Artcraft: Free Adobe alternatives built with AI, but they're far from finished

What's going on

If you work professionally with images, video or graphics, it's hard to avoid Adobe. That gets expensive. According to t3n, the Creative Cloud Pro plan with Photoshop, Premiere and the Firefly image generator costs individuals around 78 euros a month. Artcraft wants to offer a free alternative. The apps are open source (anyone can view, modify and share the code) and run on Windows, macOS and Linux.

The project comes from software developer Brandon Thomas. According to a Japanese blog post on note.com, he was previously CEO of Storyteller.ai, the company behind the voice service "FakeYou". t3n says he works with a team of four. The project took off after Thomas claimed in a Hacker News thread that he had rebuilt Photoshop with AI in a single session. What makes it unusual is that, according to the team, an AI wrote most of the code: Anthropic's Claude. t3n names the model specifically as Claude Opus 5.5.

The apps at a glance

The app names borrow heavily from their Adobe counterparts. According to shiftdelete.net, the interfaces also deliberately mirror the originals so switchers feel at home right away. The author of the note.com post tried out each app to see how far along it is (as of October 22, 2026):

Depending on the source, the PDF app is called either PrintCraft or PdfCraft. According to note.com, versions of Figma, Word, Excel and PowerPoint are also in the works. You install everything through the "ArtCraft Launcher" from the official website getartcraft.com, where you can pick which apps you want. Many of them are also available as browser versions. According to trak.in, some apps work without an account and without an internet connection, so you skip the cloud connection Adobe requires.

note.com highlights one more feature: the apps are built so that AI agents can control them. These are AI programs that complete several steps on their own. FilmCraft, for example, can be controlled externally through more than 650 commands.

How the project came together

All the apps are written in Rust. The language is known for speed and safe memory handling, which helps avoid the kinds of bugs that cause crashes and security holes. According to t3n, Thomas insists this isn't just a vibe coding project. Vibe coding means letting the AI do the work without understanding the code yourself. Thomas points to 15 years of software development experience, including large Rust projects.

According to trak.in, the project describes its apps as clean-room reimplementations. That means the features are rebuilt without copying the original code. Futurism (quoted by t3n) reports that Artcraft aims to recreate Adobe's software through reverse engineering, working out from the outside how it works. The goal is an equivalent product with no subscription and no mandatory cloud.

There also seem to be personal reasons. In a Reddit post, Thomas writes that Adobe charged him a cancellation fee several times and that he has "hated" the company ever since. According to Austria's Der Standard, he sees Artcraft as the start of a new era in which anyone can build and customize their own alternatives to commercial software. The apps are released under the permissive MIT or Apache 2.0 licenses.

What the tests show

There's a lot of excitement. One Reddit user wrote: "Tried it out briefly. Absolutely fantastic." Independent tests are much more cautious. According to note.com, the British design magazine Creative Bloq concluded that the apps are "not stable or complete enough to replace existing software". Trak.in reports problems in PhotoCraft with selecting objects and with saving. It also says FilmCraft lacks basic video editing features.

note.com lists more weak spots:

• You can't open Premiere or After Effects projects, so your existing work doesn't carry over.
• 4K video editing is pretty sluggish.
• Plugins (third-party extensions) don't work.
• There's no enterprise-level support.
• Conversions like PDF to Word don't work well yet.

Thomas himself says it will take a few more months to cover 99 percent of the features. shiftdelete.net's coverage reads more like a press release and presents the apps as powerful professional tools that run smoothly even on demanding tasks. Hands-on tests don't back that up.

Legal questions

It's unclear how Adobe will respond. The apps closely resemble the originals in their names, interfaces and features. Trak.in notes that calling something "clean room" doesn't settle every legal question on its own, for example around interface design or trademarks. None of the sources report any response from Adobe.

Our take

More than anything, Artcraft shows how far AI-assisted programming has come. A small team has built a whole suite of apps in a short time. The apps open PSD and AI files and run on three operating systems. A few years ago, that would have taken large development teams.

Copying an interface is the easy part, though. The hard parts are reliable support for lots of file formats, stability, accessibility and years of maintenance. Those are what decide whether professionals will trust software with paid client work. It's also an open question how well a large codebase written mostly by AI can be maintained over the long run.

If you use Adobe for work, don't cancel your subscription just yet. The tests all agree on that. If you only edit images or PDFs now and then, or you're just curious, Artcraft is worth a look. According to trak.in, mature alternatives like DaVinci Resolve or Affinity are the more practical choice for now. The next few months will show whether Artcraft becomes more than an impressive prototype.