Working in the creative industry but don't want to use Adobe products?
For quite a long time, I've been looking into entirely ditching https://alternativeto.net/software/adobe-creative-suite/ products because of the price (€60/month), the subscription model, the fact that you have to use their Creative Cloud in order to use their software and to sync anything, the way https://alternativeto.net/software/adobe-photoshop/, https://alternativeto.net/software/adobe-illustrator/, and https://alternativeto.net/software/adobe-indesign/ are bloated, the fact that often you can't use the software if you don't have an Internet connection because Adobe must be able to check your license… and so on and so on.
For a long time, their software were amazing and above everything on the market, but now, Adobe software feel like old complicated bloated tools to me. And, so I took my courage with both hands, uninstalled all Adobe products on my computer, canceled my subscription and deleted my https://alternativeto.net/software/behance-network/ and Adobe accounts.
I've since then replaced all Adobe software with the following ones:
Adobe product to replace: Adobe Photoshop
Affinity Photo is a powerful professional photo editing software that offers sophisticated tools to edit and improve your images. Affinity Photo has an intuitive interface and offers powerful tools that allow professionals as well as the public to retouch their images.
Also worth mentioning: GIMP, Krita, Pixelmator & Photopea
Adobe product to replace: Adobe Illustrator
Affinity Designer is an incredibly accurate vector illustrator that feels fast and at home in the hands of creative professionals. It intuitively combines rock solid and crisp vector art with flexible layer management and an impressive range of high quality raster tools for finishing. With accuracy, quality and speed at the heart of every single design task, and the ability to finesse designs without switching apps, this fresh-faced multi-discipline illustrator lets creatives shine.
Also worth mentioning: CorelDRAW Graphics Suite, Inkscape & Corel Vector
Adobe product to replace: Adobe InDesign
Bring your vision to life with Affinity Publisher, the most advanced professional publishing software from the developers of the award-winning Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo apps. This incredibly smooth, intuitive app gives you the power to combine your images, graphics, and text to make beautiful layouts ready for publication. From magazines, books, brochures, posters, reports, and stationery, to other creations, Affinity Publisher has everything you need to create the perfect layout. Like the two previous apps, it comes at a one time fee of $49.99 and all updates are free.
Also worth mentioning: QuarkXPress, Scribus & Swift Publisher
Adobe product to replace: Adobe Premiere Pro
DaVinci Resolve is a very complete color grading software that allows you to play with colorimetry as well as edit, mix, and composite your videos. Thanks to its complete interface, DaVinci Resolve allows you to manage your projects from A to Z without too much difficulty. Multitrack management allows you to work with multiple video and audio sequences simultaneously. Multicam support gives your work a formidable professional look and quality by automatically synchronizing audio and video tracks through sound wave analysis.
Also worth mentioning: Final Cut Pro, Kdenlive, Lightworks & Olive Video Editor
Adobe product to replace: Adobe After Effects
FXhome HitFilm is an all-in-one editor, compositor, and VFX powerhouse featuring a unique mix of video editing, visual effects, and 3D compositing for filmmakers and professional motion artists. It's everything you need in one product.
Also worth mentioning: Blackmagic Design Fusion, Apple Motion, Natron, NUKE & Blender
Adobe product to replace: Adobe XD
Figma is an interface design application that runs in the browser–but it’s actually much more than that. I would go so far as to say it’s probably the best application for team-based collaborative design projects. Figma gives you all the tools you need for the design phase of the project, including vector tools which are capable of fully-fledged illustration, as well as prototyping capabilities, and code generation for hand-off.
Also worth mentioning: Sketch, InVision, Framer, Akira & Alva
Adobe product to replace: Adobe Lightroom
Capture One is a professional RAW converter offering you ultimate image quality with accurate colors and incredible detail from more than 400 high-end cameras — straight out of the box. It offers state-of-the-art tethered capture, powerful digital asset management, extensive adjustment tools, and a flexible workflow.
