ArtCraft vs Adobe Creative Cloud: An App-by-App Comparison

“ArtCraft adobe” and “craft adobe” have become some of the most-searched phrases around the new suite, usually asked as can ArtCraft replace my Adobe subscription? Here’s the full mapping, with each project’s own estimate of how far along it is.

The mapping

Adobe app	ArtCraft app	File compatibility	Stage (upstream’s words)
Photoshop	PhotoCraft	PSD open/edit/save	Early alpha
Illustrator	VectorCraft	SVG, PDF, PDF-compatible .ai	Alpha, ~65% “ready for real work”
Premiere Pro	FilmCraft	H.264, HEVC, ProRes, DNxHR, MXF; timeline interchange	~56% “ready for real work”
Lightroom	LightCraft	DNG, CR2/CR3, ARW, NEF, RAF	Alpha
Acrobat	PdfCraft	PDF	Alpha, 94% of must-haves
After Effects	EffectCraft	Lottie in/out, ProRes 4444 alpha	Alpha, ~91% of features exist
InDesign	DesignCraft	IDML in/out, PDF/X-4	Pre-alpha

Outside Adobe, the suite also covers Microsoft Office (WordCraft, GridCraft, DeckCraft), Pro Tools (SoundCraft), AutoCAD (CADCraft) and Figma (FigCraft).

Price

Creative Cloud All Apps is a paid monthly or annual subscription. Every ArtCraft app is free and open source (MIT OR Apache-2.0), with no account and no license server. Over a few years, that difference is thousands of dollars per seat.

Platforms

This is ArtCraft’s clearest win. Adobe’s desktop apps run on Windows and macOS. Every Crafting App also ships native Linux (AppImage, deb, rpm, Flatpak, on x86_64 and ARM64), FreeBSD and a WebAssembly build that runs in the browser. Linux creatives in particular have had nothing comparable for Photoshop or Premiere before.

Familiarity

The apps deliberately copy Adobe’s muscle memory. PhotoCraft uses ⌘J and ⇧⌘D, FilmCraft has , and . for insert/overwrite and Q/W ripple trims, EffectCraft twirls down layers with P, S, R, T and U, and VectorCraft has the Pen, Direct Selection, Pathfinder and Appearance panel. If you know the Adobe app, you’ll find your way around in minutes.

Where Adobe still clearly wins

• Generative AI. Firefly-powered Generative Fill, Expand and similar features have no equivalent inside the Crafting Apps. ArtCraft’s separate AI studio covers image and video generation with third-party models.
• Ecosystem. Plug-ins, stock, fonts, cloud libraries and team collaboration.
• Depth and edge cases. Decades of professional features. Every ArtCraft repo publishes a docs/gaps.md listing what’s missing.
• Stability. These are alphas that release every few days. Save often. Most apps have crash recovery, but still.

Where ArtCraft is already better

• Privacy. No telemetry, no cloud sync, nothing uploaded, even in the browser version.
• Openness. Readable native formats. VectorCraft’s .vectorcraft and EffectCraft’s .ecproj are documented JSON that diffs cleanly in Git.
• Automation. Every action is a command reachable from a CLI and an MCP server, so AI agents like Claude can operate the apps directly, which Adobe’s apps don’t offer in the same way.
• No FFmpeg, no C. FilmCraft and EffectCraft decode and encode video with their own Rust codecs, tested bit-exact against reference decoders.

So, can ArtCraft replace Adobe?

• For students, hobbyists and Linux users: for many tasks, yes, today.
• For freelancers: use it alongside Adobe. Open the client’s PSD in PhotoCraft, cut a quick edit in FilmCraft, merge PDFs in PdfCraft.
• For studios with established pipelines: not yet. Watch the roadmaps; the pace is remarkable.

The fastest way to decide is to try it. Every app here opens in your browser in seconds: PhotoCraft, VectorCraft, FilmCraft, LightCraft, PdfCraft, EffectCraft, DesignCraft.