The Best Adobe Alternatives For 2024 (Free Software TIER LIST)

hello and welcome back to another video today I'll be creating a tier list featuring some of the most common Adobe Alternatives and I'll be doing a combination of free Alternatives as well as some commercial [Music] Alternatives before I get into that don't forget to check out my website at Davies mediad design.com you can enroll in my gim 2.10 masterclass on udemy or you can enroll in my WordPress masterclass also on you to me and I'll include a link to this as well as all the ren links from this tutorial in the description of the video with that being said let's start off with WordPress which is a CMS or content management system and it is made to design websites Adobe does have the Adobe experience manager so this replaces the need for that and I'm not going to beat around the bush here WordPress is an S tier piece of software because it is the industry standard when it comes to designing websites that is especially true if you want to design websites without coding however you can also use code to put together very custom websites and WordPress is the most popular CMS platform in the world it's used by huge companies it's very stable it's very consistent it has a ton of developer activity lots of thirdparty plugins and themes developed for it so a lot of support around it so yeah in my opinion WordPress is a no-brainer it is an S tier piece of software so next up we have and is going to primarily be an alternative for Photoshop it is a photo editor it's got tons of photo manipulation features so when it comes to ranking there's a lot to think about is by far the best free photo editing alternative to photoshop it has tons of great tools for basic photo editing like color correction levels curves you can also sharpen your photos there's lots of great photo manipulation tools like the heel tool in its Heyday did have a ton of developer activity however that's kind of fallen off a little bit in the last few years and that has led to the community shrinking a little bit if not just staying stagnant but overall is a great piece of software it is stable when you use it it can be a little buggy if you're using development versions but the stable versions usually are pretty bug-free gimp's main weakness is that it has fallen so far behind on things that photoshop has really made standard with photo editors such as adjustment layers non-destructive editing smart objects Vector shape tools still does not have any of these right now and then you add on top of that AI so does not have an AI implementation it does use some third party plugins that can do some AI like things like the resynthesizer plugin but as of right now nothing built in so I think at the present has slipped down to a b tier software I think at one point it was a tier but just over the years as it's Fallen more and more behind Photoshop it's slipped down to a b it can get back up to a if it implements all those features I just mentioned so moving on we have blender and blender I'm not going to beat around the bush again so I'm just going to put this as an S tier blender is constantly in development constantly putting out new versions it's very Innovative it's an industry disruptor I think even companies like Adobe have recognized that and that's why they contribute to this software Adobe has donated money to blender and blender is used for things like 3D animation sculpting it can even be used for video production although it's not primarily a video editor and while blender is kind of its own program I think the pr programs that it is most known for replacing is going to be things like after effects Cinema 4D and in some cases Premiere Pro if you follow free and open source software on social media you'll constantly see updates from the blender Community with things like new blender materials shaders different types of physics you can add to blender so there's all sorts of thirdparty add-ons that are constantly being developed and there are tons of creators out there who know way more about blender than I do but from my understanding blender is an S tier piece of software next up we have dark table so dark table is raw processing software it is most similar to Lightroom it has a lot of great features for processing raw images it is very scientifically based you can get some great colors out of your photos with it it has a pretty steep learning curve especially compared to Lightroom which just uses really a bunch of Sliders to make adjustments dark table is going to use a lot more graphs and curves and manual number adjustments although they have made more of a push to introduce more sliders to make it a little bit easier to use but once you do conquer that learning curve you can get some great results out of your images so for those Reasons I'm going to put dark table as a b tier software if it did improve its UI and ux I would put it up to an A but for now dark table is B tier so moving on we have scribus and scribus is going to be a desktop publishing software so a lot of people cite this as being a potential replacement for InDesign and I think when you look at this software directly next to in design it doesn't really hold up I just feel like the UI and ux could be updated and there could be a lot more new features added to this and as far as I know there's not a ton of new development coming out of this so for all those Reasons I'm going to put this as a d tier software again I'm not trying to knock this or have any ill will against scribus so let's move on here to K so K is a digital painting software it's kind of in a league of its own in terms of being a digital painting software I mean Adobe Photoshop has a lot of digital painting features but none of them on the level that K has there are some very basic photo editing and photo adjustment features in K but if you are a digital artist and you're just looking to paint your own Works CR has made some huge strides in terms of its UI and ux it has some really unique and cool features like its little Carousel for selecting different brush types and it has a lot of great textures and I think it really is a consistent product it's a stable product and its Community seems to constantly be putting out resources and add-ons like new brushes for that reason I'm going to put CR as an a tier software again that is as a digital painting software but for now a very respectable a tier so next up we have pen poot and penot is going to be a UI ux prototyping tool very similar to figma so figma of course was recently acquired by Adobe which caused people to go scrambling for some sort of alternative to figma because they didn't want to get sucked into the Adobe Universe naturally a lot of people grab V itated towards penot and they realize pen poot is a really viable piece of software and while penot is relatively new it has seen a lot of developer activity so there's been a lot of new great features added I think the built-in features do exactly what you expect them to do and there's a lot of support behind pen poot