Best Desktop Publishing Software

Compare the Top Desktop Publishing Software as of October 2026

What is Desktop Publishing Software?

Desktop publishing software helps businesses, designers, publishers, marketers, and creative professionals create professional-quality print and digital publications with precise control over layout, typography, and graphics. These platforms provide tools for designing brochures, magazines, books, newsletters, flyers, catalogs, business cards, posters, and other marketing and publishing materials using advanced page layout and formatting capabilities. The software often includes features such as master pages, style management, color control, prepress tools, PDF export, image editing integration, and collaboration workflows to support professional publishing. Many desktop publishing solutions integrate with graphic design software, photo editing tools, digital asset management (DAM) platforms, cloud storage, and print production services to streamline content creation. By combining text, images, and graphics into polished layouts, desktop publishing software helps organizations produce visually compelling publications for both print and digital distribution. Compare and read user reviews of the best Desktop Publishing software currently available using the table below. This list is updated regularly.

  • 1
    Marq

    Marq

    Marq

    Marq (formerly Lucidpress) is a design & brand templating platform that empowers non-designers in your company to create and distribute marketing collateral all on their own (without going off brand). Lockable templates protect your brand while allowing colleagues to make small design tweaks and customizations, easing the workload off your creative team. Say goodbye to rogue branding forever with Marq -- the brand templating platform trusted by over 7 million users worldwide. Get high-quality printed materials shipped straight to your location with our web-to-print features. Or, reach your audience even quicker with Marq's direct mail delivery. Whether its social media posts or printed brochures, our cloud-based platform helps your business manage the brand experience from start to finish.
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    Starting Price: $10 per user per month
  • 2
    hyper Digital Asset Management Server

    hyper Digital Asset Management Server

    hyperCMS Content Management Solutions

    The hyper Content & Digital Asset Management Server helps organizations to have full control over all their digital assets, to automate processes and cut costs. Access all your rich rich content directly by conveniently integrating it into the creative workflow of internal/external teams and programs like Adobe CS, MS Office, and OpenOffice. Ensure process control with collaborative approval. Share the content directly on Social Media Networks. Create customized Brand Portals to promote and meassure the success of various rich content.
    Starting Price: $21.00/mo (SaaS) $0 On-Premise
  • 3
    Microsoft Word
    Microsoft Word is the world’s leading word processing software, designed to help you write, read, and create with confidence. Powered by Copilot, Word uses AI to help you generate ideas, refine drafts, and edit your writing with clarity and precision. Whether you’re working on essays, reports, proposals, or creative writing, Word delivers professional results across devices—desktop, web, and mobile. With Editor and built-in collaboration tools, teams can co-author documents in real time while maintaining consistency and accuracy. Integrated with Microsoft 365, Word also connects seamlessly with apps like Excel, PowerPoint, and OneDrive for a complete productivity experience. Trusted by millions, Word empowers individuals and businesses to create polished, impactful content anytime, anywhere.
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    Starting Price: $9.99 per month
  • 4
    Adobe InDesign
    InDesign is the industry-leading layout and page design software for print and digital media. Create beautiful graphic designs with typography from the world՚s top foundries and imagery from Adobe Stock. Quickly share content and feedback in PDF. Easily manage production with Adobe Experience Manager. InDesign has everything you need to create and publish books, digital magazines, eBooks, posters, interactive PDFs, and more. Design everything from stationery, flyers, and posters to brochures, annual reports, magazines, and books. With professional layout and typesetting tools, you can create multicolumn pages that feature stylish typography and rich graphics, images, and tables. Create digital magazines, eBooks, and interactive online documents that draw people in with audio, video, slideshows, and animations. InDesign makes it easy to manage your design elements and quickly deliver immersive experiences in any format.
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    Starting Price: $20.99 per month
  • 5
    VistaCreate

