Adobe has announced the end of new feature development for Adobe Muse CC. The feature improvement released on March 26th, 2018 is the last one. As bad and terrifying as it sounds, this does not mean that Adobe Muse is going to disappear from your desktop or stop working. Adobe will offer technical support for active Creative Cloud customers until May 20th 2019 and you will still be able to design your websites in Muse after that date.
What’s next?
In our experience, when a program is discontinued, it will still work for some years. Muse third party developers will still be able to fix some of the future problems via code injection (widgets). For this reason, Responsive Muse will continue working for Muse users and offering technical support of our products until then.
Should you choose an alternative now? No! There are free alternatives that you can try before choosing a Muse replacement. You do not need to purchase or subscribe to anything before being sure that it is what you are looking for.
Some important facts:
- The only drag and drop web development solution that can replace (and improve) Muse freedom of functionalities and without monthly fees is WordPress.
- Any current visual web development tool based on browser design will have limitations that a lot of Muse users will find frustrating.
- Browser design apps will usually force you to use their hosting services or pay additional fees for extra requirements like e-commerce or CMS. That means that you will need to charge monthly fees to every final client just for giving them basic requirements.
Muse alternatives
In several years from now, modern browsers may not support the code generated by Muse. Responsive Muse team will be there for you during these transition years, working on Muse products, looking for new ways to design your websites and helping you out all the way.
Our team has been studying all the options available now, all the pros and cons, and these are our thoughts about the two winners:
- WEBFLOW – (Easy: 6/10 – Powerful: 4/10 – Pricing: 3/10)
Many of you have thought of Webflow as an alternative option to Muse. It is a pretty interesting tool as you can design websites without code like in Muse, but we find some big handicaps in this app. We have found some issues in their forum without a solution, it is not compatible with PHP (so something as basic as an upload form will not be available in Webflow), you still cannot attach files (like PDF, PPT) other than images in their CMS and their e-Commerce solution is in a Beta stage.
You will also need to pay from $16/month to $36/month for every site that needs their CMS functionalities. We know that final clients will not like these fees and this can bring you problems in web projects that need to evolve.
You can read more about it here https://wishlist.webflow.com/?sort=popular
- WORDPRESS + VISUAL BUILDERS – (Easy: 4/10 – Powerful: 10/10 – Pricing: free)
What we find very interesting in WordPress is Page Builders. Builders like Elementr or Divi might sound familiar to you. They are popular but include a license fee. On the other hand, there are builders that are free and we can make good use of them.
For this reason, we are launching a free course about learning how to design a website with a 100% free WordPress visual builder. We take Adobe’s announcement as an opportunity to show you more tools, to help you broaden your knowledge and gain new skills. This is not the end and we will be with you all the way.
The first chapter of the course will be out soon. We will start the course from zero, so you will learn the basics of WordPress setup (buy a domain and hosting and install WordPress) and after this initial steps, you will be able to visually design any kind of site without using code. As a Muse user, we are sure that you will love WordPress. You will design websites 10 times faster than before, and any client petition like login or protected areas, CMS, e-commerce… everything will be faster and easier to create.
- OTHER OPTIONS
We do not rule out sharing with you other options in the future. We are still studying other cool alternatives and ideas, but if you want to stick with a solution that will be valid for every client, that will probably never be discontinued nor will you need to learn another tool in many years, we encourage you to join us in our WordPress visual development trip 🙂
Join us!
We will publish the WordPress Visual Design course for free in our Youtube Channel. Subscribe to get notified when the first chapter is out!
