Comments on: Free Software Alternatives to Substitute Adobe Products

By: daemonna

daemonna — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:44:20 +0000

@bikeman: wake up! you suggest MS products? you mean that company that makes that useless browser??

- Only good dreamweaver alternative is AptanaStudio… is free, cross-platform with plugins like Ruby,Air,Python.. easy to use and very profesionall
- for AE substitute i didnt find anything much usefull except Blender… but let’s wait for Blender 2.5, this will change game a lot :)

By: bikeman

bikeman — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 17:18:53 +0000

Unfortunately many of these free alternatives are just not comparable to Abobe’s products and frankly a waste of time getting into – Kompozer for example messes around with html/css worse that MS Frontpage ever did!

A more useful article would include lower cost alternatives which are stable and a useful alternative for designer/web designers of limited means. e.g. Photoshop Elements, MS Web Expression, MS Web Developer Express etc.

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 19:40:06 +0000

I’ve always used Dreamweaver and Photoshop but I’ve just discovered Inkscape as a replacement for Illustrator. This is a good article but I’m also a big ADOBE fan! All my webd evelopment positions from past to current have always provided me with adobe. It’s at home I gotta spend.

By: Kim Burgess

Kim Burgess — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 20:15:59 +0000

@Gilberto Whoops my bad.

By: Gilberto Ramos

Gilberto Ramos — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:18:02 +0000

@Kim is “Viva EL open source” ;)

By: Jordan

Jordan — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 12:14:24 +0000

Great comment Kim, I think you’ve made some great points there.

I think these alternatives aren’t widely advertised apart from perhaps Gimp, so it’s always hard for people to come across them.

Hopefully this post will help those people!

By: Designium

Designium — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:52:29 +0000

@Kim Burgess amazing speech :D

iÂ´ll try use some of them in the near future! ty for this list Jordan

By: Kim Burgess

Kim Burgess — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:20:16 +0000

I’m always amazed when people have the mindset that to be able to produce work of a professional standard they must be using the Adobe Suite. Kudos to Adobes marketing team.

For those willing to not follow everyone else like sheep there are some amazing free and open source apps around. A lot of them are listed here but there are also many others around, with the list growing every day.

The 3Ders might be intersted in Blender3D, combine a scene in that with some post processing in The GIMP and you’ve got a very sexy workflow. Also, it’s understandable if you’ve invested a lot of time learning your way around the Adobe interfaces you may be reluctant to switch products. Fear not, as it is open source and freely modifiable, Scott Moschella was nice enough to make a few changes and create GIMPshop, which is The GIMP with the interface of photoshop.

There is absolute masses of other packages out there for different creative disciplines and most of them have quite expansive, passionate and active communities that are more than willing to help out. There’s also complete packages that have been developed to give you an open source operating system built for creative work and bundled up with the tools you need – check out Ubuntu Studio as a good example.

Viva la open source :)

P.S. I’m not dissing the Adobe suite, it is an amazing product and is the ‘industry standard’ for good reason. That being said it is still just a tool that is used as a part of your creative process.

By: Student Brands

Student Brands — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:41:17 +0000

Thanks for the great info, we hope to use this info on our website : http://www.studentbrands.co.za

By: Jose Betancur

Jose Betancur — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:38:40 +0000

Great List.

But I would remove Omnigraffle.. isn’t free.