13 Smarter Alternatives to Expensive Adobe Apps
Moving to the full suite of Adobe Creative Cloud apps is an expensive proposition: a $ 53 / month kickback (at the time of this writing) might be overkill for your needs if you don’t produce a lot of multimedia in a variety of formats.
You can of course go piece by piece , but you will still pay a little more than your regular monthly music subscription to edit photos / videos / audio / printed pages, etc. In addition, there are cancellation fees that can come as an unexpected shock if you are trying to get out of your annual plan ahead of schedule.
Not to hate Adobe, but if you’re looking for alternatives that cost less, cost nothing, or just aren’t as cumbersome to work with as some of Adobe’s apps, I’ll share with you. For example, while nothing beats Photoshop, there are many cheap tools you can use to do most of what the application allows you to do. Dare I say these “smaller” apps might even be better as you don’t really need a tank of graphics editing apps if you just do a little cropping and color correction from time to time.
I’ll highlight a few alternative Adobe apps in this guide, but if you’re impatient, here’s a complete list:
- Affinity Photo [Adobe Photoshop]
- Photopea / SumoPaint [Adobe Photoshop]
- GIMP / Glimpse Image Editor [Adobe Photoshop]
- Crete [Adobe Illustrator / Photoshop]
- Inkscape [Adobe Illustrator]
- Scribus [Adobe InDesign]
- RawTherapee / Darktable [Adobe Lightroom]
- PDF-XChange Editor [Adobe Acrobat]
- DaVinci Resolve [Adobe Premiere]
- Audacity [Adobe Audition]