A huge list of free software alternatives to Adobe products.
Only open source alternatives are included. Acrobat Pro, Dreamweaver, Dimension, Capture, Premiere Rush, Photoshop Camera, Aero, Prelude and Lightroom Web are excluded from the list considering there are no worthwhile alternative I found.
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| GIMP | GIMP is a free program for such photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. Essentially it’s the closest thing to Photoshop you can get for free. |
| Krita | Krita is a professional Free and open source (FOSS) painting program. It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone withith concept art, texture and matte painters, illustrations and comics. |
| PhotoGIMP | A Patch for GIMP 2.10+ for Photoshop Users |
| MyPaint | It’s open source software designed mainly to illustrate and draw with a digitizer tablet. It has a simple interface, where almost all the basic drawing functions are assigned to keyboard shortcuts, which improves workflow speed. In addition, you can hide the entire graphical interface and focus all attention on the drawing without being distracted by unnecessary or complex buttons or palettes. It’s a good option if you are interested in digital illustration without too many overwhelming features.MyPaint is a fast, distraction-free, and easy painting tool for digital artists. It supports graphics tablets made by Wacom, and many similar devices. |
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Inkscape | Unlike Illustrator, Inkscape is completely free and open source, and it uses Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) as its native format. This lightweight app is usually recommended if you don’t have a powerful computer, as it also has many of the useful features from illustrator, including layers, grouping objects, drawing, shape, calligraphy, pencil tools, path simplification with variable threshold, bitmaps, and boolean operations. Plus, you can open or import a wide range of file formats including SVG, PDF, EPS, CDR, or even AI (Adobe Illustrator). |
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Scribus | Scribus is a desktop publishing (DTP) application. Scribus is designed for flexible layout and typesetting, and the ability to prepare files for professional quality image setting equipment. It can also create animated and interactive PDF presentations and forms. |
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Kdenlive | Kdenlive is a non linear video editor. It is based on the MLT framework and accepts many audio and video formats, allows you to add effects, transitions and render into the format of your choice. |
| Shotcut | Shotcut is a free, open source, cross-platform, non-linear video editor. |
| Olive | Olive is a free non-linear video editor for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It offers advanced features such as color management and node based compositing. |
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Natron | Natron is an open source, cross platform nodal compositing application. It is built around industry standard open source tech such as OpenFX, OpenEXR, OpenColorIO and OpenImageIO. |
| Blender | Blender is the free and open-source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing, video editing, and motion tracking. |
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Darktable | darktable is a virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers: it manages your digital negatives in a database and lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable. it also enables you to develop raw images and enhance them. |
| RawTherapee | RawTherapee is a free RAW converter and digital photo processing software. All changes can be applied and batch processed at a convenient time. |
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Penpot | Penpot is the first Open Source design and prototyping platform meant for cross-domain teams. Non dependent on operating systems, Penpot is web based and works with open web standards (SVG). For all and empowered by the community. |
| Pencil | Pencil is a standalone app that lets you create diagrams or UI mockups. It doesn’t have collaboration/multi-user features. |
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Wick Editor | The Wick Editor is a free and open-source tool for creating games, animations, and everything in-between. It’s designed to be the most accessible tool for creating multimedia projects on the web. Your creations can run on any device with a web browser - that means mobile too. |
| OpenToonz | OpenToonz is an animation program that is a free software version of Toonz, the animation software used by Studio Ghibli, amongst others. |
| Godot | The Godot Engine is a free, all-in-one, cross-platform game engine that makes it easy for you to create 2D and 3D games. |
| TupiTube | TupiTube App is a 2D animation tool. |
| enve | Open-source 2D animation app for desktop computers. |
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Darktable | darktable is a virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers: it manages your digital negatives in a database and lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable. it also enables you to develop raw images and enhance them. |
| RawTherapee | RawTherapee is a free RAW converter and digital photo processing software. All changes can be applied and batch processed at a convenient time. |
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Audacity | Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. You can use Audacity to record live audio, convert tapes and records, edit sound files, change the speed or pitch of a recording and much more. |
