Free AI-built clones of Photoshop and Word go viral

A collection of free programs that resemble Adobe's and Microsoft's expensive tools has drawn massive attention within a few weeks. The suite is called ArtCraft and was created by software engineer Brandon Thomas of Atlanta, who has 15 years of experience in the industry.

The programs are written in the Rust programming language with the help of Anthropic's AI model Claude Opus 5.5. They include PhotoCraft (comparable to Photoshop), VectorCraft (Illustrator), FilmCraft (Premiere) and PdfCraft. There are also WordCraft (Word), DeckCraft (PowerPoint) and GridCraft (Excel).

From $779 to free

For comparison, Adobe Creative Suite costs $779.99 a year when paid upfront, or $69.99 a month. Microsoft's prices range from $19.99 to $199.99 a year. ArtCraft's code is released as open source under permissive licenses (MIT/Apache), so others are free to use and modify it.

The PhotoCraft project was created on September 30, 2026, and after two weeks had about 54,000 stars on GitHub, a kind of thumbs-up from developers. A related tool, REA (Reverse Engineer Anything), has roughly 130,000-134,000 stars. REA connects AI coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex and Cursor with tools for taking existing programs apart and understanding them.

Still early and buggy

PhotoCraft is labeled "early alpha," and there are more than 800 open bug reports and feature requests. According to developer Fabio Akita, images larger than 8,192 pixels fall back to the CPU, a 12-megapixel photo requires about 800 MB, color management is rudimentary, and CMYK editing is missing. There are about 100 reports of crashes.

KDnuggets estimates that WordCraft has roughly 62 percent feature parity with Word, and that GridCraft has more than 500 spreadsheet functions. DeckCraft has 79 percent of PowerPoint's feature breadth, but only about 55 percent practical usability. The figures come from a single source, and the methodology is unknown.

Akita argues that Adobe's most important value lies in server-side features such as Generative Fill, Neural Filters and camera profiles in Camera Raw, which cannot be copied simply by studying the program's behavior.

Doubts about the clean room

The programs are described as "clean room" replacements, built on public file format specifications and observation of behavior, without any Adobe or Microsoft code. That is the developer's own claim. Copyright law professor Andres Guadamuz says it is not known whether the process will withstand scrutiny.

Cofounder Michael Caffrey says, according to Futurism: "Adobe has been notoriously scummy in the past, and when using it we were shocked that this wasn't an alternative, it was better."

KDnuggets assesses that the threat to the big companies is not free alternatives in themselves, but software that delivers the same thing and gives users no reason to pay. No official reaction from Adobe or Microsoft has been reported.