Microsoft Publisher is retiring—but your designs can level up. Whether you want something familiar, beginner-friendly, or fully professional, I’m here to walk you through the best Publisher replacements.
Microsoft is pulling the plug on Publisher this October, making now the ideal time to explore a new graphic design and stay ahead of any potential workflow disruptions. The upside? There are plenty of user-friendly alternatives that can handle all your creative projects with ease.
Before diving into those options, it helps to understand what Publisher offers. The Windows-only app, which has long been part of the Microsoft 365 office suite, is a lightweight desktop publishing platform for non-designer office workers who need to create high-quality (but not professional-level) communication materials, such as flyers, internal documents, newsletters, and simple ads. It is popular for its familiarity, offline support, and simplicity. Publisher uses frames (boxes) as placeholders for text and images, making it much easier to move text and image blocks around than in Word.
That simplicity, however, comes with trade-offs. Publisher lacks advanced features such as document preflight and print packaging, robust typographic controls (including support for variable fonts), master and parent page management, and other professional publishing tools. It can also be challenging to find print providers willing to work with its native .pub files.
Still, much of Publisher’s appeal lies in its versatility. With that in mind, here are the best alternatives tailored to different types of users.
If You Want the Easiest Transition Possible
If you don’t want to learn how to use a new app or platform, the following recommendations will suffice. They should already be familiar if you do any sort of typical office or productivity work.
Microsoft PowerPoint
Hiding in plain sight is a decent, basic layout app. It’s true—I’ve set up publication templates in PowerPoint for clients’ staff members who were unhappy using anything other than Publisher or Word for layout, neither of which is a good fit for that task. You just need to change your vantage point a bit.
Consider setting up a document with 8.5-by-11-inch pages, rather than 16:9 ones. If you know how to use PowerPoint’s Master Slides and Master Layouts, then you have a powerful master and parent page system at hand. The app also offers better-than-basic typography controls, such as custom bullet settings, line and word spacing, and more. It’s easy to create templates for others to use and to collaborate with your team. And don’t forget the handy access to Microsoft Copilot, which can help spark your creativity. PowerPoint is a part of Microsoft 365.
Google Docs
surprised myself while writing this article inGoogle Docs. It’s a great free alternative to Publisher, since it has most of the same capabilities and limitations. Additionally, you can create tables, dictate content, enjoy easy collaboration, export docs as PDFs, make custom bullet points, translate text, and even check your spelling and grammar. Its version history capability is also robust.
Beginner-Friendly Design Platforms
If Publisher’s simplicity was the primary reason you stuck with it over the years, don’t fret. For most community organizations, non-designers, and social media creators, the following apps are perfectly suitable and just as easy to use:
Adobe Express
Adobe Express offers a robust free version with high-quality fonts, professional photography tools, and sophisticated assets. Meanwhile, a paid subscription unlocks many goodies, such as 30 days’ worth of version history, 100GB of cloud storage, a larger allocation of monthly AI credits, and significantly more fonts, stock content, and templates. It isn’t quite as intuitive as Canva, but it strikes a nice balance between ease of use and polish for brand-keepers, freelancers, or small businesses that want better output quality without springing for a pro-level app.
Canva
Canva is more template-driven than Microsoft Designer. It offers a decent free version with lots of assets, while a paid subscription gets you additional tools, elements, features (such as a branding toolkit), and images. Think of Canva as a kitchen-sink-like app in which you can use customizable, predesigned templates to produce just about anything—flyers, presentations, websites, signs, social posts, and more. It makes it easy to get started, collaborate with others, organize your creations, and share your work.
Microsoft Designer
Microsoft Designer is available for free or with extra AI allowances and storage via a Microsoft 365 subscription. It’s similar to Adobe Express and Canva in many ways, but it stands out for its prompt-first, AI-assisted design capabilities. As you begin typing your requirements and vision, Designer generates visuals and layout suggestions (much like templates)—it’s a good choice for quick creative iterations. However, it’s not ideal if you have requirements for specific branding color formulations and Pantone-matching, or if you need to produce print-ready files.
When You Need More Power and Precision
Professional design applications have a steeper learning curve because they are orders of magnitude more capable than standard desktop publishing apps. For complex layouts, elegant long-format publications, high-level photo editing, packaging design, and ultra-precise typesetting using professional OpenType and variable typefaces, you need a pro-level app.
