Best Free & Open Source Alternatives to Adobe Photoshop

miniPaint is a browser-based image editor built with HTML5 canvas technology. It offers a rich set of features including multi-layer support, a wide range of filters and effects (blur, sharpen, emboss, vintage, Instagram-style filters), selection tools, and drawing tools like pencil, brush, eraser, and clone stamp.

Unlike cloud-based editors, miniPaint runs entirely in your browser — no images are ever uploaded to a server. It supports opening and saving in PNG, JPG, BMP, WEBP, animated GIF, and TIFF formats, and can import layers data as JSON. It also reads EXIF data and includes tools like magic wand, content fill, color adjustments, and a histogram.

As a lightweight open source alternative to Adobe Photoshop, miniPaint is ideal for quick edits and basic graphic design tasks without installing software or creating an account. It works offline once loaded and can be embedded in other websites via an iframe.

Compositor is a free, open-source Photoshop-style image editor for macOS, written in Swift. It is built around the compositing and post-processing workflow: layers with blend modes and opacity, layer and folder masks, clipping masks, and adjustment layers for Hue/Saturation, Levels, Curves, Exposure, Gradient Map and Grain.

The toolset will feel familiar to Photoshop users: Marquee and Lasso selection tools plus a Magic Wand, Brush with size, hardness and opacity, Spot Healing Brush, Clone Stamp, Blur, Gradient and Shape tools, a Type tool with paragraph boxes, and a Content-Aware Fill that can also extend images past their edges. Adjustments include Levels with Auto, Curves, Gaussian and Motion Blur, Add Noise, Lens Correction and Remove Background, all previewed live and limited to the active selection.

Transforms are non-destructive — images keep their full resolution no matter how you scale them — and a Photoshop-style keyboard shortcut scheme is used throughout. Projects open in tabs, and JPEG, PNG, HEIC and TIFF can be imported (including dropped screenshots) with JPEG export and Copy Merged support.

Compositor is MIT licensed and developed openly on GitHub, so feature changes and fixes happen in public. It only runs on macOS, while Photoshop is cross-platform — so it is a strong alternative for Mac users who want a native, lightweight editor without a subscription, but Mac-only availability is the main trade-off.

SnapOtter is a comprehensive self-hosted image manipulation platform that runs in a single Docker container. It bundles over 45 image tools — resize, crop, compress, convert, watermark, color adjust, vectorize, create GIFs, find duplicates, and more — alongside local AI capabilities for background removal, image upscaling, photo restoration, face enhancement, and OCR.

What sets SnapOtter apart is its pipeline system, which lets you chain multiple tools into reusable workflows with unlimited steps and batch process unlimited images at once. Every tool is also available via a REST API with API key authentication, making it easy to integrate into automated workflows.

As a privacy-first alternative to cloud services like Canva, TinyPNG, and remove.bg, SnapOtter processes everything locally — your images never leave your machine. It runs on AMD64 and ARM64, supports GPU acceleration via NVIDIA, and stores no telemetry unless you opt in.

PhotoCraft is an image editor that reimagines Adobe Photoshop as free, open-source software, written entirely in Rust by the ArtCraft team. It is a clean-room project: built from Photoshop's public behaviour and documentation rather than its code, so it offers the same familiar workflow — panels, tools and shortcuts — without a Creative Cloud subscription.

The editing core is already substantial: layers, masks, adjustment layers, layer styles, editable type layers, vector shape layers with boolean operations and brush tools, plus a catalogue of live-preview filters from the Blur Gallery to Oil Paint. Smart objects keep filters editable, Free Transform handles scale, rotate, skew and perspective, and a Photoshop-style History panel with the History Brush lets you roll every step back. Small-radius blurs are GPU-accelerated across all cores, so large images stay responsive.

PSD compatibility is a headline feature: real Photoshop documents round-trip through PhotoCraft with layers, masks, type and adjustments intact, and Export As covers JPG, PNG and other formats with quality, scale and file-size estimates. PhotoCraft runs natively on macOS, Windows and Linux, with installers on the GitHub releases page and a WebGPU-powered browser build. Every one of its 500+ commands can also be driven from the CLI, a JSON control channel or an MCP server, making it unusually scriptable — see PhotoCraft vs Adobe Photoshop below for where it stands today.

