Studio NotesCreative Business
ArtCraft Cloned 7 Adobe Apps. Here’s My Take.
We said AI copying our work was wrong. So where do we draw the line?
The short version
Free Adobe clones built with AI have creatives cheering. I'm sitting this one out, and here's why.
In this post
Last week a developer dropped seven free apps that copy Photoshop, Premiere and five more Adobe tools. He says AI wrote them. My feed lit up with ArtCraft and Adobe takes, and the loudest cheers came from creators who’ve spent the last couple of years saying AI is stealing from artists.
That part stuck with me.
I’ve been doing design, branding, photo and video for 13 years. I run Arctic Lynx here in Dallas, and Adobe has been my home base for a long time. So I didn’t jump in. I read the threads, watched the reactions, and sat with it for a few days. Quick note before we start: I haven’t downloaded ArtCraft, and I don’t plan to. This is a take on what it means for working creatives, not a hands-on review. (Facts below are current as of October 13, 2026. This story moves fast.)
What Is ArtCraft?
ArtCraft is a free, open-source suite of seven apps that recreate Adobe’s Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat. Developer Brandon Thomas says he built them in Rust using AI, specifically Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5. They run on Mac, Windows and Linux, and they’re still in early alpha.
The seven apps
Every app swaps the Adobe name for a “Craft” name:
- PhotoCraft for Photoshop
- VectorCraft for Illustrator
- FilmCraft for Premiere Pro
- LightCraft for Lightroom
- EffectCraft for After Effects
- DesignCraft for InDesign
- PdfCraft for Acrobat
The look is close on purpose. Menus, tools and shortcuts are built to feel like what you already know.
Who built it, and how
Thomas used to be CEO of Storyteller.ai and an engineer at Square, according to PetaPixel. He calls ArtCraft a “clean-room reimplementation.” In plain words, that means building from public specs and from watching how the apps behave, without touching Adobe’s actual code.
The apps are free under the MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses. At launch he said they’d hit 100% feature parity with Adobe within a month. Later, on Hacker News, he softened that to 99% parity in months, not years.
And the reason he did it? Personal. He told Reddit that Adobe “charged me the ‘cancellation fee’ on multiple occasions.” He’s been mad ever since.
Why People Are Cheering
I get the excitement. I really do.
Subscription fatigue is real
A lot of creatives feel locked in. You pay every month, and if you try to leave early, there’s a fee waiting for you. Thomas built a whole suite out of that frustration. When someone finally pushes back that hard, it feels like a win for the little guy.
Free is a strong pitch
Free hits different when you’re a student or just starting out. There’s also Linux. Adobe has never made its apps for it, and ArtCraft runs there out of the box. For that crowd, this looks like a door that’s been closed for a long time finally cracking open.
The Comments Got Me
Here’s where I slow down.
Same move, different target
I’m not talking about AI features inside an app. That’s its own conversation. My issue is how AI was used to make these apps in the first place.
For years, creatives have said it’s wrong for AI to take someone’s work and spit out a copy. I agree with that. But look at what happened here. Adobe’s interfaces, tools and workflows are decades of design work by real designers and engineers. AI got pointed at all of it and told to make a copy, in weeks.
Different victim. Same move.
The best defense I’ve heard goes like this: image generators were trained on artists’ portfolios and now compete with those artists, while code that rebuilds a tool doesn’t take anyone’s portfolio. Fair point. But the whole goal of ArtCraft is to copy someone else’s design work as closely as possible. That’s the part I can’t get past.
So where do we draw the line as creatives? If we only care when it’s our work being copied, and cheer when it’s a company we don’t like, that’s a little two-sided.
Follow the money
One more thing people skip. The apps are free, but ArtCraft plans to pay for development by selling tokens for its own AI image and video models. Those models show up inside the apps as an option. So “free Adobe” is also a path into generative AI. Worth knowing before you cheer.
It’s Still an Alpha
Even if none of the above bugged me, I couldn’t hand this to a client yet.
Parity takes years
Thomas himself calls it super early alpha. PhotoCraft’s own README says it isn’t ready to replace Photoshop for daily professional work, per this independent ArtCraft guide. Early users have reported missing effects, slow brushes on big canvases and shortcuts that don’t work yet.
Copying how a tool looks is one thing. Matching 30-plus years of plugins, color management and edge cases is something else.
The legal question is open
Adobe holds thousands of patents, and some people have raised the look-and-feel question too. Nobody has tested any of it in court yet, and Adobe hadn’t commented when PetaPixel asked. I’m not a lawyer, so I’ll leave it there. Just know it’s unsettled.
Why I’m Staying With Adobe
For me, this was never really about price.
The math works for me
I’m deep in the Adobe ecosystem, and it just works. The subscription has never been an issue because I have projects coming in every month that cover it. The tool pays for itself.
Clients ask for .psd and .eps
Not every client, but a handful ask me for .psd and .eps files. Their teams need to open my work and keep building on it. If I can’t hand that over clean, I lose the job.
On paper, PhotoCraft can open and save PSD files. But “on paper” in an alpha isn’t what I want on a delivery day. Picture it. A client’s in-house team opens your file on Monday morning and a type layer got flattened. Nobody asks what app you used. They just ask why the file’s broken.
Switching costs time
Relearning tools, rebuilding presets, finding new plugins. That’s hours I’d rather spend on client work. A free app that costs me a week of setup and one lost client isn’t free.
So, Should You Switch?
If you get paid for your work, my answer is not right now.
For working pros
If your income runs through Adobe files, keep your setup. If you’re curious about ArtCraft, that’s your call. Just keep it far away from client deadlines.
Where I land
Adobe isn’t perfect. I’m not here to defend their subscription model. But I am going to keep one rule for myself: wherever you draw your line on AI, keep it in the same spot no matter who’s on the other side of it.
Me? I’m staying put. The work comes first, and right now the work runs through Adobe.
Cesar is a creative director and brand designer with 13 years in the field and the founder of Arctic Lynx, a brand identity and creative studio in Dallas, TX.