I tried replacing Photoshop, Lightroom, and Acrobat with free vibe-coded alternatives, and they're surprisingly good

Vibe coding is scary, don't get me wrong. As a computer science major, there's probably no one more terrified of what the job market will look like by the time I graduate, especially with how good AI coding tools are getting. However, I also see massive potential in these tools, and I see them opening up opportunities that would've been unimaginable just a few years ago.

For one, what most would describe as the grunt work that comes with coding can now be offloaded to AI, freeing developers to focus on the more creative and challenging parts of building software. Beyond that, these tools are making it possible for individuals to take on projects that would've once required entire teams of developers, months or even years of work, and substantial funding.

Well, that's exactly what one developer has set out to prove by vibe-coding free, open-source alternatives to seven of Adobe's most popular Creative Cloud applications, including Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and Lightroom. The project, called ArtCraft, sounded almost too good to be true, so naturally, I had to put it to the test.

A developer used Claude Opus 5.5 to recreate Adobe's Creative Cloud suite

All it took was a grudge against Adobe and a little Claude

You know how sometimes being fed up with something is all the motivation you need to do something about it? Well, that's pretty much the story behind ArtCraft, a project by software engineer Brandon Thomas, who apparently got so frustrated with Adobe's subscription practices that he decided to build his own alternatives to its most popular applications.

Thomas shared on Reddit that Adobe had charged him cancellation fees on multiple occasions, and he's held a grudge against the company ever since. Most people would just sit with the grudge and wait for the next opportunity to complain about it. Thomas, however, decided to take things a little further. Armed with 15 years of software engineering experience and Claude Opus 5.5, he set out to recreate seven of Adobe's most popular Creative Cloud applications and make them completely free and open source. You can find all the code for these applications on GitHub.

All seven applications are available for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and they're designed to look and feel remarkably similar to their Adobe counterparts. They're all written in Rust, a programming language known for its performance and memory safety. There's PhotoCraft for Photoshop, FilmCraft for Premiere Pro, LightCraft for Lightroom, VectorCraft for Illustrator, PDFCraft for Acrobat, MotionCraft for After Effects, and LayoutCraft for InDesign.

Interestingly, ArtCraft isn't a brand-new project that Thomas put together overnight. The project has actually been around for nearly a year, and his ambitions extend far beyond simply recreating Adobe's software. The seven Creative Cloud alternatives are part of a much larger effort to make professional creative tools more accessible, without forcing users to rely on expensive subscriptions.

PDFCraft is an excellent Acrobat alternative

Adobe Acrobat, we need to talk

Just a few days ago, I wrote an article about how I've spent far too many years mindlessly uploading PDFs to completely random (and admittedly shady) websites just to avoid paying Adobe $15 more dollars off of my paycheck. This is why I've tested a bunch of open-source and self-hostable Acrobat alternatives as of lately, and PDFCraft has become one of the top apps I've tried in a fairly short time.

PDFCraft has both a browser-based version and a desktop application, and both process your documents locally rather than uploading them to a server. The browser version runs entirely within your browser, while the desktop app is available through the ArtCraft Launcher.

I've primarily been using the desktop version, and PDFCraft seems to be a fairly feature-packed PDF editor despite still being in its early stages. The tool's GitHub repository mentions that the tool has over 80+ tools to handle PDF tasks, and it also offers multi-language support.

It has pretty much all the essentials you'd expect, including highlighting and annotating PDFs, filling out forms, merging and splitting documents, rearranging pages, adding signatures, and even redacting sensitive information. It also supports password protection and OCR for scanned documents.

One feature in particular that I've almost always found myself going back to Adobe Acrobat for before is the ability to edit existing text inside a PDF. While plenty of free PDF editors let you add new text boxes, finding one that actually lets you modify the text that's already there without messing up the formatting is surprisingly difficult. So, I was genuinely impressed to find that PDFCraft handles this remarkably well, at least in the desktop version I've been testing.

Within PDFCraft, you can also convert documents between different formats, including exporting PDFs as Word documents, images, and plain text files. While it's convenient to have these options built into the editor, some of the conversion features are still a work in progress, particularly when it comes to preserving complex formatting and layouts.

