replacing Adobe Photoshop
Raster graphics editor — Adobe Photoshop pricing: $22.99/month. Below: 2 free, self-hostable open source projects that cover the same ground, ranked by real GitHub adoption.
There are 2 open source Adobe Photoshop alternatives tracked on this registry, against Adobe Photoshop pricing of $22.99/month. The most-adopted is Krita with 10,385 GitHub stars under GPL-3.0, written in C++. Together the set has 16,817 stars across 2 languages and 1 licence. All 2 are free to self-host with no licence fee, and 2 of 2 received a commit in the last 90 days. 2 head-to-head Adobe Photoshop comparisons are available.
Krita is a free and open source cross-platform application for digital painting. It lives in the KDE ecosystem and is built on the KDE and Qt frameworks. The project is licensed under the GNU Public License, Version 3, and the GitHub repository is a mirror of the real code repository at https://invent.kde.org/graphics/krita.git.
GPL-3.0 · C++ · Adobe Photoshop vs Krita →
GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program, a long-running image editing application written in C and developed as part of the GNOME ecosystem. Source code lives at `https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/`, and the copy tracked by this registry is a read-only mirror of that GitLab repository. The branch described in the README is the GIMP 3.3 development series, which the project itself labels an unstable development release rather than a stable one. Work is coordinated through GitLab, with documentation hosted separately at `https://docs.gimp.org/` and contributor material at `https://developer.gimp.org/`.
NOASSERTION · C · Adobe Photoshop vs GIMP →
Professional digital painting made accessible to everyone
Professional image editing without the price tag
last updated nightly · ranking method: github stars, live-tracked
Krita is the most-starred open source alternative to Adobe Photoshop in this registry, with 10,385 GitHub stars. 2 alternatives are compared here in total.
Yes. Every project listed on this page is open source and free to self-host — there is no licence fee. Some projects also sell a managed hosted version, but the self-hosted path costs nothing.
Compare licence terms, community size (stars), primary language and release activity. A fast-moving project with a compatible licence and an active maintainer base matters more than raw star count when you are committing to a migration.