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KenneyNL
Adobe-Alternatives
OPEN SOURCE2023–2026
KenneyNL / Adobe-Alternatives

Adobe-Alternatives

A list of alternatives for Adobe software

6Distinct people
8Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
10KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A list of alternatives for Adobe software

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year8 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2023-07-19 13:59:40 UTC to 2026-10-09 02:03:58 UTC.

012342023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments20232024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments20242025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC413

What Hacker News says

8 sources
I am anti LLM by many means, but I do believe it is possible (setting aside some moral quandaries just for the sake of argument) to accelerate the development of software in a meaningful way using them. But doing so requires a strictly defined process of incrementalism, incorporating human expertise and intervention, treating the LLM as a tool and not as magic and as much of a potential liability as a benefit. Anyone serious about developing a graphics editor or replicating Photoshop software who doesn't have professionals - both developers and from the industry - involved isn't serious. A project of that scale should still take months at least to do properly even with AI. Posting whatever Claude spits out over a weekend and declaring coding "solved" is clown shit. The problem is many AI developers don't want to have to care about the cod
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e, or human expertise. They consider the process beneath them. They want to trust the LLM implicitly, believing in its superior intelligence. They want to already be living in the sci-fi post scarcity post singularity universe where they can just say "Computer make me a photoshop" and it just happens, perfectly and without error. And all else being equal... that attitude will never lead to quality software, it will only lead to vibecoded slop. It's sad because there are already plenty of open source alternatives to Adobe[0], but none of them are AI generated, so no one is going to bother trying to support or contribute to them. Except with vibe-coded slop PRs. [0]https://github.com/KenneyNL/Adobe-Alternatives
In Show HN: Free open source Adobe Lightroom alternative, completely local with AI
No, the concepts are the same. The button you push is incidental. For example, the GNU Image Manipulation Program now has non-destructive workflows and adjustment layers - and can easily easily be configured with photoshop-like keybinds anyway. That's not to mention free-to-use tools like Affinity. The things an architecture student needs it for are: Photo adjustment: Lightroom -> Darktable Photo retouching: Photoshop -> Affinity Pixel or Gnu Image Manipulation Program Vector drawing (which for us is mostly processing from 3d modeling programs): Illustrator -> Affinity Vector or Inkscape Board and Book Layout InDesign -> Affinity Layout or Scribus or VivaDesigner Plus, for motion graphics and video processing, my partner and I have had great luck replacing AfterEffects and Premiere with Blender and DaVinci Resolve, respectively. And ... b
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elieve it or not, I've had excellent luck with LibreOffice Draw as a PDF editor, so anything they would have needed Acrobat Pro for is covered by that (and / or PDF SAM). The real "sticky wicket" is Revit. Autodesk has been a FAR more abusive company for FAR longer, but it's what we're stuck with - although the emergence of the BIM Workbench (Building Information Modeling) with the release of FreeCAD 1.0 [0] and the continued development of BlenderBIM (oh, now called BonsaiBIM) [1] at least gives some hope. Anyway, for the Adobe replacements, here's more [2] based on [3] [0] https://wiki.freecad.org/BIM_Workbench [1] https://bonsaibim.org/ [2] https://github.com/KenneyNL/Adobe-Alternatives?tab=readme-ov... [3] https://x.com/XdanielArt/status/1799474607055102257/photo/1
In Adobe modifies hosts file to detect whether Creative Cloud is installed

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