PixiEditor is a universal open-source 2D editor built for artists, game developers, and designers. It combines pixel art, digital painting, vector graphics, and animation capabilities in a single intuitive interface.

Version 2.0 introduces three integrated toolsets — Pixel Art, Painting, and Vector — that can all be used on the same canvas. You can mix raster and vector elements freely, then export to PNG, JPG, SVG, GIF, MP4, and more.

The built-in timeline and animation system supports frame-by-frame animation and node-based shader animation. Under the hood, a powerful node graph renders every layer, effect, and connection, enabling procedural art and deep customization.

PixiEditor is written in C# with the AvaloniaUI framework, making it cross-platform for Windows, Linux, and macOS. It is actively developed with a strong community and available free as open source.

Krita is a professional, free, and open source painting program built by artists, for artists. It is the leading open source alternative to Adobe Photoshop for digital painting, comic creation, and concept art, and is widely recommended as a Procreate replacement on desktop.

Krita ships with a customizable brush engine, brush stabilizers for smooth lines, vector and raster layers, wrap-around mode for seamless textures, animation tools, and full support for pressure-sensitive tablets from Wacom, Huion, XP-Pen, and others. A growing ecosystem of free brush packs, plugins, and Python scripting makes it highly extensible.

It runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android, and the source code is released under GPL-3.0. Krita is funded by donations, brush pack sales, and a paid Steam version that helps finance development.

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is the most established free, open source image editor. For decades it has been the default Adobe Photoshop alternative on Linux, and it is also available on macOS, Windows, and other Unix-like systems.

GIMP supports layers, masks, channels, paths, custom brushes, plug-ins (in Python and Scheme), and a powerful Script-Fu console for automation. It handles a wide range of file formats, including PSD, XCF, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, and WebP, and can be extended with community plug-ins such as GIMP PhotoGIMP for a Photoshop-like UI.

Released under GPL-3.0 and developed by a worldwide community of volunteers, GIMP is a strong fit for photo retouching, image composition, graphic design, and illustration work — especially for users who want a full-featured image editor without a subscription.

PhotoSuite is a free, open-source desktop raster and vector image editor built for fidelity rather than reinterpretation. Panels sit where you expect them, shortcuts match your muscle memory, dialogs expose identical fields, and tools behave exactly like their Photoshop counterparts, down to modifier keys. It is built with Tauri v2: the editor runs on HTML5, WebAssembly, and WebGL inside the system webview, backed by a lightweight Rust host for filesystem access, native menus, dialogs, clipboard, and printing. Everything runs locally on your machine with no telemetry, accounts, or cloud requirements.

Its defining feature is native PSD/PSB support: PSD is the document's native format, not a lossy import filter. Files round-trip cleanly through the binary format with layer records, masks, blending modes, layer effects, smart-filter stacks, text engine data, vector paths, slices, and colour profiles intact, so a file saved in PhotoSuite opens in Photoshop and vice versa. The feature set covers the Photoshop toolset (Marquee, Lasso, Magic Wand, Brush, Clone Stamp, Healing Brush, Pen, Type, and more), 1:1 layer styles, Smart Objects, a classic Filter Gallery with live thumbnails, Liquify mesh warping, Lens Correction backed by the Lensfun database, Camera RAW development for DNG/CR2/NEF/ARW, and vector geometry with boolean operations powered by Paper.js.

Compared with Adobe Photoshop, PhotoSuite offers graphic designers a legal, offline way to edit PSDs on macOS, Linux, and Windows at no cost. It intentionally avoids becoming a mega-app like GIMP, focusing instead on Photoshop-compatible behaviour, and it welcomes sidebar plugins written in plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, a JavaScript/JSX scripting engine, and playback of Photoshop Actions (.atn) files. The project is inspired by Photopea and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Adobe.