    VistaCreate

    VistaCreate

    VistaCreate (formerly Crello) is a graphic design platform where anyone can quickly create engaging projects for any industry or occasion —design skills optional. Crello joined the Vista group of companies and changed its brand name to VistaCreate. Start with one of 50,000 professionally designed templates that are already preformatted and customizable. Easily edit, resize, remove background from images. Edit video content and add sounds and music to create multi-dimensional visuals. Upload your own photos or use VistaCreate Unlimited library of 50M+ free media files including premium images, videos, vectors, backgrounds, and clipart. Easily brand your content with Media Kit functionality. With VistaCreate, everyone can produce designs that look like they took hours, in minutes. VistaCreate is also available on web, iOS and Android devices.
    Starting Price: $0
  • 6
    Adobe Express
    Adobe Express is the quick and easy app that controls content chaos and scales your brand reach by empowering every team in your company - marketing, HR, sales, and more - to self-serve on-brand content with ease. Powered by Adobe's commercially-safe AI and integrated with the world's leading creative and marketing solutions, maximize your MarTech investments with Adobe Express.
    Starting Price: $9.99 per month
  • 7
    Microsoft Publisher
    Create polished, professional layouts without the hassle. Precisely lay out and style text, pictures, borders, calendars, and more. In Publisher everything you add stays exactly the way you’ve designed it, in print, online, or in an email. Easily design unique, specialized materials for any purpose. Create everything from simple greeting cards and labels to professional newsletters and marketing materials using Publisher’s wide range of pre-designed templates. Publish in the way that suits your audience best. Share pixel-perfect printouts, send professional-quality email publications, or export to industry-standard non-editable formats.*
    Starting Price: $6.99 per year
  • 8
    Template.net

    Template.net

    Template.net

    Ready-Made Templates. Beautifully Designed, Easily Editable Templates to Get your Work Done Faster & Smarter. Simply Browse, Search, Save & Download our Easy to use Templates. At Template.net we create Premium Designs, Documents for our users. We are a Dedicated Global Team of Coders, Artists, Designers, Lawyers, Marketers & Writers. We are working towards one goal of making the world’s work get done Faster and Smarter! Simple! Why start from Scratch, when you can get your work done faster with our Huge Collection of 100,000+ Beautifully designed, Instantly downloadable, Professionally designed, Ready-Made Templates which are easily Editable, Shareable & Printable. Simply Browse, Search, Save & Download our Easy to use Templates. We Standardize Your Business to help you Create Brand Identity and Visibility, helping you Build Bigger, Better and Faster Business Processes and Improve Productivity through better Organization and Better communication. You Save Time, Money and Frustration.
    Starting Price: $8 per month
  • 9
    Xara Designer Pro
    Xara Designer Pro is our flagship product and includes all the illustration, photo editing, DTP and web design features of photo & graphic designer, web designer premium and page & layout designer. It is a single integrated solution for all your creative work, for print and the web. Here are just some of the reasons why we believe Xara Designer Pro stands out from the competition, making it a great choice for all your graphic design needs. Xara Designer Pro is our flagship all-in-one creative title. In one completely integrated and consistent interface it provides all the tools for a range of graphic design tasks that would normally require three or more separate ‘suite’ programs: illustration, photo editing, advanced page layout, web graphics, websites and more. Xara Designer Pro is based on one of the world's most sophisticated, high performance vector rendering engines.
    Starting Price: $14,99
  • 10
    CatBase

    CatBase

    Stylux Software

    The most flexible data publishing solution for producing catalogs, price lists, directories - or any type of publication that's based on data from a database or spreadsheet. Manage your catalog content using completely user-definable tables and fields (attributes). Publish the data in the many different ways: as a catalogue, price list, or directory; as an XML file or Excel spreadsheet; as a csv or tab-delimited text file; PDF or Microsoft Word document; or update another database such as MySql or SqlServer. You can design any number of different publishing formats. From the same set of data, produce catalogs or price lists in different styles, or including different data, for different customers, markets, or territories. Include any number of pictures. Set up Rules to determine what to include or omit, or how to style the data, according to criteria you define. Supports all languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, etc.
    Starting Price: £595 one-time purchase
  • 11
    Venngage

