I’ve spent enough time using Adobe alternatives to know which ones hold up. And I have my personal preferences as well, which lean to clean and easy interfaces, and a toolkit that covers just enough ground but doesn’t overcomplicate the editing process. Nobody who isn’t a professional designer, editor, or part of a team really needs an Adobe subscription, let alone the All Apps plan that’s most certainly going to go to waste.
Luckily, there are many capable alternatives, but that’s also the problem; there are so many. This is one of the reasons I justified my subscriptions for so long, because I didn’t really need to make the effort of looking elsewhere or building my own stack – Adobe handled everything for me. While it’s not realistic to include every app I test in my stack permanently, for real day-to-day work, there are two apps that I started defaulting to for graphics work…
How many apps do you need to replace Adobe?
It depends on your subscription
If you’re on a journey of finding free Adobe alternatives, you might be overwhelmed by the thousands of listicles out there. And there will probably be a couple of the same tools that keep popping up, such as GIMP, Kdenlive, Figma, and Inkscape, because they’re the most popular replacements. If you’re not interested in digging any further and just want something that gets the job done, settling for one of the top recommendations and calling it a day will probably serve you well.
But if you’re as enthusiastic about graphics software as I am, you’re probably going to want to try each one. And, from first-hand experience, that will turn into a rabbit hole and you’ll never get any actual editing work done. You end up installing a dozen apps, convinced each one has a specific use case, and slowly start building a setup that’s just as bloated as the Adobe suite you were trying to escape.
That’s why the better question isn’t “what’s the best Adobe alternative?” but “what am I actually replacing?” Your Creative Cloud plan matters here. If you had the Photography plan, then one RAW editor and one image editor would be all you need. If you had a solo subscription to Premiere, only one free video editor is necessary – maybe a second one for motion graphics.
The All Apps plan complicates things: it’s just about being honest with yourself about which apps are actually useful to you, and I recommend categorizing them by domain. For example, if you only did audio, motion graphics, and illustration, but never touched Adobe’s video or image editors, that gives you a clear starting point.
Affinity is all you need
It’s a three-in-one powerhouse
Ever since Affinity made its new app free, which includes the Photo, Designer, and Publisher trio, I’ve been slipping it into every recommendation list I write on free Adobe alternatives. And I genuinely love it – it’s an app I default to outside my work that involves user-testing. There couldn’t be a more perfect time to cancel an Adobe subscription or for newbies to step into the world of design.
Affinity does it all. You’ve got the Pixel workspace which handles all of your raster graphics. It has the same advanced toolkit as the old Affinity Photo, including selections, masks, blend modes, brushes, and effects. The Vector workspace handles all things vector-design, and you can expect to find node, pen, pencil, shape, and text tools, all with tweakable properties. And Layout is for anything that involves multi-page document layouts.
Pixel is my go-to workspace for any image or graphic that needs more than a basic contrast slider. This is where I make selections and create masks. For example, I use images of my own desktop as the featured images for my articles, but the light in this office isn’t photography-friendly and often causes glare on the screen. I use Pixel to make a cutout of the screen, remove the light flare and adjust the hue, then I add it back on the original image so the changes don’t affect the rest of the background.
Although I prefer using Penpot for SVG-based interface designs, Affinity’s Vector workspace comes in super handy for my more creative ideas. It lets me sketch more freely and experiment with shapes and gradients, too. I don’t really need the Layout workspace that often, but it doesn’t get in my way since all its features are hidden inside the workspace until I open it.
It’s nothing groundbreaking, but it’s effective
Before I even make my way to Affinity for selective editing and masking, I run my images through a super basic editor first – Windows Photos. Everyone with Windows has it, and it’s probably not the first Adobe alternative that comes to mind because it’s so simple (and definitely doesn’t come close to Photoshop). But that’s exactly why it’s so useful.
For starters, there’s no lag when starting it up and no sync delays. In fact, opening any image on my desktop takes me straight to Photos by default. I use it to do some quick lighting and color corrections – the contrast, exposure, saturation, and warmth sliders are all I need. I also like the AI erase tool for quickly getting rid of specs of dust or other imperfections in the shot; it’s surprisingly accurate.
Sometimes, this is all I do to fix my shots and I don’t even move them into a heavier editor. It’s a massive time-saver compared to opening and navigating apps like Photoshop or Lightroom, and I significantly underestimated its capabilities before giving it a real shot.
Two tools for the whole editing pipeline
Between Affinity and Photos, there’s no reason to pay for an Adobe graphics subscription anymore, and they’re making it easy for me to never go back. Together, they cover almost everything I do with my still visuals, without all the extra installs, lagging, or complexity. For anyone who loves graphics but hates subscriptions, this could be a solid starting point.
