HACKER Q&A
📣 t0bia_s

Professional Replacement for Adobe CC?


I'm over 7 years Adobe CC subscriber (All apps) and I'm looking for proper alternative from various reasons.

1. Price. My income is very unstable last year and it will probably not change with current inflation, energetic craziness and refugee crisis in my country. 2. I really want to leave Windows and stay completely on Linux. 3. Especially for photo-catalogue I don't want be limited by one software in future.

Honestly I have no problem to work with Adobe products. They are really good, stable since 2018, dynamic link is very useful and I'm used to work with. But... They do not have competition. I'm regularly use Photoshop (advanced photo editing, drawing), Premiere (video production), After Effects (basic animations, motion graphic), InDesign (print work), Lightroom Classic (pro photo editing and management), Audition (audio editing for video and podcasts) and occasionally Illustrator (vector graphic).

Please, are there any professionals, that switched from Adobe and share experience from professional production? Thanks.

  👤 two2two Accepted Answer ✓
It's difficult to replace all of Adobe's software. Your needs are varied enough to make it a bit more difficult. Mostly due to your need for animation software and Linux. I completely moved over to the combination of the following software and only rarely come across an edge case scenario where Adobe CC could do something that my configuration could not.

- Affinity Designer (one-time <$60usd) (replaced Illustrator)

- Affinity Photo (one-time <$60usd) (replaced Photoshop)

- Affinity Publisher (one-time <$60usd) (replaced InDesign)

- Photo Mechanic Plus (one0time >$100) (replaced Lightroom and Apple Photos)

- DaVinci Resolve (free and I love this software) (replaced Premiere)

There might be some smaller supplemental softwares I have accumulated over time to add more to my tools, but I don't think they're necessary.

It's so nice to not have CC, the subscription, the bloatware etc. Truly, I advocate against Adobe products to anyone I know who can actually perform professionally with the above substitutes. This is from someone who used to publish tutorials for Adobe's software in the many years past.

👤 open-source-ux
I dislike Adobe, but you will struggle to find equivalents to Adobe apps on Linux. Some apps like After Effects have no equivalent even on Windows and Mac.

On Linux, you have GIMP (for photo editing and digital painting), Inkscape (for vector drawing), Krita (for digital painting). These apps are not meant to emulate all the features of similar Adobe apps. You will have to learn new apps on Linux with no connection between them. The resources for learning these apps are small compared to the colossal number of learning resources and tips for Adobe apps. And don’t forget the massive number of brushes, actions, scripts, filters, LUTs etc.

If you decide to stay on Windows, you have the Affinity apps as possible options: Designer (Vector), Photo (Raster), and Publisher (DTP). These are professional-grade apps and have excellent integration with each other. However, the Affinity apps do not try to match Adobe apps feature-for-feature (intentionally so). That means you may find some Adobe features missing in the Affinity suite of apps. Also, expect different ways of completing tasks and different shortcuts (sometimes).

👤 loige
Affinity photo and affinity design are quite good replacements for Photoshop and illustrator respectively. You can get them with a one time payment.

I got them during a promotion and i was able to get both for 30 USD.

I have been using them for about 6 months now and i find them quite good, even though, having used Adobe tools for a long time, i miss the familiarity with the interface and the shortcuts and some of the more advanced features.

I am not that he expert with video editing to be able to recommend alternatives unfortunately...