Free Alternatives to Commercial Graphics Applications

In 2021 there are an amazing number of free (and often open source) alternatives to commercial graphics applications, such as Adobe’s suite (Photoshop, Animate, Illustrator, Premere, Substance and more) and other applications like Autodesk’s 3DS Max and Maya. The following is a list of freely (as in beer) available applications. If you are looking for more free software and game development resources, be sure to check out our extensive guide to free gamedev resource on DevGa.me.

The following is a table of popular graphics (pixel, vector, video, 3D, texturing, etc) applications on the left, with free alternatives linked on the right.

Commercial ApplicationFree Alternative
Adobe PhotoShop
GIMP
Paint.NET
PhotoPea
Adobe Illustrator
Inkscape
Adobe Animate/Flash
RIVE
OpenToonz
Synfig
enve
Corel Painter/ArtRage
Krita
MyPaint (Now included in Krita Beta 5)
Adobe Lightroom
Dark Table
Autodesk 3DS Max/Maya/3D Coat/Modo/Cinema4D
Blender
SculptGL
Adobe Substance Designer/Substance Painter
Material Maker
PixaFlux
Quixel Mixer
ArmorPaint (If built from source)
Adobe Premere/HitFilm/Final Cut
DaVinci Resolve
Blender
Open Shot
kdenlive (Learn More Here)

You can learn more about many of these applications (and suggest others in the comments) in the video below.

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