Adobe just got cloned
Someone just cloned Adobe’s entire Creative Cloud. For free.
Brandon Thomas, a software engineer with 15 years in the industry, got hit with Adobe’s cancellation fee one too many times. So he did something about it.
His project, ArtCraft, has released seven free, open-source apps that go after Adobe’s biggest products: Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro. They were written in Rust with heavy help from AI, and they run on Mac, Windows, and Linux with no subscription.
People clearly want this. The repos passed 42,000 GitHub stars combined in about eight days.
Some honest caveats:
→ It’s early alpha. Reviewers who’ve tried the apps report real bugs and missing features. Thomas says he’s aiming for full feature parity within a month, which is a bold claim.
→ The legal question is open. ArtCraft calls these “clean-room” rebuilds, meaning no Adobe code or assets. But Adobe holds thousands of software patents, and it’s hard to picture them ignoring a free Photoshop alternative that catches on. As of last week, no lawsuit had been reported.
→ Polish takes time. What makes Photoshop worth paying for isn’t the headline features. It’s the small things you take for granted: file compatibility, accuracy, and stability. That’s the hardest part to clone.
Still, the bigger story isn’t whether ArtCraft beats Adobe next month. It’s that one developer with AI tools could get this far this fast. If a 40-year-old software giant can be roughly copied in weeks, the moat is no longer the code. It’s trust, ecosystem, and how you treat your customers.
That last part is where Adobe made itself a target. The company recently settled a $150M federal lawsuit over subscriptions that were hard to cancel. ArtCraft didn’t come from nowhere. It came from frustration.
Would you switch?
