ArtCraft: free Adobe alternatives, a graphic designer’s view
ArtCraft and its 13 Craft apps became the talk of October: free alternatives to Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. What they are and whether they are ready.
In October 2026 ArtCraft became one of the most talked-about topics in design. Greek and international sites, from ellak.gr to tech blogs, wrote about a team building free tools aimed at Adobe and Microsoft software, with the help of AI.
What it is in practice. ArtCraft is a desktop app from the Storytold team that brings AI image and video models such as Nano Banana, GPT Image, FLUX, Kling and Veo into one workspace with a canvas and 2D and 3D scenes. The app is free, but generating images and video uses credits, with plans starting at 8 dollars a month.
Alongside it there is a family of 13 Craft apps, each one set against a well-known program: PhotoCraft for Photoshop, VectorCraft for Illustrator, DesignCraft for InDesign, LightCraft for Lightroom, FilmCraft for Premiere, EffectCraft for After Effects, PdfCraft for Acrobat, FigCraft for Figma, plus WordCraft, GridCraft and DeckCraft for Word, Excel and PowerPoint, SoundCraft for audio and CADCraft for drafting.
There are caveats. Most of the apps are still in alpha, so bugs and missing features are to be expected. The code is published on GitHub, but according to ellak.gr the licence is not open source in the strict sense and is still being drafted. They are not official Adobe or Microsoft products and will not necessarily read every one of their files correctly.
What it means for a graphic designer. Professional work needs more than a program that opens files. It needs proper colour management, CMYK and Pantone for the printer, reliable print-ready PDFs, fonts that do not shift and files that open the same for every partner. An alpha tool is not yet the right base for a logo, packaging or a print run of thousands.
That does not take away from the effort. Pressure on expensive subscriptions is good for everyone, and for a small business that wants to make a post itself or fix a photo, a free tool may be enough. It is worth following and trying out, with backups.
But the program does not do the design. A logo people recognise at a glance, a brand identity that ties together card, packaging and website, come from the idea and the decisions behind it. If you need an identity or a logo that will serve you for years, let us talk, whichever program wins.