Resolve editors get a browser round-trip, agents get an enterprise API rather than a licensing MCP server, and clients get licence PDFs rather than a verification link. Brollvia's workflow is the mirror image: browser, both major NLEs via panels, API and agent — with the licence proof designed to travel.
Switching away
From Artlist
Moving from Artlist to Brollvia is mostly a matter of re-downloading: footage you licensed under Artlist stays licensed under its terms for the uses you made, but your working library, playlists and project organisation do not transfer — no platform in this comparison offers library migration, Artlist included. The practical path is to let the annual plan lapse at renewal, run both for a month on active projects, and rebuild your staples as Brollvia collections and packs. If you rely on stems or Clearlist, weigh those two features honestly before switching; they are Artlist's strongest hold.
From Adobe Stock
Adobe Stock licences are perpetual for the uses you licensed, so past work is safe; keep your licence history exported from your Adobe account as evidence. The real lock-in is workflow, not law: teams whose Libraries, templates and DAM are Adobe-shaped will feel the move in their habits, not their contracts. A sane path is to stop the Stock subscription at renewal, keep Creative Cloud for the tools, and run new projects through Brollvia for a quarter before deciding — the panels make that trial painless inside Premiere itself.
Artlist vs Adobe Stock: questions
Which is cheaper, Artlist or Adobe Stock?
On the full-access tier this comparison charts, Artlist runs Max Pro — $39.99/mo (annual billing) and Adobe Stock runs Unlimited Stock + AI Studio — $129.99/mo (the only unlimited tier). Artlist is the cheaper of the two on that basis — but the models differ: Artlist — Artlist sells media in bundles. Music & SFX starts at $9.99/mo; the all-in-one Max bundle is $29.99/mo (Social) or $39.99/mo (Pro) billed annually, and AI-credit tiers can raise Max Pro steeply. RAW/LOG footage is a +$20/mo upgrade. Adobe Stock — Credit subscriptions, not flat unlimited: 10 credits/mo $29.99; 10 credits + AI Studio $39.99; 40 credits $89.99; Unlimited + AI Studio $129.99/mo. A video costs multiple credits, and Premium, templates and 3D draw on credit packs.
Which has the bigger library, Artlist or Adobe Stock?
Adobe Stock claims the larger catalogue. Artlist: Reviewers count roughly 60,000 music tracks, 50,000 sound effects, 180,000 footage clips and 20,000 templates (CC Hound review, October 2026). Artlist does not publish one audited library total. Adobe Stock: Adobe's own plans page claims 900M+ stock assets (fetched October 2026) — the largest claim in this comparison. Third-party counts by media type differ and are not directly comparable. Both figures are the platforms' own claims, not audits — depth in your specific niche matters more than the headline total.
Do Artlist or Adobe Stock offer unlimited downloads?
Artlist offers unlimited downloads; Adobe Stock is unlimited only in part (only the $129.99/mo tier is unlimited; most plans spend credits per download). If unlimited is the deciding factor, check the tier fine print on both — caps and catalogue exclusions are where "unlimited" goes to hide.
Artlist or Adobe Stock — which should a filmmaker pick?
It follows the work. Artlist is solo creators and small teams who want music, footage and templates on one bill — especially music-led edits. Adobe Stock is creative Cloud teams and enterprises who live inside Adobe apps and need DAM-level, org-wide licensing. The scorecard above scores the nine categories where they actually differ; the where-they-win lists are written from each platform's own record.
Is there a third option besides Artlist and Adobe Stock?
Brollvia, the platform publishing this comparison — declared interest, stated plainly. Pro is $15/mo or $99/yr, unlimited across video, photos, music and SFX. On this dataset it fully offers what neither of these two does: MCP server for AI agents, Script-to-B-roll, Public licence verification, Curated packs. Its honest weakness is catalogue scale: it is a new contributor library and publishes no comparable total. The full Brollvia-vs-each head-to-heads are linked at the foot of this page, and each lists that rival's wins too.
Data & sources
Data as of October 2026. Library sizes and prices are each company's own published claims or reputable reviewer reports, attributed in the text — not audited figures. Prices change; verify on the provider's site before budgeting. Found an error? Tell us and we will fix the record and this page with it.
Artlist sources
- Artlist — Max launch announcement (official blog)
- CC Hound — Artlist complete review
- SaaSWorthy — Artgrid pricing & tiers
- FrameKit — stock footage licensing roundup
Adobe Stock sources
Or skip the shortlist entirely
Start free, upgrade when the work does. Every download writes a licence record you can verify in public.