Adobe Express Add-ins are Coming on 23rd March — Here's What You Need to Know

 If you are an IT admin in a school, college, or business that uses Adobe Express, there is a date you need to have in your diary right now. On 23rd March 2026, Adobe is enabling the K-12 Add-on Collection for Adobe Express, which means a whole set of third-party add-ins are going to become available to your users automatically.

Let's take a look at what that means in practice, and crucially, what you can do if you don't want all of them showing up in your environment.

So What Are Adobe Express Add-ins?

Add-ins in Adobe Express are essentially integrations with third-party services that sit right inside the Express editor. Think of them a bit like browser extensions, but baked into your creative workflow. Things like QR code generators, stock image libraries, video tools, background removers from third-party providers, and productivity connectors.

For a lot of users these are genuinely useful. A teacher building a classroom poster can pull in resources from connected services without leaving Express. A student working on a project can access additional creative tools in one place. The concept is solid.

But the key thing to understand is that from 23rd March, these add-ins will be enabled for users in your organisation by default. That means unless you take action in the Adobe Admin Console, your users will see and have access to all of them from day one.

Why Would an Organisation Want to Disable Them?

There are a few legitimate reasons why you might want to control what add-ins are available.

Data governance is the big one. Some add-ins connect to external services, and if you are in an education environment particularly around K-12, you need to be confident about what third-party services your students can interact with. Not all add-ins will have been assessed against your organisation's data protection policies.

There is also the distraction factor. If you are deploying Adobe Express in a structured learning environment, having a full marketplace of third-party tools available is not always ideal. You want students focused on the task, not exploring every available add-in.

Finally, some organisations simply want a controlled, consistent experience across all users. Keeping the toolset standardised makes support easier and reduces the risk of users accidentally connecting accounts or sharing content through unapproved channels.

How Do You Manage Add-ins in the Adobe Admin Console?

This is where it gets practical. Adobe gives admins control over add-ins through the Admin Console, and the process is relatively straightforward once you know where to look.

Head into your Adobe Admin Console at adminconsole.adobe.com and sign in with your admin credentials.

From there, navigate to Products and select Adobe Express. You will see the option to manage your Product Profiles. Click into the relevant profile for your users and look for the Add-ins or Integrations section.

From here you have a couple of options. You can disable add-ins entirely, which means no third-party add-ins will be visible to users in that profile at all. Or you can take a more surgical approach and block specific add-ins while leaving others available. This is the better option for most organisations because it lets you whitelist the tools you are happy with while blocking anything you have not reviewed.

Adobe has also introduced the ability to set a default deny policy, meaning only add-ins you have explicitly approved will be accessible. For schools and colleges dealing with safeguarding obligations, this is probably the right approach.

My Recommendation

If you have Adobe Express deployed in a K-12 or FE environment, do not wait until 23rd March to think about this. Get into your Admin Console now, review the add-ins that will be enabled, and make a decision about your policy before the date arrives.

At a minimum, I would suggest switching to a default deny approach for student-facing product profiles and then selectively enabling any add-ins you have reviewed and are comfortable with. That way you are in control from day one rather than scrambling to disable things after the fact.

The good news is that Adobe has built these controls in for exactly this reason. The tools are there, it just requires a bit of admin prep time before the switch gets flipped on the 23rd.

Got questions about managing your Adobe Express deployment? Drop a comment below or get in touch.