Software alternatives

In economics, vendor lock-in, also known as proprietary lock-in or customer lock-in, makes a customer dependent on a vendor for products, unable to use another vendor without substantial switching costs.

The use of open standards and alternative options makes systems tolerant of change, so that decisions can be postponed until more information is available or unforeseen events are addressed. Vendor lock-in does the opposite: it makes it difficult to move from one solution to another.

Keep in mind that the alternative may have a very different workflow, and some options may be missing (while offering other options as well). This list is mostly meant for those who didn’t develop either an affection or muscle-memory for Adobe applications 🙂

If you know any others worth mentioning, let us know!

Free software alternatives for (Adobe-) software
Image
Photoshop, Lightroom GIMP, Krita, Raw Therapee, Darktable
Indesign Scribus, Lucidpress
Illustrator Inkscape, Vectr
Video
Premiere, FCP Da Vinci Resolve, KdenLive, Shotcut
After Effects Da Vinci Resolve, Blender
Audio
Audition Audacity, Wavacity
Ableton Live, Logic Pro Ardour, Lmms, Cakewalk (win)

See also:

https://github.com/johnjago/awesome-free-software

https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#self-hosting-solutions

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/floss-and-foss.en.html

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Free_and_open-source_software