The number of options when moving away for Adobe continues to grow every day and in the last year several new major alternatives have appeared. These new options are also often free and recently some traditional strongholds such as Lightroom and After Effects now have some major competition.
Lightroom
Lightroom, and application for post processing photos, has long had only a few competitors and only one free one, Dark Table. Now there is a new competitor from a very unlikely source – DaVinci Resolve. With the recent release of DaVinci Resolve 21 new Photo Mode has been added. DaVinci Resolve of course is also a viable competitor to Adobe Premiere/Adobe After Effects.
Adobe After Effects
In the last week Adobe After Effects got not one but TWO new competitors, both available for free! Canva purchased Cavalry earlier this year and now they have made it available completely for free. Additional Maxon have released Autograph for free to individuals as well.
Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign
Back in 2024 Canva acquired Serif and shortly there after released Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher completely for free. In 2025 they released Affinity Studio which combined all of these Adobe competitors together into a single free product.
Other New Graphics Applications
There are other interesting applications that are shaping up to be Adobe alternatives. We have recently looked at both of these applications, PixiEditor and Graphite. Both are procedural graphics applications and blur the lines between several Adobe products.
Key Links
You can learn more about these new Adobe alternatives in the video below.