ArtCraft just open-sourced free Rust rebuilds of Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects and ten more apps. PhotoCraft alone went past 61,000 GitHub stars in about two weeks.
Stars don't edit videos, though. So I installed three of the apps on my Mac mini M4 (16 GB) and gave them real work. Every number below comes from a log I saved on October 15, 2026.
What ArtCraft actually is
ArtCraft is a family of desktop apps that copy the Adobe and Microsoft playbook, released under the Apache 2.0 license:
- PhotoCraft: Photoshop
- VectorCraft: Illustrator
- FilmCraft: Premiere Pro
- EffectCraft: After Effects
- LightCraft: Lightroom
- Plus clones of InDesign, Figma, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Pro Tools and AutoCAD
When I took my first screenshot the site listed 12 apps. By the time I finished testing, it listed 13. They run on Mac, Windows, Linux and in the browser.
The price gap: Adobe Creative Cloud Pro is US$69.99/month on adobe.com (about $840 a year). ArtCraft is $0.
The catch: most of these repos were created on September 30, 2026. Every app I checked is labelled early alpha or "in development". So the real question is whether you can use them today.
Test 1: PhotoCraft photo edit (0.23 s)
PhotoCraft looks almost exactly like Photoshop: same toolbar, same panels, same layers. The interesting part is that every action is a command, and the app ships its own MCP server. An AI agent or a small script can drive the real app while you watch.
The edit: auto tone, remove background, yellow fill layer behind the subject, two text layers, drop shadow. From the command line (photocraft-cli 0.9.0), the whole thing took 0.23 seconds and saved a real layered PSD with every layer still editable.
The log, trimmed:
{"command":"image.autoTone","result":null}
{"command":"layer.removeBackground","result":{"bounds":[171,56,587,664],"layer":2}}
{"command":"layer.newFillLayer.solidColor","result":{"layer":3}}
{"command":"type.create","result":{"bounds":[838,244,1155,351],"layer":4}}
{"command":"layer.layerStyle.dropShadow","result":{"layer":5}}
real 0.23
What broke: Remove Background left a blue fringe in the subject's hair from the old backdrop. Photoshop's masking still wins here.
Test 2: batch-edit 20 product photos (1.75 s)
The boring test that actually saves time. Picture a small online shop fixing 20 product photos every week. I gave PhotoCraft one action list: auto tone, more vibrance, unsharp mask, resize to 1080 px.
[["image.autoTone",{}],
["image.adjustments.vibrance",{"vibrance":35,"saturation":5}],
["filter.sharpen.unsharpMask",{"amount":60,"radius":1.2,"threshold":2}],
["image.imageSize",{"width":1080}]]
photocraft-cli batch --actions actions.json --in batch-in --out batch-out --format jpg --quality 90
Result: 20 succeeded, 0 failed, 1.75 seconds. In Photoshop you'd record an action for this. Here it's one line in a terminal.
Test 3: FilmCraft 16-second travel reel (12.5 s export)
FilmCraft is a real Premiere clone: source monitor, program monitor, project bin, timeline. I built a 16-second 1080p30 reel from four free Mixkit stock clips, with three cross dissolves and a title.
What broke: one clip was 720p and showed up small in the middle of the 1080p frame. Premiere does the same thing, and one Fill Frame command fixed it.
The export is the nerdy part. FilmCraft doesn't use FFmpeg; its H.264, HEVC, ProRes and AAC codecs are written from scratch in Rust.
filmcraft-cli --project reel/reel.fcproj export out/travel-reel.mp4 --format h264
"frames": 480, "render_fps": 38.3, "seconds": 12.52, "bytes": 38815510
12.5 seconds for 480 frames. The file is chunky, though: 38.8 MB for 16 seconds, so compress it before you upload it anywhere.
Test 4: EffectCraft animated title (0.99 s render)
This one surprised me most. You script EffectCraft with After Effects-style JavaScript: comps, layers, keyframes, easing, Gaussian blur. Here's part of the title script I wrote:
var comp = app.project.items.addComp("Title", 1920, 1080, 1, 4, 30);
var t = comp.layers.addText("OPEN SOURCE");
var o = t.property("Transform").property("Opacity");
o.setValueAtTime(0.3, 0); o.setValueAtTime(0.8, 100);
var blur = t.property("Effects").addProperty("ADBE Gaussian Blur 2");
blur.property("Blurriness").setValueAtTime(0.3, 40);
blur.property("Blurriness").setValueAtTime(1.0, 0);
A yellow bar wipes in, the text blurs into place, and a subtitle fades up. The script ran in 0.08 s, and the 4-second 1080p title (120 frames) rendered in 0.99 s.
All four results
- PhotoCraft photo edit: 0.23 s, layered PSD (hair fringe after background removal)
- PhotoCraft batch, 20 photos: 1.75 s, 0 failures
- FilmCraft 16 s 1080p reel: 12.5 s export, 38.8 MB file
- EffectCraft 4 s title: script 0.08 s, render 0.99 s
The real use case: automation
ArtCraft isn't replacing a pro editor tomorrow. The strength is that every app has a command line and an MCP server, so agents like Claude can drive them:
- Make 50 social posts from a spreadsheet
- Fix every product photo in one go
- Turn a script into a rough cut
- Render a title for every video
Adobe gives you a beautiful app. ArtCraft gives you an app that scripts and AI agents can use too, for free.
So, can you cancel Adobe today?
If you're a professional with client deadlines: no. These apps are days old, labelled alpha, and you will hit missing features.
If you're a student, a Linux user, a small business, or a developer who wants to automate creative work: it's already useful.
And if PhotoCraft keeps moving at 61,000 stars in two weeks, Adobe should be a little nervous.
ArtCraft apps: https://getartcraft.com/apps
Not sponsored by or affiliated with ArtCraft or Adobe. Tested on a Mac mini M4 (16 GB), October 15, 2026. Price checked on adobe.com the same day. This article was written with AI assistance from my own test logs and video script.
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