In our experience, the best alternative to Photoshop will help you produce professional-level image editing and creative designs, boast effective AI tools, and even exceed Adobe's own toolset - but without or requiring a Creative Cloud subscription.
For that reason, I rate Serif Affinity Photo as the best choice for most, whether you're a professional or beginner. It's an incredibly capable tool that easily matches what you can do in Photoshop. Like PS, it's also available across Windows, macOS, and iPad devices. Unlike PS, you can get it for a one-off cost.
We've gone hands-on reviewing all the the best photo editors, best graphic design software, the best drawing apps, and the best Adobe Lightroom alternatives. And while Photoshop remains our top pick software for most people, especially pro photographers and designers, not everyone wants an endless subscription, and some may find the interface slightly overwhelming when learning the ropes. That's where our recommended best Photoshop alternatives will shine. We've tested each app in this round-up to discover the pros and cons.
See what we think of the latest version of Adobe's top tool in our Photoshop review.
The best Adobe Photoshop alternatives of 2025 in full:
Best Adobe Photoshop alternative overall
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Affinity Photo, from Serif, is positively packed with professional tools that make it a genuine rival to Photoshop for both Windows and macOS. There’s also a tablet version if you're looking for one of the best Photoshop alternatives on iPad.
During our testing, we found an impressively clean interface (although the UI can be occasionally glitchy). There’s also no shortage of useful tools, including PSD file support, RAW Support, masking, layering, retouching, removing blemishes, curving, and a full set of 16-bit filters. In fact, the amount of tools available is impressively large, capably rivalling the professional feature-set of Photoshop. Just don't let yourself get too overwhelmed with the power on offer.
Best of all, there are no endless subscriptions, just a one-off cost, making it ideal when working to a budget - one of the main reasons why we like this software so much. The app is available as a standalone download. Alternatively, the Affinity V2 universal license, bundling the photo editor alongside Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher, which offers great value if you're working across different design projects.
Read our full Serif Affinity Photo review.
Best free Adobe Photoshop alternative
GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a professional, open-source photography powerhouse that works on Linux, Windows, and macOS. So, it's both the best Adobe Photoshop alternative overall, and an excellent free alternative, too.
In our review, we championed the fact that Gimp comes with an absolutely huge range of pro-grade tools for editing images, drawing and more. If you're familiar with Photoshop already, it won't take too long to get to grips with the interface. And if you're new to all this, you'll find a huge community of developers and artists who have created a wide array of plugins, making this a highly adaptable program. If you desire a specific feature, there’s probably an add-on for it.
The interface is highly customizable, so you can pare things back or leverage multiple windows and toolbars as needed. For this reason, GIMP has a similarly steep learning curve as Photoshop, but once you’ve made your way through a few tutorials, it’s quite comfortable.
In our experience, GIMP was slightly less responsive and used a few more resources than its proprietary counterpart, but this can be easily forgiven on the basis that GIMP always has been and always will be free and open source.
Read our full GIMP review.
Best Photoshop alternative online
Pixlr is one of the best free Photoshop alternatives online - but what makes this a good pick is that it's available as a web app. During our review of the HTML 5 photo editing software, we found it to be impressively feature-rich compared to downloadable software.
Quite often, I find myself using this tool and Pixlr Editor for those quick image edits and compositions when there's no need to crack open Photoshop. The interface is more spartan than either Photoshop or GIMP, but that’s not a bad thing. The workflow is streamlined and intuitive: you can drag-and-drop a photo from your computer or add a URL, and then get to work adjusting images with familiar one-click filters and sliders.
Given that it’s a web app, Pixlr has surprisingly robust layer support - one of the reasons why it's considered one of the best Photoshop alternatives. However, important features are still missing. Custom brushes, for example, are slated for development in the future but don’t exist yet.
Overall, Pixlr gives you a super clean and intuitive interface for basic to medium-complexity photo editing.
Read our full Pixlr X review.
Best Photoshop alternative for intermediates
ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate is an image manipulation tool that, like any good Photoshop alternative, allows you to perform many of the functions you’d find in Adobe's popular photo editor, but at a fraction of the cost. We found this app to be an ideal middle-ground if you're not quite a beginner, but not yet a pro.
When we tested out the software, we found a versatile alternative to Photoshop. It might not match every powerful feature in Adobe’s top tool, but it delivers most tools for most photographers and designers, including layers and RAW file editing. As expected, there are AI tools on offer here, too. For us, this an ideal Photoshop alternative for intermediates, rather than full professionals.
