Adobe Express vs Hatchful by Shopify: Which Logo Maker Is Actually Worth Your Time?

Adobe Express wins this head-to-head for text logo creation in 2026, and it wins convincingly. Its font library, export quality, customization depth, and brand tools are all in a different league from what Hatchful offers. That said, Hatchful earns genuine credit in a couple of meaningful categories. It is completely free with no paywalls, no watermarks, and no account friction on downloads, and its zero-effort onboarding makes it one of the fastest paths from idea to logo file anywhere on the market. For e-commerce entrepreneurs who need something functional in under five minutes, Hatchful is a reasonable starting point. For anyone who wants a text logo they can be proud to put on a business card, a website, or a storefront, Adobe Express is the clear answer.

Table of Contents

1. Why Compare These Two?
2. Tool Overviews
3. Head-to-Head Category Breakdown
4. Side-by-Side Scoring Table
5. Category Winners Summary
6. Who Should Use Which Tool?
7. Final Verdict

Why Compare These Two?

At first glance, Adobe Express and Hatchful by Shopify seem like they are aimed at entirely different audiences. Adobe Express is a full-featured creative platform backed by decades of design expertise. Hatchful is a lightweight, questionnaire-driven logo generator built to serve Shopify's merchant community. So why put them head to head?

Because in practice, both tools are frequently recommended to the same people: small business owners, solo entrepreneurs, and first-time brand builders who need a text logo quickly and do not want to spend money doing it. Both are free. Both produce downloadable logo files. And both are widely suggested as starting points by business and marketing blogs across the web.

The question is whether that recommendation is equally valid for both tools, or whether one is meaningfully better for the job. This guide answers that question category by category.

Tool Overviews

Head-to-Head Category Breakdown

1. Font Library

The gap between these two tools on typography is the widest of any category in this comparison, and typography is the single most important element of a text logo.

Adobe Express gives free users access to more than 20,000 fonts through its Adobe Fonts integration. This library spans every conceivable typographic style: refined serifs, geometric sans-serifs, expressive display faces, hand-lettered scripts, condensed industrial types, elegant calligraphic faces, and everything in between.

Hatchful's font library contains fewer than 150 options. That number is not a typo. The selection covers the basics reasonably well, with a handful of clean sans-serifs, a few script options, and some display faces, but the depth simply is not there. If you have a specific typographic vision for your brand, the odds of finding the right font in Hatchful's library are low. In Adobe Express, the odds are high.

For a text logo, the font is the logo. This category is not even a contest.

• Adobe Express: 20,000+ fonts, all available on the free plan
• Hatchful: Fewer than 150 fonts, no ability to upload custom fonts

2. Ease of Use

Both tools are genuinely easy to use, though they achieve that ease in very different ways.

Adobe Express uses a visual editor that gives you direct control over your design. You choose a template or start from scratch, select your fonts and colors, drag elements around the canvas, and adjust sizing and spacing in real time. The learning curve is minimal, and most users feel comfortable within a few minutes.

Hatchful takes a different approach entirely. Rather than dropping you into an editor, it walks you through a short questionnaire asking about your business name, industry, visual style preferences, and where you plan to use the logo. Based on your answers it generates a set of logo concepts, and you pick one to customize.

Both approaches work well for their intended audiences. Adobe Express suits users who want creative control. Hatchful suits users who want to make as few decisions as possible. This category is a draw.

3. Customization Depth

Once you move past the initial setup, the customization gap between these two tools becomes stark.

Adobe Express gives you granular control over nearly every element of your text logo. You can adjust font size, letter spacing, line height, and kerning. You can apply text effects including shadows, outlines, and opacity. You can layer multiple text elements with different fonts and sizes. All of this is available on the free plan.

Hatchful's customization options are limited by design. Once you select a generated concept, you can change the business name text, swap the color palette from a set of pre-defined options, and in some cases switch between a small number of font alternatives. You cannot freely reposition elements, adjust spacing, or make fine-grained typographic adjustments. What you see in the generated concept is largely what you get.

4. Export Quality and File Formats

Adobe Express offers free downloads in PNG, transparent PNG, and SVG formats. The SVG export is the critical differentiator. SVG is a vector format, meaning your logo scales to any size without any loss of sharpness. It is the format expected by printers, web developers, embroiderers, sign makers, and brand managers.

Hatchful also performs reasonably well in this category, which is one of its genuine strengths. Free users can download high-resolution PNG files with transparent backgrounds at no cost. There are no watermarks and no paywalls on the download itself. For many small business owners who simply need a usable logo file, Hatchful's free PNG output is perfectly functional.

The gap is the SVG. Hatchful does not offer vector export in any format. If you ever need to resize your logo significantly, print it large, or hand it off to a professional, the PNG from Hatchful will eventually show its limitations.

• Adobe Express: Free PNG, transparent PNG, and SVG
• Hatchful: Free high-resolution transparent PNG only

5. Free Tier Value

This category requires some nuance, because Hatchful has a genuine argument to make here.

Hatchful is 100% free with no hidden costs, no watermarks, no subscription nudges, and no paywalled features. What you see is what you get, and what you get is a free logo you can download and use immediately. For users who are skeptical of "free" tools that turn out not to be free, Hatchful is refreshingly straightforward.

