Artcraft Releases Seven Open-Source Adobe Alternatives, Still in Early Alpha

Adobe users have seven new free, open-source alternatives to explore—but not a finished replacement for their creative tools. Artcraft debuted the suite over the weekend, recreating familiar Adobe interfaces and tools. As Ars Technica reports, developer Brandon Thomas describes the apps as very early alpha and has already softened his timetable for matching Adobe’s features.

Seven familiar targets

The suite is modeled on Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat Pro. That puts image editing, illustration, video work and document tools within the same release. The apps are free and distributed under MIT/Apache licenses; their open-source status is separate from whether they can yet match Adobe’s functionality.

Thomas said he used Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 to build what he calls clean-room replacements in Rust, a programming language. WebAssembly versions also make the apps available in a browser. Clean-room development aims to reproduce software’s behavior without directly copying its underlying code; Thomas’s description is his account of the development method.

The release also changes Artcraft’s direction. It began last year as an AI tool for artists, offering precise editing after image and video generation. Thomas said Adobe cancellation fees helped motivate the alternatives. He describes himself as having roughly a decade of large-scale Rust experience and says he has coded exclusively with AI tools since February.

A deadline already softened

On Reddit earlier this week, Thomas promised 100% feature parity within a month—meaning the same functionality as the Adobe products. He planned to use community reports to fix bugs and add features. Commenters on Hacker News and elsewhere identified numerous shortcomings in the current apps. Days later, Thomas offered a less aggressive forecast on Hacker News:

99% parity will take a while, but I’m sure it’ll be measured in months and not years.

Brandon Thomas, on Hacker News, as quoted by Ars Technica

Funding and the cost of imitation

Thomas says paid AI access will support the free software. Revenue would come from selling token-based access to Artcraft’s existing visual AI model and development environment. That model is offered inside the apps as an image-generation option alongside third-party models. The proposed funding source is therefore an existing paid service, not a charge for the open-source apps themselves.

He also said a team already building software for filmmakers would support the project, describing that work as fully funded. That is Thomas’s assurance about ongoing support, rather than evidence that the promised feature set has been delivered.

The close visual resemblance carries a separate risk. Ars Technica notes that reverse engineering has generally been found legally acceptable, but copying a product’s trade dress—its recognizable appearance and interface—could still create legal trouble. The distinction is between reproducing what software does and reproducing how it looks. For Artcraft, clean-room code alone does not resolve that potential issue.