In 2026, there are more Adobe alternatives than ever. We have Canva's free Affinity, which can do most of what you would do in Photoshop and Illustrator in a single platform. There's also now raw photo editing in DaVinci Resolve, which has a reasonable one-off cost for the Studio version.
Now there's potentially a more complete competitor on the horizon: an open-source AI-generated replica of most of the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite. The package was vibe-coded in the programming language Rust using Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 with the aim of providing a free software suite covering everything from image editing to digital art, video, vector illustration, effects and motion design.
They're at a very early stage, and the developer clarifies that they're not yet in a state where they can replace existing software, but I decided to test it out with the help of my cat, Gurí.
ArtCraft takes on Creative Cloud (and beyond)
The ArtCraft package was developed by software engineer Brandon Thomas, who says he was inspired by frustration at Adobe's subscription costs and cancellation fees. Many will feel able to relate.
The suite comprises LightCraft (Lightroom), PhotoCraft (Photoshop), FilmCraft (Premiere), EffectCraft (After Effects), DesignCraft (InDesign), VectorCraft (Illustrator) and PrintCraft (Acrobat). The same developer has since launched AI-coded versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint too (WordCraft, GridCraft, and DeckCraft).
The apps are free and available in early alpha for PC, Mac and Linux systems. As for legality, the develop claims that nothing copyrighted has been copied. Adobe and Microsoft's lawyers will surely be scrutinising that as I write.
Installation is straightforward via the ArtCraft Installer. You don't need to create an account or provide any details. The apps are also incredibly light, weighing up to around 50MB compared to the several gigabytes of each piece of software they're intended to replicate. That's apparently due to the optimisation that comes with clean-room reimplementations written in Rust compared with legacy apps built on decades of accumulated C++ code, dependencies and overlapping frameworks.
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LightCraft
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I tried LightCraft, PhotoCraft and FilmCraft since these are the areas I'm most familiar with. I used the apps on a Windows PC based on an Intel Core i7 and Nvidia RTX 5070 GPU. Content was all shot on a Canon EOS R5.
LightCraft is the Lightroom copy for raw image editing. I tested it using some quick shots of Gurí, who wasn't impressed at being woken up to participate, hence the grumpy face. The app didn't seem to want to import the CR3 files direct from the camera, so I had to bring them onto my computer first, which was a minor irritation.
A bigger issue is that there's no native camera-matched colour profiles or lens profiles, which means starting from a different base, already a step back from where I would be starting in Lightroom. You can make optical corrections for vignette and chromatic aberration manually, but who wants to do that?
That aside, I was surprised at how far advanced the program is. Most of Lightroom's main controls are in approximately the same places. Clarity, Texture and Dehaze are grouped under Effects separate from the other contrast controls, which seems counterintuitive, but Light, tone curve, HSL and colour controls all behave as expected.
What didn't behave as expected was sharpening. Even the standard 40% looked terribly harsh and added fuzzy artefacts to images. Hitting Alt doesn't bring up an overlay like in Lightroom, so masking required some guesswork, and even at 80% the artefacts remained.
Masking in general has issues. When I tried to select the subject (Gurí), I seemed to get a radial mask instead. Lightroom selected the cat immediately. Object selection isn't currently available natively – you need to install Meta's SAM 3 Model manually. The same goes for AI denoising.
PhotoCraft
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I found PhotoCraft more convincing in that I had no compatibility issues. It can open and save PSD files as well as TIFF, JPG, PNG and other common formats, although not HEIC, apparently.
Again, anyone who's used Adobe's software will immediately feel at home. Most of the main tools are in the same place, and you add the same kinds of adjustment layers, masks, blend modes and filters – although you can also do most of this in Canva's Affinity, which is also free, or in open-source Krita.
Again, automatic selection and masking seemed less precise than in Photoshop. The same for content-aware fill/Delete and fill and the spot heal tool. Everything felt like it was only just usable. Filters wouldn't preview for me, which meant having to use guesswork to decide the amount of blur, grain or any other effect to apply.
I don't use Photoshop's generative AI features like Generative Fill or text-to-image generation, but if you do, you'll find those absent in PhotoCraft too.
FilmCraft
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I intended to test FilmCraft the way I would normally edit a video, but things got off to a bad start. I shot some footage in 4K at 25 and 100 fps in Clog3, but it turns out that FilmCraft doesn't support 10-bit 4:2:2 playback, so I had to convert the clips using Handbrake before I could start editing. Then I was hit with the issue that there's no native ability to create optimised media, so trying to edit in 4K was painfully slow. I went back to Handbrake again to downsize.
Once I had the footage converted, the editing interface did generally work for basic trimming, cutting and adding transitions. It looks like Premier and has most of the basic tools, including the workspaces for colour and effects. As a DaVinci Resolve user, some of my gripes were as much with the Premiere way of doing things. I could import LUTs and make basic colour adjustments, but, like in LightCraft some artefacts seemed to crop up in shadows.
For Premiere uses, be aware that the software can't open or save .prproj files.
Conclusion
ArtCraft is a work in progress, and the developers recognise that. It's impressive how much it can do considering that it was made and tested using AI and weighs next to nothing, but it's not currently stable or complete enough to be able to replace existing software. Shifting work to a new platform takes time and is only worth doing if you know a new platform is going to be reliable for the long term.
That doesn't mean that Adobe doesn't need to be worried. Any program is going to have bugs in early alpha, and ArtCraft is making a big commitment to ironing them out. I'm not entirely convinced there's a need for it when there are very good free or well-priced Adobe alternatives out there in the form of DaVinci Resolve, Krita, Canva's Affinity and Calvary and Maxon's Autograph without having to resort an ethically debatable use of AI, but greater UI similarities could likely win over many users if ArtCraft really does reach Creative Cloud parity.
Some will enjoy the irony that after embracing AI so heavily, Adobe now faces potentially losing its own job as a result of the same technology. On the other hand, ArtCraft also justifies the company's AI obsession. Adobe saw this kind of thing coming and turned to AI to try to keep ahead as traditional tools become easier to copy.
Sometimes people complain when an Adobe release comes around without a big headline new feature, but ArtCraft makes you realise that the most important things are the smaller features you take for granted, as well as basic compatibility, accuracy and reliability.
Joe is a regular freelance journalist and editor at Creative Bloq. He writes news, features and buying guides and keeps track of the best equipment and software for creatives, from video editing programs to monitors and accessories. A veteran news writer and photographer, he now works as a project manager at the London and Buenos Aires-based design, production and branding agency Hermana Creatives. There he manages a team of designers, photographers and video editors who specialise in producing visual content and design assets for the hospitality sector. He also dances Argentine tango.