Open Source

Free Photoshop and Excel: A.I.-Built Clones Take On Adobe and Microsoft

co-produced by AI12. October 2026, 19:14

Photo editing software open on a laptop screen — Photo editing software on a laptop. © Zulfugar Karimov / Unsplash

One developer and one A.I. model: That is apparently all it takes now to challenge Adobe and Microsoft with free software. The developer Brandon Thomas has released open-source replicas of Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and more through his project ArtCraft, built with the help of Anthropic’s A.I. model Claude Opus 5.5. Shortly afterward, the first clones of Word, Excel and PowerPoint followed.

Seven Adobe Apps in Rust

Mr. Thomas says he spent three years as chief executive of the A.I. start-up Storyteller.ai and has been programming for 15 years. His motivation is frustration with Adobe’s subscription model, especially the fee charged for canceling an annual plan early. The ArtCraft suite includes seven programs, all written from scratch in the programming language Rust:

PhotoCraft: image editing as a Photoshop replacement, with layers, masks, brushes and support for PSD files
VectorCraft: vector graphics modeled on Illustrator
FilmCraft: video editing as an alternative to Premiere
LightCraft: photo management and RAW processing like Lightroom
Other apps: EffectCraft (After Effects), DesignCraft (InDesign) and a PDF program to replace Acrobat

The programs run on Windows, macOS and Linux, and PhotoCraft even runs directly in the browser. The code is available under the free MIT and Apache 2.0 licenses on GitHub, where PhotoCraft alone has collected almost 52,000 stars. Mr. Thomas calls it a “clean-room” reimplementation, meaning no Adobe code was used. All functions can also be controlled from the command line and via an MCP server, so A.I. agents can operate the programs directly.

Word, Excel and PowerPoint Are Next

After Adobe, Microsoft is now the target. With WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft, ArtCraft is working on replicas of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, though they are even less mature. According to figures from the project reported by Thurrott.com, WordCraft already reads and writes DOCX files and covers about 62 percent of Word’s features. GridCraft is said to handle 93 percent of Excel’s formulas, while DeckCraft is still at an early stage. ArtCraft has since removed the download links from its website, so anyone who wants to try the programs has to build them from source.

The case shows how sharply A.I. coding tools are driving down the cost of software. Just recently, OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, claimed that three months of start-up work can now be done with Codex in 17 minutes.

Established Alternatives Have Long Existed

Free alternatives to Adobe and Microsoft are nothing new in themselves. GIMP, Krita and Inkscape have offered open-source competition to Photoshop and Illustrator for many years, and darktable is an alternative to Lightroom. For office work, many public agencies and companies rely on LibreOffice or OnlyOffice. What is new about ArtCraft is mainly its approach: The clones closely mirror the interface and feature set of the originals, and Mr. Thomas aims to match their core features within a month with the help of A.I.

Still Far From Professional Use

Whether the A.I. clones will pose a real threat to Adobe and Microsoft remains to be seen. The project itself acknowledges on GitHub that PhotoCraft is not yet a Photoshop replacement for daily professional work. It lacks A.I. features, tools and plug-in support. Vice called the software “incredibly glitchy,” and the tech site HotHardware points to the hurdles of color management and stability as well as possible patent disputes with Adobe, which holds thousands of patents. Adobe and Microsoft have not commented so far.