Artcraft’s seven Adobe alternatives launch in early alpha
Developer Brandon Thomas says AI helped build the open-source suite and predicts near feature parity within months, though the apps remain unfinished.
Artcraft has introduced seven early-alpha apps intended to replicate Adobe’s Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat Pro. The suite marks a shift for the project, which began last year as a tool for editing AI-generated images and videos.
Developer Brandon Thomas said Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 helped build the apps in Rust, with WebAssembly versions for browsers. They are available under MIT/Apache licences, and are free to use.
The apps have reported shortcomings, and their current capabilities have not been independently established. Thomas initially forecast full feature parity within a month, then said reaching 99 per cent parity would take months rather than years.
Thomas says development will be funded through paid, token-based access to Artcraft’s existing AI model and IDE. That funding plan and the timeline for improving the software remain his projections.
Software reverse engineering has generally been found legally acceptable, Ars Technica reported. It also noted possible legal exposure if the apps’ appearance and interface too closely resemble Adobe’s; the report did not say Adobe had taken legal action.