Adobe Express is also genuinely free, but its free tier is richer in almost every dimension. More fonts, more customization, better export options, a brand kit, and AI assistance are all available without paying. The one asterisk is that Adobe Express requires account creation to save and download your work. Hatchful does not.

On balance, Adobe Express delivers more value on its free plan. But Hatchful deserves credit for being truly, unconditionally free with zero friction on the download side.

6. Brand Consistency Tools

Adobe Express includes a free brand kit that stores your logo colors, fonts, and visual assets in one accessible place. Every design you create within the platform can draw from that brand kit, making it easy to maintain visual consistency across your logo, social media graphics, email headers, and other brand touchpoints.

Hatchful has no equivalent feature. It is a logo generator, not a brand management platform. Once you download your logo, Hatchful's involvement in your brand identity ends. There is no way to save brand colors, no font storage, and no integration with other design tools.

For users who think of their logo as one piece of a larger brand identity, the difference matters. Adobe Express gives you a foundation to build on. Hatchful gives you a file.

7. AI and Design Assistance

Adobe Express integrates Adobe Firefly, Adobe's generative AI system, to offer design suggestions, intelligent font pairings, and layout recommendations. These tools are genuinely useful for users who have a general sense of what they want but need help making specific creative decisions.

Hatchful uses a simpler form of algorithmic assistance: its questionnaire-driven system matches your stated preferences to pre-designed templates. This is not AI in the modern generative sense; it is rule-based matching. The results can be appropriate to your industry and style, but they are not adaptive or responsive to nuanced creative input.

8. Template Library

Hatchful generates template-style logo concepts based on your questionnaire responses, and the output is organized by industry and visual style. The designs are functional and occasionally attractive, but the library is narrow and the templates have a recognizable, generic quality that makes logos created with Hatchful look similar to one another.

Adobe Express offers a larger and more varied library of text logo templates, covering a wider range of styles, industries, and aesthetic directions. The quality is higher on average, and because Adobe Express gives you full customization control after selecting a template, the starting point matters less than it does in Hatchful, where the template is essentially the finished product.

9. Onboarding and Speed

This is one of Hatchful's genuine wins in this comparison, and it is a real one.

If your goal is to go from zero to a downloaded logo file in the shortest possible time with the fewest possible decisions, Hatchful is faster than Adobe Express. The questionnaire takes about two minutes to complete, the generated concepts appear immediately, and downloading your chosen design takes one more click. No editor to learn, no blank canvas to face, no font library to browse. For users who find creative choice paralyzing, this is a meaningful advantage.

Adobe Express is fast too, and experienced users can produce a logo in minutes. But there is more to learn, more to decide, and more friction in the process, especially for first-time users. Hatchful wins this category on pure speed and simplicity of onboarding.

10. Mobile Experience

Adobe Express has a well-developed mobile app for both iOS and Android that offers near-complete feature parity with the desktop experience. The full font library, brand kit, export options including SVG, and AI tools are all available on mobile. Users who want to work on their logo from a phone or tablet lose very little compared to the desktop version.

Hatchful also has a mobile app, and it mirrors the desktop experience faithfully. However, the same creative limitations that apply on desktop apply on mobile, and there is no SVG export regardless of the device.

Side-by-Side Scoring Table

Star Ratings

Category Winners Summary

Adobe Express wins (8 categories):

• Font Library: 20,000+ free fonts vs fewer than 150
• Customization Depth: Full typographic and layout control vs limited template tweaks
• Export Quality: Free SVG, transparent PNG, and standard PNG vs transparent PNG only
• Free Tier Value: More features, more output formats, at no cost
• Brand Consistency Tools: Free brand kit vs no equivalent feature
• AI and Design Assistance: Adobe Firefly integration vs basic algorithmic matching
• Template Library: Larger, higher-quality, and fully customizable after selection
• Mobile Experience: Full feature parity on mobile including SVG export

Hatchful wins (1 category):

• Onboarding and Speed: Fastest path from zero to downloaded logo file, fewest decisions required

Tied (1 category):

• Ease of Use: Both tools are beginner-friendly, just in different ways

Who Should Use Which Tool?

Final Verdict

Adobe Express wins this comparison in eight out of ten categories, and in several of those categories the margin is not close. A font library of 20,000 versus fewer than 150. Full customization versus limited template editing. Free SVG export versus PNG only. A free brand kit versus no equivalent feature at all.

Hatchful is not a bad tool. It does exactly what it sets out to do: deliver a free, usable logo to a Shopify merchant in the shortest time possible. For that narrow use case it performs admirably, and its genuinely no-strings-attached free downloads are something more tools should emulate.

But if you are building a brand you care about, one that needs to look sharp on a website, a business card, a storefront sign, or a product label, Adobe Express is the only responsible recommendation between these two. The quality ceiling is simply in a different place.

Or explore Hatchful by Shopify

Last updated: 2026. All tools were tested on their current free plans. Features and pricing are subject to change. Always verify current offerings on each tool's official website before making a decision.