    Venngage

    Venngage

    Venngage is the simple design platform for bringing your dull data, dry documents and complex communications to life. Using our engaging visual communication templates, created by our expert in-house designers, Venngage users can easily create powerful visuals; no design experience required. Our easy-to-use drag and drop editor, alongside some helpful articles, videos and courses, will have you creating dazzling designs in minutes. Venngage has a wide range of templates perfect for business and professional communications including infographics, charts, reports, diagrams, mind maps, presentations, and more so that you can impress your boss, your clients, prospects and online audience.
    Starting Price: $10/month
  • 12
    Netrix iCMS
    Netrix iCMS is a single source editorial system for content creation and multichannel publishing. Manage and publish content across websites, print publications, mobile apps and other channels. Every piece of content is archived in a platform-independent, structured database and can be reused efficiently. Integrated print CMS: Adobe InDesign plugin for managing content in print layouts. Connected: plugins for publishing on WordPress sites and other platforms. Flexible: JSON API and a headless, content-first approach.
    Starting Price: 15 EUR/user/month
  • 13
    Xara Cloud
    Create content that speaks to your audience. A complete toolkit that reflects your ideas with visual results. No design skills required. Business owners, managers, and employees alike produce tons of content all day for sales and marketing, attracting new partners, and securing new investors. However, most people use basic tools, don’t have years of design experience, or are just frankly intimidated by design. Xara Cloud automates the application of critical brand elements such as logo, colors and fonts. All content produced by the team is on-brand without hundreds of hours of revision and constant input from designers. Let anyone express themselves without risk of damaging your brand.
    Starting Price: $12.99/ Month
  • 14
    Xpublisher

    Xpublisher

    Fabasoft Xpublisher

    Fabasoft Xpublisher is one of the leading providers of editorial and publishing systems in the German-speaking area and part of Fabasphere—Fabasoft’s intelligent, cloud-native ecosystem. With Xpublisher, book and magazine publishers, media companies, as well as public research institutions, institutes, and associations create, manage, and publish their content: from planning and creating structured, media-neutral content, through managing editorial coordination processes, to automated print production and efficient distribution across all digital channels—all in compliance with the highest European data protection standards. The system is supported by the artificial intelligence of partner company Mindbreeze: The AI generates teasers, translations, and texts of the highest editorial quality and improves content reusability through automated tagging.
  • 15
    Canvasflow

    Canvasflow

    Canvasflow

    Canvasflow is the mobile publishing hub that connects your content to your audience. Choose where your content comes from and to where it is published. Stay in control. Packed with smart tools to make responsive content authoring simple and rapid. Manage production, streamline workflows and engage your audience everywhere. Canvasflow is a mobile publishing hub that enables you to create, manage and distribute beautiful, responsive content straight to your audience. Delivering strong reader experiences is essential to increasing digital revenues. Canvasflow makes your content more readable, accessible and discoverable helping you to grow users and build deeper engagement with your audience. Create beautiful responsive stories rapidly from scratch or use existing content from multiple sources. Use our simple drag and drop editor that requires no design or developer skills. Create editions or continuous article based content to suit your publishing needs.
    Starting Price: $2000
  • 16
    advastamedia®/O

    advastamedia®/O

    Kittelberger media solutions

    Based on our advastamedia®/O product media database, we have developed a powerful system in the sectors of Product Information Management (PIM), Media Asset Management (MAM) and Cross Media Publishing. All data and media relating to product, marketing, PR and sales are managed and processed and accordingly, advastamedia®/O supports numerous print and online publishing processes. PIM and MAM systems are often used separately from each other. Each topic is extremely complex in itself. There are many challenges to mapping object dependencies, handling mass data and the diversity of outputs on the PIM side, and for handling media assets, variants, maintenance workflows and naming conventions on the MAM side (to name but a few). However, there should be no output boundaries between PIM and MAM – and increasing requirements in data quality and flexibility demand short paths and data consistency. The use of our integrated advastamedia® solution saves money, time and resources.
  • 17
    Adobe FrameMaker
    Intelligent content for any screen, format and language. Superfast. Fast. Powerful. Future-ready. Boost performance with an all-new 64-bit FrameMaker. Create rich, immersive content with unmatched image handling capabilities. Experience faster opening and publishing of PDF and HTML5 files. Push the envelope with new capabilities built on top of the latest technologies. Get started with XML/DITA authoring with an easy-to-use workspace, productivity enhancements, and lots more. With an all-new 64-bit architecture, you can significantly boost productivity with more memory for long, complex documents. Open files up to 40% faster. Work with images like never before with support for transparency, high quality import and other striking enhancements. Open up a world of possibilities with the latest technologies, modern libraries, Duden hyphenation and spell-checking support and more.
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