There have been many posts about Adobe’s aggressive and unethical updates to their terms of service. For many companies, like those in healthcare, use of Adobe products is now off limits. I don’t think an update to their terms can rebuild the lost trust. At the same time, most professionals have only ever used Adobe products like Photoshop and they may resist moving away. What reasonable alternatives even exist for each of Adobe’s major products? Are there any true equivalents?
Ask HN: What alternatives to Adobe products are you switching to?
1–10 of 74 posts
Re: Ask HN: What alternatives to Adobe products are you switching to?
#2[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What alternatives to Adobe products are you switching to?
#3https://affinity.serif.com is quite good. It's not the same, but I switched (95% personal use) when Adobe forced everyone onto subscriptions and it's been more than sufficient for that.
Re: Ask HN: What alternatives to Adobe products are you switching to?
#4I didn't switch for ethical reasons, but Photopea is such brilliant editor that for most of my Photoshop needs I use that now. Photoshop is way more powerful and Photopea probably wouldn't be suitable for power users, but as a techy that occasionally needs to do a bit of cropping or a some basic photo editing it's a great tool and does everything I used to use Photoshop for.
Re: Ask HN: What alternatives to Adobe products are you switching to?
#5My free stack, 2024 edition:
Fedora Linux Sway spin,
Inkscape,
GNU Image Manipulation Program,
KdenLive,
Natron,
Blender,
FreeCAD,
KiCAD,
OpenSCAD,
Orca slicer,
IceCat,
Zulip,
LibreOffice,
and a flock of CLI tools
Re: Ask HN: What alternatives to Adobe products are you switching to?
#6I canceled my Adobe Premiere Pro subscription a while back, not because of AI terms but because other dark patterns in how they bill gave me a bad taste. I switched to DaVinci Resolve, which has a pretty capable free version. (I haven't used it extensively enough to comment on whether I will miss Premiere in the long run)
Re: Ask HN: What alternatives to Adobe products are you switching to?
#7I canceled my Adobe Premiere Pro subscription a while back, not because of AI terms but because other dark patterns in how they bill gave me a bad taste. I switched to DaVinci Resolve, which has a pretty capable free version. (I haven't used it extensively enough to comment on whether I will miss Premiere in the long run)
Davinci Resolve is super powerful, even in its free version. Every project I have learned something new that it can do. Highly recommend.
Re: Ask HN: What alternatives to Adobe products are you switching to?
#8I switched a long time ago. I use Affinity Photo and Corel PaintShop Pro. Only features I feel I'm missing out on are the generative ai features in latest Photoshop versions.
Re: Ask HN: What alternatives to Adobe products are you switching to?
#9Adobe only supports Windows/Mac and they want a subscription fee license, so they can shove their software.
Illustrator (used since 1990s) -> Inkscape, Krita
Photoshop (used since v3.0) -> Gimp, imagemagick, rembg
If I were doing loads of design work I would still prefer Adobe. However, I can use the above with a Wacom tablet on Linux and feel very productive. Linux largely allows scripting so I open Gimp a lot less then I used to use Photoshop, eg. due to imagemagick convert/mogrify, rembg, etc. Haven't used PS in a decade maybe. Haven't used Illustrator in a year or more. Hope that helps.
Re: Ask HN: What alternatives to Adobe products are you switching to?
#10For personal use, cracked Adobe products.
I myself have switched from Illustrator to Affinity Designer several years ago, but Photoshop is somehow irreplaceable for me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