open source Adobe alternatives
Adobe Inc. is the dominant software provider for design and creative software. Like Microsoft, they switched their Creative Cloud suite to a subscription-based model where you don’t even own the software that you’re paying for and where they charge non-US customers up to twice as much for their software. I don’t use a lot of creative software—my creative pursuits either use Markdown for text-based projects or Audacity for audio recording and editing[1]—but I’m aware of some Adobe Creative Cloud alternatives that might be useful to you if you’re looking to break free of Adobe’s monopoly on digital creativity.
Adobe Photoshop
The best open source software for raster graphics editing is the unfortunately-named GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program. GIMP is a fully-featured stand-in for Adobe Photoshop for image editing, retouching, and image manipulation. As of writing, GIMP is closing in on a 3.0 release and I’ve heard it’s a much better user experience than the current stable version, 2.10.28. The current stable version of GIMP is available here https://www.gimp.org/downloads/ and the 3.0-RC development versions are here https://www.gimp.org/downloads/devel/. GIMP is released under the GPL-3.0-or-later license and is developed by the GIMP Development Team.
Adobe Premiere Pro
Kdenlive (KDE Non-Linear Video Editor) is a free and open source video editor that, just like Adobe Premiere Pro, allows you to edit video and audio, add effects, transitions, and render into various video formats. Kdenlive is available under the GPL-2.0 license and is developed by KDE, the international free software community.
Shotcut is another free and open source video editor like Adobe Premiere Pro. It’s based on the same MLT framework as Kdenlive but my impression is that it boasts of more frame-by-frame accuracy in editing. Shotcut is released under the GPL-3.0 license and developed by Meltytech, LLC.
Adobe Illustrator
Inkscape is a straightforward free and open source vector graphics editor to replace Adobe Illustrator. It is suitable for illustrators, designers, or web designers looking to creative vector imagery. Inkscape is released under the GPL-2.0 license and is developed by the Inkscape development team with support from The Inkscape Fund.
Adobe InDesign
Since I work on a scholarly publishing project, I come across Adobe InDesign more than the other software in this post. I see lots of small open access presses paying extortionate subscriptions for Adobe InDesign because that’s how their workflow has always worked.
Scribus is a free and open source desktop publishing application that can handle layout, typesetting, and outputting of files for publication with versions available for macOS, Microsoft Windows, and various flavours of Linux and BSD. They pleasingly emphasise that the software is:
Free with an uppercase F. Free is more than just gratis (which is just a side-effect). It means that you are in control of your data and, if you wish, the code of your desktop publishing tool. That’s what smart individuals and companies prefer.
Scribus does not use a proprietary binary file format; it saves files in XML meaning that it’s a lot more difficult to lose damaged files and a lot easier to share files between various applications. Scribus is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and is developed by the Scribus Team.
Adobe Lightroom
darktable is a free and open source photography workflow application and raw developer. Like Adobe Lightroom, it’s designed for non-destructive image editing operations on raw image files. darktable is released under the GPL-3.0 license and developed by the darktable team.
RawTherapee is another free and open source raw image processing programme. It’s cross-platform and, to my eyes, looks slightly easier to install and run than darktable. RawTherapee is released under the GPL-3.0 license and developed by the RawTherapee team.
Adobe Acrobat
Now I could argue that we shouldn’t be using PDFs at all and so we don’t need dedicated PDF viewer software like Adobe Acrobat Reader: the PDF file format is owned by Adobe which licenses the format for royalty-free use. Since a corporation holds the patent on it, it is therefore only nominally an open format and we should all really switch to alternatives for publishing static documents. However I recognise that that’s a losing argument. Everyone uses PDFs whether I like it or not[2].
So what I’ll argue instead is that you don’t need dedicated PDF viewer software. It’s 2024 and everything can view PDFs: ONLYOFFICE and LibreOffice (specifically LibreOffice Draw) can both edit PDFs. Mozilla Firefox also has Firefox PDF Editor built-in these days.
Adobe Audition
As I said at the top, audio editing is something I actually know about and Audacity is a far more popular audio editor than Adobe Audition. Audacity is free and open source audio editing and recording software and is one of the most popular open source tool in the world [3]. It’s easy to install, easy to use, and allows any white men with opinions about the Alien or Jurassic Park franchises to record and edit a podcast. Audacity is released under a GPL-3.0 license and is developed by the Muse Group.