Thought Leadership
Using Claude Opus 5.5, developer Brandon Thomas has built seven open-source alternatives to Photoshop, Premiere and other Adobe applications in Rust. The software is still in an early stage of development.
Software developer Brandon Thomas has released seven open-source applications under the Artcraft project that aim to replicate popular Adobe products. According to Thomas, he developed them in Rust with the help of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 AI model, using a so-called clean-room approach. Ars Technica was the first to report on the project.
Seven applications
The lineup includes PhotoCraft as a Photoshop alternative, VectorCraft as an alternative to Illustrator, and FilmCraft as a Premiere replacement. Lightcraft, Effectcraft, Designcraft and Printcraft are intended as alternatives to Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign and Acrobat Pro, respectively. The applications are free to use and do not require a subscription. Their source code can be downloaded, modified and extended with fixes.
Thomas describes himself as a software developer with 15 years of professional experience, including around 10 years working with Rust. The project has a team working behind the scenes and is expected to continue after its launch. Development is to be funded through a separate Artcraft business that sells tokens for AI image and video models.
“We’re going to reach 100% [feature] parity within a month.”
Brandon Thomas, Software Developer
Thomas later walked back that timeline on Hacker News, saying that reaching 99 percent feature parity would take months, but not years.
Basic features still have issues
The applications are still in an early stage of development. According to TechSpot, early users have reported problems with basic functionality. It is not known how Adobe plans to respond to the replicas. Thomas cites Adobe’s early termination fees as one of his motivations for the project. In June 2024, the US government sued the company, alleging that Adobe had concealed fees for early cancellation of certain annual subscriptions and made the cancellation process unnecessarily difficult.
In such cases, customers had to pay half of their remaining subscription payments. In March 2026, Adobe agreed to a settlement worth $150 million USD, including $75 million USD in civil penalties and $75 million USD in free services for customers. Adobe must also make its fees clearer and simplify the cancellation process. The company did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement. Thomas expects other developers to follow a similar path and create free alternatives to widely used paid software.
(Editorial Team)