| Ardour | Ardour is a hard disk recorder and digital audio workstation application. Record, edit, and mix on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. |
| Tenacity | an easy-to-use, cross-platform multi-track audio editor/recorder. |
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Manuscript | Manuskript is an open-source tool for writers, with outliner, character management, plot development, distraction-free editor, etc. |
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Synfig Studio | Synfig is a free and open-source, industrial-strength, vector-based 2D animation app designed for producing feature-film animations. It eliminates the need to create animations frame by frame. It is available for Windows, Linux, and macOS. |
| enve | Enve is a free and open-source 2D animation app. It can create both vector and raster animations and even use sound and video files. It has been created with flexibility and expandability in mind. |
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Krita | Krita is a professional Free and open source (FOSS) painting program. It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone withith concept art, texture and matte painters, illustrations and comics. |
| MyPaint | MyPaint is a fast, distraction-free, and easy painting tool for digital artists. It supports graphics tablets made by Wacom, and many similar devices. |
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| DigiKam | digiKam is an advanced digital photo management application which makes importing and organizing digital photos a “snap”. The photos are organized in albums which can be sorted chronologically, by folder layout or by custom collections. |
| quigv | Qt5 image viewer with optional video support. Contribute to easymodo/qimgv development by creating an account on GitHub. |
| JPEGView | Fork of JPEGView by David Kleiner - fast and highly configurable viewer/editor for JPEG, BMP, PNG, WEBP, TGA, GIF and TIFF images with a minimal GUI. Basic on-the-fly image processing is provided - allowing adjusting typical parameters as sharpness, color balance, rotation, perspective, contrast and local under-/overexposure. |
| Shotwell | Shotwell is a personal photo manager. |
| Allusion | Allusion is a tool to help you organize your Visual Library. |
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| GIMP | GIMP is a free program for such photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. Essentially it’s the closest thing to Photoshop you can get for free. |
| Pixelitor | Pixelitor is a cross-platform raster graphics editor written in Java. It supports image filters, drawing, layers, multiple undo, etc. Currently its main strength lies in the more than 70 image filters and color adjustments, some of which are unique. |
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Handbrake | HandBrake is an open-source, multithreaded video transcoder – it compresses and converts digital media from one format to another. HandBrake can rip encrypted DVDs with libdvdcss (libdvdcss is installed with VLC media player on macOS, or AnyDVD/DVD 43 on Windows). |
| FFmpeg | FFmpeg is the leading multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much anything that humans and machines have created. It supports the most obscure ancient formats up to the cutting edge. |
| Shutter Encoder | Shutter Encoder is a GUI for video transcoding, designed specifically for video post-production work. It makes use of FFmpeg to handle its encoding, allowing support for almost every codec you’ve ever heard of, and many more you haven’t. |
| Avidemeux | Avidemux is a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks. |
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| GImageReader | gImageReader is a simple Gtk/Qt front-end to the Tesseract OCR Engine. |
| Tesseract | Tesseract.js is a javascript library that gets words in almost any language out of images. |
| OpenScan | A privacy-friendly Document Scanner app. |
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| JsignPdf | JSignPdf is a Java application which adds digital signatures to PDF documents. It can be used as a standalone application or as an Add-On in OpenOffice.org. The application uses the jsignpdf-itxt library for PDF manipulations (based on iText library in version 2.1.7 with LGPL/MPL license). JSignPdf is open-source software and can be freely used in both private and business sectors. |
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Okular | Okular allows you to read PDF documents, comics and EPub books, browse images, visualize Markdown documents, and much more. |
| SumatraPDF | Sumatra PDF is a free PDF, eBook (ePub, Mobi), XPS, DjVu, CHM, Comic Book (CBZ and CBR) viewer for Windows. |
| Evince | Evince (or GNOME Document Viewer) is a document viewer for multiple document formats: PDF, Postscript, djvu, tiff, dvi, XPS, SyncTex support with gedit, comics books (cbr,cbz,cb7 and cbt) and others. See Supported Document Formats for details. |
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Ripledd | Media blogging social network, an entire word of channels and topics. |
| Creary | Blockchain-based social network of creative portfolios that rewards creators and curators of digital art |
- switching.software has a pretty good list of alternatives to Adobe.
- AlternativeTo, while non-free (free as in freedom), it is the best source to find a specific product alternative.
- degoogle is a similar list to this one but focusing on Google rather than Adobe.
- Cover Your Tracks is a research project designed to better uncover the tools and techniques of online trackers and test the efficacy of privacy add-ons.
- Free Sofware Directory is a catalog of free software.
Credit to degoogle for inspiration. Credit to AlternativeTo for information.