What I especially like here is the option to buy a perpetual license - great for those wanting to avoid Adobe subscriptions (or any other subscriptions for that matter). But you can still get it for a monthly or annual fee, if you prefer, with a range of cloud storage options depending on how much you pay.
Overall, it's one of the best Photoshop alternatives for creating professional-looking content while working to a budget.
Read our full ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate review.
Best Adobe Photoshop alternative for photographers
Photoshop is loaded with AI tools - so a good alternative should also boast at least some of these features. And that's precisely what Luminar Neo offers.
This app features a wealth of industry-standard AI tools that should make design and content creation so much easier (and, presumably, faster). This includes tweaking curves, white balance, a cropping tool, and Luminar's much-vaunted sky replacement tool. In our tests, these worked very well, overall. Aside from a couple of hitches, we were left generally rather impressed with results.
So, who's it good for? Our sense having reviewed the software is that this is the ideal tool for amateur photographers. Unfortunately, for professional use, it's missing certain features and performance, as with its simpler sister software Luminar AI, can be occasionally spotty. But once you get going, the overall experience of using Neo is surprisingly fluid, with more than enough fine-tuning tools for perfectionists.
Read our full Luminar Neo review.
Best alternative to Adobe Photoshop for businesses
We're ranking this as one of the best Photoshop alternatives - particularly for small teams and businesses - because it's just so feature-rich, Photo Pos Pro comes with tools for editing images, web design, and document creation. Pretty much any design work you need can be handled here. Better still, it has a twin-track interface: one for beginners, one for experts.
This customizable interface lets you select either Novice or Pro layouts. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, but essentially, the novice layout sacrifices power for usability, while the pro layout is feature-rich, albeit with a steep learning curve. Even if it’s not executed perfectly, this flexibility is commendable and practical.
While it lacks the deep customization that professional photographers rely on, it's still one of the best Adobe Photoshop alternatives for making adjustments to photos for presentations, marketing campaigns. An ideal tool for professional use in a business or office setting, particularly if you don't have time to learn the intricacies of Adobe's tool.
With layers, masking, brushes, scripts, and batch editing, Photos Pos Pro is a feature-rich alternative to Photoshop.
Read our full Photo Pos Pro review.
Best Adobe Photoshop alternative for artists
Krita is open-source and free alternative to Adobe Photoshop, backed by a huge community of developers and talented artists who share artwork and methods. If you’re looking for an active user base that’s invested in discussing and sharing art, Krita is a great Photoshop alternative for drawing.
Beyond the community, Krita is an incredibly powerful photo editing software, with hundreds of brushes and a brush customization engine, vector and text capabilities for comic strips, a wrap-around mode for seamless repeating images and patterns, and a powerful resource manager for importing tools from other artists.
We found the interface intuitive and familiar, with minor functions like being able to scroll sliders with the trackpad and having helpful tooltips that let us know to find the right tool.
Krita isn't one of the best Adobe Photoshop alternatives for its photo editing tools. In fact, it's more of a drawing tool than a photo editor. For that reason, certain features are missing: fewer photo filters, no automatic heal tool, etc. It does, however, support opening and saving PSD files.
Also, Krita has fantastic tablet support with custom sensitivity settings, so for artists looking to combine drawing and photos, it’s hard to beat.
Best Adobe Photoshop alternative: Frequently asked questions
How to choose the best Adobe Photoshop alternative for you
When deciding which alternative to Photoshop is best for you, first consider how much of your relevant image file you need to edit and change. If you’re just trying to make simple edits to an existing image file, you may find a free software program will suit you fine.
However, if you plan to develop a file from scratch and/or plan to make a series of complicated edits using advanced photo-editing tools and filters, it may be better to aim for one of the higher range and more expensive programs on our list.
You should also check your current computer specs. Photo editors tend to have low minimum requirements, but for more seamless workflows, you may need a higher-power device. To help with this, we've reviewed the best laptops for graphic design, best laptops for photo editing, and best photo editing PCs. For professionals, we also recommend choosing one of the best monitors for photo editing.
How we tested the best alternatives to Adobe Photoshop
To test for the best Adobe Photoshop alternatives we first set up an account with the relevant software platform, whether as a download or as an online service. We then tested the service using a handful of images to see how the software could be used for the editing and development of each image. The aim was to push each software platform to see whether it could simply and easily not just edit a range of content types but also do so faithfully and consistently without introducing formatting issues or similar problems.
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