Brief: In this article, we list the best Adobe alternatives for Linux. These Adobe Creative Suite alternative for Linux are also free and open source.

Adobe provides a number of applications under Adobe Creative Suite, now under Adobe Creative Cloud. It’s not just limited to Photoshop but contains various other software that helps primarily in Web design, logo making, video editing, pdf editing and more.

However, Adobe Creative Suite is a proprietary software costing you a good amount of your money and if you are a Linux user, even if you are willing to spend that money, it’s just not available for the platform.

In this article, we are going to cover some of the best Adobe products alternative for Linux.

Best Adobe alternatives for Linux

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I have included one non-FOSS item in this list. This is because I really couldn’t find a decent alternative to Adobe Acrobat in Linux.

For the rest, here we go!

1. GIMP: Alternative to Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is the most popular and widely used graphics editing tool both for regular and professional users. It’s an excellent tool for photo editing, website design, and graphics creation.

When it comes to an alternative to Adobe Photoshop, GIMP provides the best replacement.

GIMP is a free and open source image editor available for GNU/Linux, Mac, Windows and other Operating System. It provides a handful of sophisticated tools that make a graphic designer and photographer’s work easier.

From high-quality photo manipulation to original artwork creation, GIMP includes options to create icons, graphical design elements, color management features etc. And the customization options along with third-party plugins make your work a bit easier.

Most likely GIMP is already installed on your system. If not, you can search in the official software repository to install GIMP.

Get GIMP

2. Inkscape: Alternative to Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator is a standard tool suited for vector graphics editing and design. With an impressive set of drawing tools and effects, it is widely used for vector editing, posters creations etc.

Inkscape is a very competitive, free and open source tool to Adobe Illustrator. A powerful vector editor, Inkscape has flexible drawing tools, various file format compatibility, powerful text tools and support for Bezier and spiro curves. It supports advanced scalable vector graphics features like markets, clones and blending.

Get Inkscape

3. Scribus: Alternative to Adobe Indesign

Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing application used primarily for creating posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers, books etc. It supports exporting a file to epub format for creation of e-books. When it comes to an alternative to Adobe InDesign, Scribus provides a powerful and easy alternative.

Scribus is a free and open source application available for all major operating systems and is based on the free Qt toolkit. From creating layouts to typesettings and creating animated and interactive PDF presentations and forms, Scribus is used to write newspapers, brochures, newsletters, posters, and books.

Get Scribus

4. OpenShot: Alternative to Adobe Premiere

Adobe Premiere Pro is video editing application from Adobe System which is used for high-resolution video editing, audio sample-level editing, 5.1 surround sound mixing and more.

OpenShot is a powerful and easy to use video editor which serves as the best replacement for Adobe Premiere Pro.

With a simple user interface, OpenShot provides a large number of features.

Get OpenShot

5. Synfig: Alternative to Adobe Animate

Adobe Animate is useful for creating interactive animations that work on everything from mobile devices to the ultra-high resolution displays. When it comes to an alternative to Adobe Animate, Synfig is an awesome open source replacement.

Synfig is a free and open source 2D vector graphics and timeline-based animation program for animation designing and rendering. The goal of the application is to provide quality animation with fewer resources and provides manual tweening, hence saving you from the pain of drawing each and every frame.

Synfig can simulate soft-shading using curved gradients and provides a wide variety of real-time effects which can be applied to layers or a group of layers. You can control and animate the width of lines at their control points and link any related data from one object to another.

Get Synfig

6. darktable: Alternative to Adobe Lightroom

Adobe Lightroom is a photo processor and image organizer which allows viewing, organizing and retouching large numbers of digital images. With Lightroom, you can enhance and your photographs, punch up colors, remove distracting objects and straighten skewed shots.

When it comes to an alternative to Adobe Lightroom, the best free and open source software is Darktable.

darktable is a photography workflow application and raw developer which manages digital negatives or RAW images, lets you view them and have features to enhance them.

It provides basic image operations like crop and rotation, highlight reconstructions, white balance, invert operation and exposure control. Tone image operations include modification to the exposure, level adjustments, changing lightness, recreating contrast for HDR images etc.

darkable also includes color image operations for correcting overexposure and color, contrast, enhancing saturation and manipulation of RGB channels. The Correction modules helps you manage sharpening of details, noise level, spot removal, chromatic aberrations and more.

Get darktable

7. Natron / ButtleOFX: Alternative to Adobe Aftereffects

Adobe After Effects is a visual effects and motion graphics application used for filmmaking and television production.

Natron provides a perfect alternative to Adobe After Effects with motion editing and multi-view workflow. With an intuitive user interface and a quick rendering, you can work with keyframes with a very accurate curve editor.

It can be used as a command line tool and the command line version is executable from ssh on a computer with any display. It supports smooth zooming and panning for large images, and includes a full-featured dope-sheet to quickly edit clips and keyframes in time-space.

You can download a deb/ rpm package or a portable archive form the page below:

Get Natron

ButtleOFX is another open source composition software which provides an intuitive Graph Editor to connect nodes, Parameters Editor to customize effects and three different Workspace layouts to switch in-between according to your needs.

The project is still in alpha state so there will be bugs. If you are willing to try, you can grab a copy from here.

8. Ardour: Alternative to Adobe Audition

Adobe Audition is a digital audio workstation from Adobe Systems for editing and mixing audio contents. When it comes to open source alternative to Audition, Ardour is an excellent application.

Ardour is a free and open source, cross-platform application to record, edit and mix different audio files with ease. Let us look at the features which Ardour provides.

Get Ardour

0. Master PDF: Alternative to Adobe Acrobat [Non-FOSS]

Adobe Acrobat is another application from Adobe Creative Suite which is mainly used to view, create and modify PDF files. The Adobe reader supports viewing, printing and annotating of PDF files while the Acrobat is used to create, edit, convert, digital sign, encrypt and export PDF files.

It’s difficult to find a fully functional open source PDF editor. LibreOffice can be used edit a pdf file with some limitation, and so can Inkscape. However, Master PDF, the only proprietary software in this list supports all the features for editing a PDF file.

It allows creating, editing, encryption and signing the PDF documents with ease. You can comment documents with stamps, notes, text underlining and fill PDF forms easily.

There are both commercial and free versions available for Linux.

You can download a .deb package from below link.

Get Master PDF

You can check some other PDF editors for Linux.

Final Words

Adobe Creative Suite is a commercial product with continuous development and release. When it comes to open source alternative to Adobe products, we have several choices some of them are at par with the Adobe products while some are lagging a bit. However, there is always an application which can make things work for you, you just have to find it.

Let us know in the comments, which open source product you use as an alternative to any Adobe Products.