Adobe Director (formerly Macromedia Director) is a multimedia application authoring platform created by Macromedia—now part of Adobe Systems. It allows users to build applications built on a movie metaphor, with the user as the "director" of the movie. Originally designed for creating animation sequences, the addition of a scripting language called Lingo made it a popular choice for creating CD-ROMs and standalone kiosks and web content using Adobe Shockwave. Adobe Director supports both 2D and 3D multimedia projects.

The differences between Director and Flash have been the subject of much discussion, especially in the Director development community. Extensibility is one of the main differences between the two, as are some of the sundry codecs that can be imported. Director has tended to be the larger of the two, but that footprint has been part of its weakness. This weakness manifest into the erosion of Director's ubiquity as the leader of authoring tools, especially in the critical window of 1998 - 2000. The download footprint of the Director Shockwave plugin was significantly larger than the Shockwave Flash download footprint. Additionally, Macromedia partnered with distributors such as Dell, Apple, etc. to have the Flash plugin pre-installed on machines for users, so that they would not be prompted to install any additional software. At that point in time (1998–2000), broadband internet access was not the norm for most users, and the fivefold difference in size was significant.