Brandon Thomas has turned his open-source project, ArtCraft, into a seven-app creative suite. The target is obvious: Adobe-style alternatives to Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro.
Thomas says the desktop apps are being built in Rust as “clean-room replacements,” with tools and workflows that should feel familiar to Adobe users. The code is under MIT and Apache licenses, and browser-based WebAssembly versions are also in the works. The pitch goes wider than tools like GIMP, Inkscape, or even DaVinci Resolve, because ArtCraft isn’t just chasing one category. It’s trying to recreate the broader Adobe Creative Cloud setup across image editing, illustration, video, layout, motion graphics, and PDFs, while also appealing to people who are tired of Adobe subscriptions and cancellation fees.
That said, the software is still deep in early alpha. Early testers say it’s nowhere near a practical replacement yet, and Thomas has already backed away from an initial claim that feature parity could happen within a month, changing that to “months, not years.” Adobe reported $21.5 billion in fiscal 2025 revenue and still dominates creative software, so matching its depth, polish, and compatibility is going to be hard. Funding questions are still hanging out there. Legal ones too.
If you want an open-source way out of Adobe Creative Cloud, ArtCraft is worth watching. It’s not worth picking up as your main replacement yet. The code is free now, and Thomas plans to make money through his token-based visual model and IDE, not through the apps themselves.
Author: Jesús Bosque
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