head to head
Adobe Photoshop vs Krita
Krita is the open source alternative to Adobe Photoshop — raster graphics editor. Here is the honest comparison.
Yes — Krita is a viable free replacement for Adobe Photoshop. Krita is open source under GPL-3.0, written in C++, with 10,385 GitHub stars, 856 forks and 0 open issues; it was last pushed 4 hours ago. Adobe Photoshop costs from $22, while self-hosting Krita carries no licence fee — the trade is your operational time instead of a subscription. 1 other open source Adobe Photoshop alternative is tracked here, led by GIMP at 6,432 stars. Krita ranks #1 of 2 tracked open source Adobe Photoshop alternatives by stars. The tracked set, by adoption: GIMP (6,432 stars). Replacement criteria on this page: 4 reasons to move to Krita and 3 reasons to stay on Adobe Photoshop.
choose Krita if
- Your Adobe Photoshop bill is growing with seats or usage
- You need your data in a format and server you control
- Your compliance posture requires auditing the code that touches sensitive data
- You have (or can rent) a server and basic Docker comfort
stick with Adobe Photoshop if
- You need the polished onboarding and support SLAs of a commercial vendor
- Your team has zero capacity to operate software, even self-hosted-simple
- You depend on a Adobe Photoshop integration ecosystem that the OSS alternatives have not replicated
Side by side
| Krita (open source) | Adobe Photoshop | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free (self-hosted) | $22.99/month |
| License | GPL-3.0 | Proprietary |
| Source code | Public, auditable | Closed |
| Self-hosting | Yes — kde/krita | Cloud only |
| Data ownership | Your server, your format | Vendor's cloud |
| Community | ★ 10K · ⑂ 856 | — |
| Built with | C++ | — |
Why people look for a Adobe Photoshop alternative
About Krita
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.
read the full Krita overview →
Other open source alternatives to Adobe Photoshop
last updated nightly · ranking method: github stars, live-tracked
Frequently asked questions
Is Krita a good replacement for Adobe Photoshop?
Krita is an open source alternative to Adobe Photoshop (Raster graphics editor). It is written in C++ and licensed under GPL-3.0, with 10,385 GitHub stars.
Is Krita free compared to Adobe Photoshop?
Yes. Krita is open source — there is no licence fee, and you can self-host it. Adobe Photoshop is typically a paid subscription, so the trade-off is licence cost against the operational work of running it yourself.
How do I migrate from Adobe Photoshop to Krita?
Migration effort depends on the data formats involved. Check Krita's documentation for import options, and compare the feature table above to confirm the capabilities you depend on are covered before switching.