Adobe Inc.

Adobe’s creative software suite enjoys a wide and enduring competitive advantage. The company’s flagship products (Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, etc.) are industry standards, creating steep switching costs for users (file format lock-in and ecosystem investment). It also benefits from a strong brand and valuable intellectual property.

A recent analysis noted that Adobe “enjoys a wide economic moat due to its high switching costs, robust network effects, and valuable intangible assets”. Although Adobe faces new competition (e.g. from Canva or Figma), its entrenched position and ongoing innovations (AI tools in Creative Cloud and Document Cloud) support multiple overlapping moats.

Overall we rate the moat very strong (wide moat).