Adobe Flash, or simply Flash, refers to both the Adobe Flash Professional multimedia authoring program, and to the Adobe Flash Player. Adobe Flash Professional is used to create content for the Adobe Engagement Platform (such as web applications, games, movies and others). The Flash Player is a client application available in most common web browsers. It features support for vector and raster graphics, a scripting language called ActionScript and bi-directional streaming of video and audio. There are also versions of the Flash Player for mobile phones and other devices.

Flash is commonly used to create various web-page components, advertisements, animation, to integrate video into web pages, and more recently, to develop rich Internet applications.

The Flash files have a .swf file extension and may be an object of a web page, strictly "played" in a standalone Flash Player, or incorporated into a Projector, a self-executing Flash movie with the .exe extension in Windows. Flash Video files have a .FLV file extension and are utilized from within .swf files.