Of course, all of the features aren't quite as polished as what you'd find in Adobe Acrobat just yet, which is understandable considering PDFCraft is still in its early stages. However, for most of the everyday PDF-related tasks I've thrown at it so far, it's worked surprisingly well. Considering that it's completely free, open source, and doesn't require me to upload potentially sensitive documents to random websites, I can see myself continuing to use it.

PhotoCraft looks and feels a lot like Photoshop

I've seen this interface somewhere before

To preface this, I'm in no way a graphic designer or a professional photo editor. So, I frankly can not pretend to know every little feature that makes Photoshop the industry standard. However, I do use it fairly often for basic image editing for my work, and that's the perspective I'm approaching PhotoCraft from.

First up, PhotoCraft's UI is extremely, extremely similar to Photoshop's, and that's entirely intentional. In fact, the developer mentions on the project's GitHub repository that if you know Photoshop, you already know PhotoCraft. The menus, shortcuts, panels, and tools are all designed to be where you'd expect them to be, so you don't have to spend ages familiarizing yourself with an entirely different interface.

It's also not just the interface that's immediately familiar! According to its GitHub repository, PhotoCraft already packs in 67 editing tools, including everything from the usual crop, brush, and selection tools to more advanced features like layers, masks, smart objects, adjustment layers, and filters. It can even open, edit, and save layered Photoshop PSD files, which is a pretty big deal if you're looking to move away from Adobe without abandoning your existing projects.

However, while PhotoCraft has plenty of the same tools as Photoshop, that doesn't necessarily mean they all work quite as well. One thing I noticed while testing the Remove tool was that instead of seamlessly getting rid of an unwanted object, it left behind a blurry, smudged patch. Photoshop, on the other hand, can use generative AI to reconstruct the background, which generally produces more convincing results, particularly with complex images.

That's one of the biggest differences between the two. PhotoCraft doesn't currently offer equivalents to Photoshop's Generative Fill or Generative Expand, and its more advanced professional editing features are still a work in progress. Still, considering it's completely free, open source, and in its early alpha stage, I was surprised by just how much it already has to offer.

LightCraft gets surprisingly close to Adobe Lightroom

This one's giving Lightroom a run for its money

Similar to both PDFCraft and PhotoCraft, LightCraft also has desktop and browser-based versions, with the former available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Now, while I've used Lightroom plenty, given that I'm not a photographer by any means, I've never really had a reason to explore its more advanced features. Most of my experience with it has been limited to basic photo editing, like adjusting exposure, correcting colors, and applying presets. So, naturally, those were the first things I decided to test in LightCraft.

Thankfully, LightCraft handles all of these basic editing tasks pretty well. You get all the familiar sliders for adjusting exposure, contrast, highlights, shadows, saturation, and white balance, along with tone curves, color grading tools, and support for presets. The best part is that all these edits are nondestructive, so you can experiment as much as you want without permanently altering the original image.

Beyond the basics, LightCraft has a surprisingly extensive feature set. According to its GitHub repository, it supports RAW image editing, selective masking, lens corrections, HDR and panorama merging, and batch editing. It also doubles as a photo management tool, allowing you to organize images into albums, assign ratings and color labels, and apply the same adjustments to multiple photos at once.

One particularly interesting feature is its support for AI-powered masking using Meta's SAM 3 model, which you can download separately. This allows you to select specific objects in an image, even by describing what you want to select in plain English, and make adjustments to those areas without affecting the rest of the photograph.

My colleague Dhruv, who recently tested LightCraft for XDA, did notice a few shortcomings, particularly when it came to RAW image processing. While the app had no trouble handling DNG files from his Sony A7 III, he ran into some compatibility issues with photos from an older Panasonic camera.

He also noticed differences in how LightCraft and Lightroom rendered colors, which meant presets didn't always produce the same results without some additional tweaking. So, while LightCraft handles everyday photo editing pretty well, photographers who rely heavily on RAW files might find that it still has some catching up to do.

Ultimately, I think ArtCraft offers immense potential, even at its fairly early stage right now. The developer has even gone ahead and vibe-coded alternatives to Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, so it's pretty clear that his ambitions extend far beyond Adobe's Creative Cloud suite.