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 Application | Free 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.