now with figma being acquired by Adobe so if you look at their website and you scroll down here to the organizations that are using penot you've got people like blender Mozilla Fedora MIT NYU Fujitsu so obviously there's been some great adoption here I don't think penot is the industry standard so I can't put it as an S tier that still belongs to figma however I will put this as an a tier piece of software and I think penot has a great future ahead of it so let's move on here to Da Vinci resolve this is going to be a video editor this is not free and open source software it is going to be a video software developed by Blackmagic the company that makes cameras this software is often cited as a replacement for Premiere Pro and as far as free software goes this is really the only replacement you'll find for Premiere Pro in my opinion I mean there's other free and open source software like open shot or Olive but I just think those are too inconsistent and lack too many features in my opinion I think Da Vinci resolve is the only industry standard alternative I think it does offer a lot of the same features Premiere Pro does and it also does its own thing very well almost like a Premiere Pro in an alternate universe and there's always lots of development going on around Da Vinci resolve and a lot of third-party add-ons so for that reason I'm going to put Da Vinci resolve as s tier so moving on we have Drupal Drupal is another CMS or content management system similar to Wordpress I have used Drupal very sparingly over the years however from what I understand from the general web design and development Community is that Drupal is very good like WordPress maybe not quite as good as WordPress not quite as many thirdparty plugins or themes you can download the learning curve is a little steeper although there are a ton of big companies that use Drupal it seems to have great security and yes like WordPress it is free and open source software but from my understanding and again this is just from hearing from others I would say Drupal is a tier software the last free software I'll cover for this video is inkscape inkscape is what I'm using right now it is a scalable vector graphics software most similar to illustrator inkscape is an interesting case case because in my eyes it is one of the only Alternatives available for illustrator there's something about vector graphics software that is just not easy to replicate or develop from scratch and in that sense inkscape has done a great job I think it's a great piece of software it has tons of new features especially with the most recent inkscape 1.2 and inkscape 1.3 releases most notably it has introduced some key features like the page tool which is most similar to The artboard Tool and its own shape Builder tool which is actually pretty surprising that is a great feature inkscape can be a little unstable so I think out of all of these programs that I have listed here inkscape does tend to crash the most in my personal experience I think if inkscape became more stable and became more predictable it could very easely be an a tier piece of software but because of those stability issues I do regretfully have to put inkscape here as c-tier software and part of me wants to just bring this up to the B tier because I do feel like it could easily be seen as a b tier software its UI is better than dark tables for example but another thing it lacks is CMYK features it doesn't really have those and so while I'm fighting to bring this higher I'm just going to keep it as a c tier for now so those were the free alternatives to Adobe software now let's move on to some of the commercial Alternatives so the two big ones are going to be Affinity by serif and canva so starting with affinity by serif this company which is a British company offers Affinity photo Affinity designer and Affinity publisher so the three of them together are sometimes referred to as the Affinity Trinity all three of them offer pretty much everything that their Adobe counterparts offer besides AI at this point so Affinity photo which is most similar to photoshop is going to pretty much have all of the Photoshop features the main difference being that photoshop does still have much better quick photo manipulation tools smart photo manipulation tools like background removal or subject selection but Affinity photo does have some really great features like it's developed persona for editing raw images it has a panoramic Stitcher you can focus stack your images as well as do some exposure blending and with affinity designer you're basically going to get all the same tools you would get out of Adobe Illustrator and it even has some of its own unique features much like Affinity photo it has multiple personas so there's a pixel persona for example where you can do some basic photo manipulation and as far as I understand it Affinity publisher which which is most similar to Adobe in design is pretty even with in design in terms of the features it offers and I think all of the Affinity products offer a great UI ux plus Affinity publisher just got a new feature called Studio link where you can jump between all three programs all from within Affinity publisher and so while there is a bit of a learning curve overall it is pretty intuitive so for all those Reasons I'm going to place Affinity by serif here in the a tier last but not least that lead leads us to canva and canva is a very interesting case because it's created its own browser-based category of content creation and design it's basically made for marketers and content creators who are not designed Savvy or not designers at least that's how it started it does have a premium model so it offers some free features and then if you want additional features or additional templates you have to sign up for canva pro canva offers collaboration features for teams which is becoming very popular in modern softare Ware it's also successfully implemented some AI features and it's even developed its own video editor and desktop app so it's just constantly expanding its audience expanding its Market I personally don't use canva I'm not a big fan of canva but I know a lot of people are including a lot of professionals so for all those Reasons I'm going to place canva as an S tier creative app so there's my tier list I feel like looking at this thing I could spend all day just rearranging these apps changing my mind but what do you guys think where would you rank this software which rankings did I get wrong which rankings did I get right let me know in the comments but that's it for this tutorial hopefully you liked it if you did don't forget to like this video subscribe to my channel and click the Bell icon to be notified each time I have a brand new tutorial you can check out any of the links to my resources in the description but thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 25,512

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, GIMP 2023

Id: bBkMmxphl8w

Length: 13min 18sec (798 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 28 2023