Also worth mentioning: darktable, Luminar Neo, DxO PhotoLab, RAW Power & RawTherapee
Adobe product to replace: Adobe Audition
Ocenaudio is a multi-platform audio editor that allows you to easily cut pieces of audio files using the spectrogram. Different effects are available such as adding silences, changing the amplitude, managing the equalizer, and more. These effects are applied in real time, which makes it much easier to go back in case of an error. Finally, Ocenaudio supports multi-selection and is not limited in the length or quantity of tracks to work on.
Adobe product to replace: Adobe Dreamweaver
Pinegrow (also know as Pinegrow Web Designer) is desktop app that lets you mockup and design webpages faster with multi-page editing, CSS and LESS styling, and smart components for Bootstrap, Foundation, Angular JS, and WordPress.
Adobe product to replace: Adobe Express
Canva offers a graphic studio for everyone. Indeed, thanks to this online service, you will be able to easily create a whole series of documents from banners to posters, newspapers, and flyers. A true graphic Swiss army knife, Canva has its place in your digital toolbox. Thousands of templates are available to serve as a starting point, then you can choose the format, background and images, not to mention fonts or colors. Once finished, all you have to do is download your creation as an image or PDF file.
Also worth mentioning: Pablo by Buffer, Desygner & DesignBold
Adobe product to replace: Adobe Acrobat Reader
Okular is a universal document viewer developed by KDE. Okular works on multiple platforms, including but not limited to Linux, Windows, macOS, *BSD, etc. Okular combines the excellent functionalities with the versatility of supporting different kind of documents, like PDF, Postscript, DjVu, CHM, XPS, ePub, and others. Of course, the first choice would be to use the document viewer integrated with your OS (like Preview for macOS), but if you don't like it, here are some alternatives that you could like.
Also worth mentioning: SumatraPDF, zathura, Foxit Reader & MuPDF
Adobe product to replace: Adobe Bridge
Photo Mechanic is a photographer's image browser tool. It is the answer for professional digital photographers looking for a fast and easy-to-use image browser for digital camera files. Photo Mechanic's innovative batch captioning, renaming, speedy browsing, and Photoshop connectivity features have made it the choice of thousands of photojournalists and professional photographers worldwide. Optimized for use with professional cameras from Nikon, Canon, Olympus and Pentax, Photo Mechanic has become the standard tool for digital image browsing.
Also worth mentioning: Eagle , Pixave, digiKam, ACDSee Photo Studio & XnView MP
Adobe product to replace: Adobe Stock
If you are looking for images to enhance your web pages, then Pexels is the right tool for you. This online service allows you to share, search and download thousands of royalty-free photos, illustrations and videos for both personal and professional use. Easy to use, simply type your query into the appropriate field and launch the search.
Also worth mentioning: Unsplash, Pixabay & LibreStock
You can also take a look at this list (by me) or this one made by Mao.
Adobe product to replace: Behance
Dribbble is an online community for showcasing user-made artwork. It functions as a self-promotion and networking platform for graphic design, web design, illustration, photography, and other creative areas. It is one of the largest platforms for designers to share their work online — competing directly with Adobe Behance — the latter being the largest.
Also worth mentioning: DeviantArt or your own website
Adobe product to replace: Adobe Fonts
Font Squirrel is the best resource for free, hand-picked, high-quality, commercial-use fonts. Font Squirrel also has a great @font-face font generator. It means that if you own a @font-face license for your fonts, you can use the generator to create web-kits or to tweak your existing kits to improve rendering and file sizes.
Also worth mentioning: Google Fonts, Font Library & dafont.com
Adobe product to replace: Adobe Portfolio
Launched in 2004, Squarespace has become a reference software for companies that want to create an e-commerce website with a modern design. Today, Squarespace also allows you to create high quality One Page sites and blogs.
It feels really good to be free of Adobe, and so far everything's great. I don't have to pay a monthly fee to use some software anymore and I'm really happy with that. Of course, it's not for everyone and lots of companies use Adobe products on a daily basis and don't let you choose of your software. But, if you're a freelancer like me, you might be tempted to make the switch!
Feel free to ask if you have any questions or if you have recommendations for me.